Free Republic

Shares of Intel jumped 3% Friday as The Wall Street Journal’s Lauren Thomas, Laura Cooper, and Asa Fitch reported that Qualcomm has approached Intel about acquiring it for perhaps as much as $90 billion, citing multiple unnamed sources. The “massive” deal, as the authors put it, is financially daunting, as Qualcomm has just $13 billion in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet against $13 billion of long-term debt. Even a mostly stock exchange would require some large debt raise. Intel, moreover, already has $19 billion of net long-term debt. The deal is much larger than Qualcomm’s attempted acquisition of...

If you search “women’s experiences at Planned Parenthood” on Google, you will find mostly positive news articles about Planned Parenthood (with the majority on Planned Parenthood’s website), and stories about “harrowing” pregnancy experiences states that protect preborn children from abortion. However, a look at the Google reviews of individual Planned Parenthood facilities provides an interesting perspective… and tells a far different story. Though strictly anecdotal, these reviews highlight the allegations of former Planned Parenthood patients — that many women have suffered from medical negligence, coercion, and a lack of maternal health services at Planned Parenthood facilities across the country. The...

I have been happily using Kaspersky anti-virus software to protect my computer for years. It never caused me any problems. Other softwares, notably NORTON, allowed a virus to infect my computer years ago, and could not be removed by home measures. So the BIDEN administration has decided that Kaspersky is too much of a risk by a hostile foreign government to continue to operate in the U.S. and now the company has to close shop in the U.S. and fire all its employees. I haven't shopped for a new anti-virus software for years. Which ones should I look at? I...

In LibreOffice Calc, if I have two fields I wish to compare to within a plus-minus value, and then if the spread between the two numbers is too great, both will, say, flash red, how do I do that?

Good morning folks. Last night I went to get on Youtube to check a couple of things. In addition, there were a few articles posted here that linked to Youtube. When I did, however, Youtube (on a Windows 10 computer) would not play or even pre-screen any videos. None, nada. I tried to disable all my extensions and adblockers. Nothing worked. I check other browsers such as Edge and Palemoon, even basic Chromium, and all of those worked fine. I finally had to uninstall Brave, completely wipe all their data from my computer, then reinstall it. Afterwards it worked fine....

Wind River’s new Debian-based server and edge Linux distribution was born out of a need to create a CentOS replacement that would remove Red Hat from the equation.Wind River, the Alameda-based software company that once upon a time was part of Intel, on Tuesday announced eLxr Pro, a commercial Linux offering tailored for enterprise use.In a way, this release represents something of a new chapter in the brouhaha that started in 2020 and which resulted in several new Linux distributions after Red Hat ended support for CentOS, the community clone of its commercial operating system.This time, however, the new distro...

Ah, THE FUTURE!It is weirdly starting to look like the past, no?While the Green grifters are busy making sure people's lives get less comfortable and more expensive every day, as the things that once made a "standard of living" worth attaining are stripped away piece by piece......some of the wealthiest in the EAT THE BUGS crowd have the wherewithal to take a different approach by virtue of their place in the economic food chain - at the pinnacle.Not relegated to gluing themselves to the floors of Porsche showrooms or flinging tomato soup at old masterpieces, these are the big thinkers,...

@skscartoon For the US, for the world, Trump must win. [cartoon]

Need advice on an iphone update fix.

A little earlier this evening I was sitting at my computer reading something when suddenly a program I had never heard of suddenly popped up on my screen. It seemed to be an antivirus, and since I've had Kaspersky Free for years (and been very satisfied with it) I didn't need a new antivirus. So I attempted to remove it. I thought I did. I didn't. After "removing" the new unwanted antivirus program I noticed my Kaspersky shorcut icon had disappeared. Oops! I clicked on the new one again and sure enough it still worked, so I attempted to create...

Scientists have for the first time observed quantum entanglement — a state in which particles intermingle, losing their individuality so they can no longer be described separately — between quarks. The feat, achieved at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, could open the door to further probes of quantum information in particles at high energies. Entanglement has been measured in particles such as electrons and photons for decades, but it is a delicate phenomenon and easiest to measure in low-energy, or ‘quiet’, environments, such as in the ultracold refrigerators that house quantum computers. Particle collisions, such as those between...

r. Daniel Sun’s research at the University of Cincinnati focuses on using magnetic nanoparticles to deliver drugs directly to the inner ear, aiming to provide a groundbreaking, minimally invasive treatment for hearing loss. (Daniel Sun, MD.) Credit: UC Health ================================================================================ NIH-funded research explores magnetic nanoparticles for noninvasive, targeted treatment of hearing loss. For medications to be effective, they require an efficient delivery system to reach the specific areas of the body where they can make an impact. Unfortunately, creating such a system has been a significant challenge for hearing loss treatments. Now, Dr. Daniel Sun from the University of Cincinnati...

