Free Republic

Small planes are dropping like...athletes. https://www.brighteon.com/7d8609c6-2271-4abf-88a4-c801befdb4e1

I tried Truth Social, registration bombed can't log in it's severely broke. Anybody else have any better experience?

...The Chinese SJ-21 satellite was seen on January 22 changing its usual place in the sky to approach decommissioned satellite Compass-G2. A few days later, SJ-21 attached to G2, altering its orbit.Chinese officials haven't yet confirmed that the apparent space tug occurred.Over the course of the next few days, the spacecraft couple started dancing westward, ExoAnalytic's video footage showed. By January 26, the two satellites separated, and G2 was kicked into oblivion.The Compass-G2, or BeiDou-2 G2, is a spacecraft from China's BeiDou-2 Navigation Satellite System that failed shortly after launching in 2009. For more than 10 years, the metal carcass...

A major eruption on the far side of the sun Tuesday created one of the largest coronal mass ejections (CME) in recent years, KTLA sister station KOIN reports. Though the explosive CME is not expected to strike Earth, images captured by satellite and seismic mapping showing the sheer size of the eruption had many people talking... Todd said scientists estimate the flare stretched to roughly 400,000 kilometers... CME events of this magnitude are caused when the negative and positive charges within the electromagnetic field on the sun contradict, resulting in a powerful discharge or sunspots. CME events and sun flares...

California dog reunited with family after being missing for 12 years The dog, Zoey, had been dropped off on a rural property outside Stockton when she was found by someone who called the authorities. The dog, Zoey, had been dropped off on a rural property outside Stockton when she was found by someone who called the authorities. San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office A California dog was reunited with her family this month after being missing for 12 years, according to authorities. The canine, Zoey, 13, had been dropped off on a rural property outside Stockton when she was found by...

Seattle drops bike helmet law because cops unfairly targeted people of color and homeless people: Black cyclists were four times as likely to be stopped as whites The King County Board of Health voted Thursday to repeal its decades-old mandatory helmet rule Data showed the rule was rarely enforced, but enforced disproportionately Since 2017, Seattle police had given 117 helmet citations, more than 40 percent of which went to people who were homeless Since 2019, 60 percent of citations went to people who were homeless Central Seattle Greenways found that black cyclists were almost four times as likely to receive...

A Crucial Clue in the $4.5 Billion Bitcoin Heist: A $500 Walmart Gift Card Increasingly sophisticated tools and some gift cards helped lead investigators to charge a young couple with conspiring to launder billions Federal investigators spent years hunting for clues in the 2016 hacking of the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange, when thieves stole bitcoin now worth $4.5 billion. In the end, what helped lead them to two suspects was something much more quotidian: a $500 Walmart gift card. That card and more than a dozen others like it, including for Uber, Hotels.com and PlayStation, were linked to emails and cloud...

Finally they have released it! Check out this episode. Maajid is a very interesting guy. Link...

Each year, about 20,000 children are diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare genetic condition that causes progressive muscle weakness and other systemic damage. Duchenne primarily affects males and is usually diagnosed by age 4. While a variety of therapies can slow progression and extend life expectancy, the disease has no cure yet. Those born with Duchenne seldom live beyond their mid-20s. In 2017, researchers learned that weekly doses of prednisone, a widely prescribed steroid, appear to provide better support for weakening muscles compared to daily doses while also reducing the significant side effects induced by daily intake. Now, a...

Every parent has been there – your kid gets a tablet or phone for the holidays, and all of a sudden you can’t pry their eyes away from it. Most parents try parental blocks or limiting their screen time, encouraging them to have fun with the family instead. Pretty much anything other than using a multi-wave band jammer that completely shuts down your entire town’s internet connection. But that’s exactly what one man did in Messanges, France, after using an illegal signal jammer to deter his child from the screen, but simultaneously nuking the internet connection of residents in a...

