Free Republic

On Thursday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the Federal Aviation Administration will replace outdated floppy disks at more than 400 air traffic control facilities with the Enterprise Information Display System by the end of 2028.A 2024 Government Accountability Office report found 90 percent of the nation's critical air traffic control infrastructure was due or past due for a technology refresh, amid recent high-profile software meltdowns and operational delays.Upgrades have already launched at five sites including Atlantic City International Airport and Nashville International Airport, with the new system replacing four legacy setups dating back to the 1980s across 435 facilities total.Duffy...

SNIPPET: "Two U.S. planes have flown radical Muslim preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri and four other suspected terrorists to the United States, hours after Britain's High Court cleared the way for their extradition. The planes departed a Royal Air Force base immediately after the British High Court rejected last-minute appeals by Hamza and the others. The five had raised legal questions about human rights and prison conditions they expected to face in the United States. In rejecting the appeals, the British court cited an “overwhelming public interest” in seeing the extraditions carried out. Hamza is wanted on U.S. charges that include...

Sony's decision to end 3.5-inch disk production is just another signal that local storage media and platforms cannot be trusted with your precious data...

School bus driver faces charges of receiving child pornography By KELLIE TOLBERT AVALANCHE-JOURNAL A Durham School Services school bus driver was recently arrested on charges of receipt of child pornography. Jim Charles Teague, age and hometown unavailable, allegedly downloaded and saved images of a young girl involved in sexual intercourse with an adult man onto a floppy disk in August 2003, according to an affidavit. Teague used his daughter's computer and entered chat rooms disguising himself as a divorced bisexual female with two children, the affidavit states. The affidavit said he used several screen names. When chatting online, Teague and...

Doctors are warning that laptop computers may inflict a burn even through clothed skin, after the bizarre case of a Swedish scientist who scorched his penis and testicles while writing a report in his armchair. The unnamed 50-year-old father of two had balanced the computer on his lap while he wrote the report at home, taking about an hour to do it, according to a letter published in the next issue of the British medical weekly The Lancet. The following day, he started to develop painful blisters on his foreskin and scrotum, which became infected but eventually cleared up without...