Do you swipe in to your office building to meet your in-person mandate, but leave as soon as possible? There’s a word for your covert strategy: “coffee badging.” It is where you show up to the office long enough for a coffee or a meeting expressly to fulfill in-office mandates — while primarily continuing to work from home whenever you can. This new workplace lingo was popularized by videoconferencing company Owl Labs. The company defined it as “showing face at the office and then leaving.” In its 2023 report of 2,000 full-time U.S. workers, 58% of hybrid employees said they...

A research team from the University of Bonn has succeeded for the first time in using light stimuli to stop life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia in mouse hearts. Furthermore, as shown in computer simulations at Johns Hopkins University, this technique could also be used successfully for human hearts. The study opens up a whole new approach to the development of implantable optical defibrillators, in which the strong electrical impulses of conventional defibrillators are replaced by gentler, pain-free light impulses. The Journal of Clinical Investigation has now published the results. Ventricular fibrillation! When the heart muscle races and no longer contracts in an...

Italian special forces divers have recovered potentially crucial video equipment from the wreck of Mike Lynch’s superyacht, which could explain how it sank. Seven people, including the British tech tycoon and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, died when the Bayesian sank in severe weather off the coast of Sicily last month. The divers, from an Italian navy unit equivalent to Britain’s Special Boat Service, recovered video surveillance systems, computers and hard drives that will be sent to specialised labs, a source close to the investigation told Reuters. It is hoped that, if the equipment was recovered intact, it may help investigators...

The State Department sought to denigrate two reporters and a member of Congress as part of damage control attempts over having helped fund an advertisers’ “blacklist” of The Post and other outlets allegedly spreading “misinformation,” according to internal documents. In March 2023, the department distributed press guidance about how to counter bombshell reports by “Twitter Files” scribe Matt Taibbi and Washington Examiner investigative journalist Gabe Kaminsky concerning the State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC). Taibbi’s first report about the GEC, in a lengthy Twitter thread published Jan. 3, 2023, revealed efforts to pressure US social media platforms early in the COVID-19...

I've been using a Windows 7 laptop. I recently bought a Windows 11 laptop.I moved the AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles folder, and the AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles folder to a hard drive, then moved them onto the new laptop, copying over the old folders in that location.Trouble is, the Thunderbird on the new laptop doesn't recognize my stored emails. Nor does Firefox recognize the bookmarks.What am I doing wrong?

Suppose, during a battle at sea— with missiles flying—an adversary is trying to disrupt a ship’s sensor- fusion system, so that it mischaracterizes what the sensors are seeing. With current cybersecurity methods, it could take minutes or even hours for analysts to determine that the system is being attacked. And by then it might be too late.However, a new approach that uses AI could, for example, send an alert to the combat systems officer—in real time—that there is a high probability that an attack on the sensor-fusion system is underway. Armed with that information, the CSO could limit any possible...

Researchers have created a revolutionary network flow algorithm that enables ultra-fast computations for dynamic networks, transforming how problems in theoretical computer science are approached and solved.In a breakthrough that brings to mind Lucky Luke – the man who shoots faster than his shadow – Rasmus Kyng and his team have developed a superfast algorithm that looks set to transform an entire field of research. The groundbreaking work by Kyng’s team involves what is known as a network flow algorithm, which tackles the question of how to achieve the maximum flow in a network while simultaneously minimising transport costs.Imagine you are...

Last week it became clear to me that although Microsoft has “loved” Linux for more than a decade now, that love still doesn’t extend to the Linux desktop.This realization came to me as I read news of a Windows security update that borked Grub, the open-source boot loader that’s used by most Linux distributions and which is used to load Windows in dual-boot situations.After the Windows update was applied, an untold number of Windows’ dual booters were unable to boot Linux, but instead were served the scary and cryptic error message: “Something has gone seriously wrong.”According to Ars Technica, the...