Anybody using Chromium 98.0.4758.102 (Official Build) snap (64-bit) My son upgraded it last night for me. There are things I need google search results for and ... When I type in search box I see the cursor move, and invisible typing occurs. The drop down suggestions appear incomplete. If I am searching for btc. I see an invisible position in the text box and the suggestions appear "itcoin, etc. The first character is invisible, even in the suggestion drop down. Upgrades: One step forward, three step back.

An old iPhone can outperform the Samsung Galaxy S22 A flagship device currently available for preorder is outperformed in the benchmarks by an iPhone from 2019. While benchmarks don't tell you the whole story, they do serve as a useful measure to compare one device to another. And sometimes benchmarks can be quite unbelievable. This is how I feel about the recent benchmarks for Samsung's newest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S22 . Now, we've already seen benchmarks that show that the Galaxy S22 Ultra and S22+ outpaces all other Android smartphones but is still beaten by the A15 chip in...

This is a video of Jeren Miles. He is/was the head of Facebook's "Community Outreach Program". Confesses to multiple victims. Youtube Link

[H/T Ymani Cricket]According to a retired professor of computer science at Oregon State University today’s large neural network artificial intelligence are already slightly conscious.In a recent Twitter post, the co-founder of a San Francisco-based Artificial Intelligence research lab stated that “today’s largest neural networks” may already be “slightly conscious.”OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever did not specify which system or systems he was talking about, nor did he define “slightly conscious” in any way.It’s likely that he was talking about OpenAI’s GPT-3, an advanced language processing system designed for translation, question answering, and word replacement.Sutskever’s cryptic tweet soon sparked a debate among specialists...

@ggreenwald Absolutely unbelievable: the excuse Twitter used to censor the pre-election Hunter Biden reporting was its policy on prohibiting use of "hacked" material. That was a lie: nothing was hacked. This [GiveSendGo] donor information was hacked, and Twitter is allowing full disclosure of all names.

Google today announced a new operating system, Chrome OS Flex, a free-to-use, cloud-based OS built to convert old PCs or Macs into Chromebooks. The new OS was developed by Google a few years after acquiring Neverware—the makers of Cloudready—and was primarily made for schools and businesses with fleets of old PCs or Macs that have been bogged down after years of use. Google argues these systems could be revitalized by stripping out Windows or macOS and installing Chrome OS Flex, a lightweight operating system that can run on weaker hardware and remain stable for years due to its reliance on...

I want to dump Verizon. Does anyone have experience with Patriot Mobile? Is the coverage and 4G comparable to the big, leftist outfits? I’m sick of spending my dollars supporting a company that doesn’t support my beliefs.

Considering the recent filing by John Durham there is quite a bit of really good information circling around in our little corner of the internet. Most of this information has already been covered by the likes of Brian Cates and Just Human on their substacks and Telegram channels. It is not my intention to challenge any of that. What I do want to do is submit my thoughts around what is currently happening from the vantage point of someone who has worked with Packet Captures and DNS (and a bunch of other nerdy stuff) for the last 15 years…me For...

If you’re using Zoom on a Mac, now’s the time to make sure it’s updated to version 5.9.3. Zoom has acknowledged a bug that appears to cause the microphone on Macs running macOS Monterey to stay on even after leaving a meeting... Users have been complaining about the issue since December, as documented in a post on Zoom’s community forum. Several users noticed that the orange recording indicator light in the Control Center appears when Zoom isn’t being used — the indicator light is a privacy feature introduced in Monterey that warns you when an application is using your microphone....

On Wednesday, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever claimed on Twitter that 'it may be that today's largest neural networks are slightly conscious,' ... He didn't name any specific developments, but is likely referring to the mega-scale neural networks, such as GPT-3, a 175 billion parameter language processing system built by OpenAI for translation, question answering, and filling in missing words. Sutskever faced a backlash soon after posting his tweet, with most researchers concerned he was over stating how advanced AI had become, Futurism reported. 'Every time such speculative comments get an airing, it takes months of effort to get the conversation...