Free Republic

Just some fun for us old people who remember the special thing that happened for the Universe during summer 1977.

The Obama administration created the United States Digital Service to be a uniquely nimble organization. Elon Musk is exploiting that feature to test the limits of U.S. law. When Barack Obama created the United States Digital Service in 2014, it was meant to disrupt the arcane tech processes that had led to catastrophes like the original HealthCare.gov rollout. A team of young, private sector workers had been able to come in and fix the site — why couldn’t they be deployed throughout the government to modernize an arcane tech infrastructure? The launch of USDS was met with deep skepticism from...

Trump’s newly-confirmed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy annihilated twice-failed presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton on Wednesday after she launched an attack on the agency. Secretary Duffy said he spoke with Elon Musk’s DOGE team to help upgrade the aviation system after do-nothing bureaucrats destroyed the US’s infrastructure over the years. “Big News – Talked to the DOGE team. They are going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system,” Secretary Duffy said on Wednesday. Elon Musk said his DOGE team is working with Secretary Duffy to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system. “Just a few days ago,...

The murder of a US Border Patrol agent near the Canadian border appears to be linked to a radical leftist trans militant cult accused of killings across the country. Around a week before the Jan. 20 attack, federal law enforcement had been surveilling German national Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt and University of Washington student Teresa “Milo” Consuelo Youngblut. Staff at a Lyndonville, Vermont motel alerted authorities about seeing the duo with a firearm and black tactical clothing. When law enforcement visited them, the pair claimed to be looking at property in the area and promptly checked out of the motel on...

Three young people with prestigious, accomplished academic backgrounds are suspected in at least two brutal, connected killings. Maximilian Snyder, 22, and Teresa Youngblut, 21, sought a marriage license in Washington State in November. They have each been charged by authorities in separate January killings that claimed the lives of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont and an 82-year-old landlord in Vallejo, according to police and court records obtained by Open Vallejo, a California news outlet. Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old data scientist arrested in Northern California on Friday on suspicion of murder, and Teresa Youngblut, the 21-year-old computer science student charged...

The mysterious duo who were pulled over in Coventry, Vt. in the deadly shootout are leftist trans militants with alleged ties to a trans terror cell allegedly involved in three other homicides. On Inauguration Day, the shocking news that a US Border Patrol officer had been shot dead near the Canadian border in Vermont in an incident involving a now-deceased foreign national was overshadowed by coverage of Donald Trump's events in the nation's capital. One week later, a 21-year-old Washington woman was charged over the deadly incident, but little has been reported about her and her deceased accomplice, a German...

BURLINGTON, Vt. — The FBI says an arrest has been made in connection to the fatal shooting death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent who was from Minnesota. On Friday, FBI Albany announced a 21-year-old woman from Washington state, Teresa Youngblut, was arrested in David "Chris" Maland's death in Vermont. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Vermont has since charged Youngblut with assault on a federal law enforcement officer. "Our hearts remain with our partners at U.S. Border Patrol Swanton Sector as they mourn this tremendous loss," the FBI said. Maland, who was born in Blue Earth, Minnesota, was killed Monday...

The FBI announced the arrest of a suspect Friday in the killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David "Chris" Maland near the Vermont-Canada border. Washington state resident Teresa Youngblut, 21, was taken into custody following the fatal shooting on Monday, according to the FBI’s office in Albany, N.Y. "The United States Attorney’s Office District of Vermont has charged Youngblut with assault on a federal law enforcement officer," it said. "Our hearts remain with our partners at U.S. Border Patrol Swanton Sector as they mourn this tremendous loss."

The World Champion largest number, listed in the latest Guinness Book of Records, is an upper bound, derived by R. L. Graham, from a problem in a part of combinatorics called Ramsey theory. Graham’s number cannot be expressed using the conventional notation of powers, and powers of powers. If all the material in the universe were turned into pen and ink it would not be enough to write the number down. Consequently, this special notation, devised by Donald Knuth, is necessary. 3^3 means ‘3 cubed’, as it often does in computer printouts. 3^^3 means 3^(3^3), or 3^27, which is already...

ATLANTA, GA—CDC officials have released official guidelines and recommendations for activity during the pandemic. At the top of the list is a request for people to stop giving them wedgies every time they pass them on the street. "You all need to stop this immature behavior right now!" said CDC official Mortimer Herbie Jr. as he adjusted his glasses and retainer. "Also, stop shoving us in lockers and giving us swirlies and grabbing us by our ankles and shaking us upside down until our lunch money falls out! This is NOT cool you guys!"

