Free Republic

Apple is set to host specialized entrepreneur training camps that bars applicants based on their race and sex. To participate, organizations must have “black, Hispanic/Latinx, or Indigenous” members in both leadership and on staff. The program will include two cohorts in October and November, the “underrepresented founders” and “female founders” groups. The camps, which offer valuable resources such as “one-on-one code-level guidance from Apple engineers,” list eligibility requirements that exclude would-be participants on the basis of their race and sex. In order to participate in the underrepresented founders program, an organization must have “a black, Hispanic/Latinx, or Indigenous founder, cofounder,...

Raúl Castro is intent on building an efficient and productive socialism, capable of generating profits. That is why he has just laid off half a million unneeded wage earners. The objective is to detach 25 percent of the labor force from the state within 18 months. That's 1.3 million workers who will be put on the street so they may be absorbed by the still-unborn private microentrepreneurial sector. Castro and his claque keep repeating that the revolution cannot feed an army of idle workers. Subsidies must be trimmed, social benefits must be reduced. The general is very confused. He understands...

ATHENS (Reuters) - Luxemburg-based Internet telephony firm Skype has shown that Europeans can build a $4 billion company in just over two years, but venture capitalists are wondering if it was a fluke or the start of a trend. Talent scouts gathered at the high-profile ETRE technology conference in Athens expressed optimism that European technology firms could be on the up again. "There are huge opportunities. It's only limited by our own creativity. Skype was actually a bellwether for a lot of European companies," said Tim Draper of venture capital fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which helped finance Skype. He basked...

There may be many problems apparent at NASA and among the U.S. aerospace giants these days, but there also are signs that space exploration is about to undergo a renaissance, with an explosion of creativity unseen in decades. To explain this conclusion will require telling a personal anecdote, which begins in the mid-1980s. At the time, I had become fascinated with the sport of caving and was getting involved in several exploration projects. Together with other enthusiasts, we pushed the limits of known caves to find virgin and previously unexplored passages - to go literally where no one had gone...

Vern Raburn has this habit of finding the next big thing — way too soon. In 1976, he opened the third computer store in Los Angeles, years before PCs came to the masses. Struck with the computer bug, he headed to Albuquerque, N.M., where he joined up with some guys who wanted to sell software. That happened to be Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Raburn was one of the first employees at Microsoft (a partner in MSNBC). But he bailed when Gates shipped the company north to Redmond, Wash., and moved on. So what is he doing back in...