Around 1:30 in the morning of Nov. 4, when I went to bed, Trump was leading in the vote count in two Midwest swing states I was closely watching, Wisconsin — about 2%, and Michigan — about 3%, well on his way to an "unexpected" election victory nationwide. Around 4:30 A.M., I woke early and decided to catch up on the election results on my iPhone, being careful not to wake my wife. Imagine my surprise to see that, overnight, Trump's lead had shrunk to less than 1% in Wisconsin and about 1.5% in Michigan. But what really startled me...

...Another project, Forecasting Religiosity and Existential Security with an Agent-Based Model, examines questions about nonbelief: Why aren’t there more atheists? Why is America secularizing at a slower rate than Western Europe? Which conditions would speed up the process of secularization—or, conversely, make a population more religious? {snip} ….Using a separate model, Future of Religion and Secular Transitions (FOREST), the team found that people tend to secularize when four factors are present: existential security (you have enough money and food), personal freedom (you’re free to choose whether to believe or not), pluralism (you have a welcoming attitude to diversity), and education...

During this summer’s D23 Expo 2017, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Chairman Bob Chapek revealed a richly detailed scale model of the Star Wars-themed lands slated for Walt Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California. The expansions will officially be called Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. If all that wasn’t enough for fans to begin booking their next Disney getaway, Chapek also took the wraps off the long-rumored Star Wars-themed resort. With enough fresh info to fill the Millennium Falcon‘s cargo hold, we made like Bothan spies and carefully collected all new and existing intel for your reference. For details...

I am blessed to be running Windows 10 Version 10.0.10586, Build 10586, and have customized it a quite a bit, but under power management (powercfg.cpl) there are processor settings which i never saw before, though i have been there before and adjusted things. " I am looking for for Max performance (and still be able to Sleep), and made sure the Max. CPU state is 100%, but wondered what the best would be for the rest. I have searched the Internet for the best settings for these new options but saw nothing yet. Feel free to chip in (pun not...

I just couldn't resist this:

Silicon Valley and the GOP — together at last? That may seem like a peculiar proposition given all the public soul-searching and dirge-singing since Election Day over the digital failure of Republicans in modern campaigning. But a blast of cheerful California sunshine may be starting to light the way in the form of an underground gang of young, conservative hackers in the Valley assembling via a communal Google Document to brainstorm about what they can do to save the party from the clutches of tech-phobic leaders. “There’s this myth that there aren’t any Republicans out here who are willing to...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lost another high-profile supporter as Anonymous, the hacking collective, said the whistleblowing site had been “ruined by egos”. Anonymous, a loose group of internet “hacktivists”, has been one of WikiLeaks’ closest allies during the past two years, launching cyber attacks against the site’s opponents and, some claim, becoming a source of its material. ...But leading Anonymous accounts on Twitter, which rallied behind WikiLeaks and Mr Assange despite his legal and financial woes, have now withdrawn their support, decrying the freedom-of-information project as a “One Man Julian Assange show”. Calling the split “the end of an...

I was wondering if anyone knows how to slow down a processor without mucking things up too badly? I have a few older video games (D&D - Pools of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, etc...) that we used to play on an old 486 Commodore computer. I want to play them again, but my processor runs way too fast for the game, making it nearly impossible to play. My brother once told me about some program that is supposed to bog your processor down to slow it (some kind of looping program), but that...

If smelling gasoline weren't a health hazard enough, meet the girl who drinks it. Lifting a red gas canister before the cameras, a girl named Shannon demonstrates her claimed addiction of drinking gasoline for TLC'S television program My Strange Addiction. 'It tingles at first and then it, it burns the back of my throat,' Shannon says describing her toxic habit which reaches up to 12 teaspoons a day. 'Even though it hurts me, it makes me feel good,' she says, of either licking the cap or drinking it straight out of the canister which she says is her favorite way.

Opinions? PC tech mystery Last week my hard working Sony VGC RA840G PC (circa 2005), 2.8ghz, 3gb ram, under XP media center (a gift), which came with a hard-to-ID mobo (appears to be a Asus p5lp-vx), would not boot into Windows, but would just hang at the stage when loading settings would take place. It would boot using safe mode, but even booting with only windows services (chosen via msconfig) would result in the same terminal hang. In safe mode I scanned the system with an up to date online scan (Bit Defender), as well as Kapersky root kit scanner...