Free Republic

When Obama called ISIS a JV team, they had taken Fallujah. US intel knew their capabilities, even though Obama Inc. has insisted on blaming bad intel for his dismissive comments.But the intel wasn’t bad. The intel is rarely that bad. It’s the leadership that’s bad. A former Pentagon official confirms to Fox News that detailed and specific intelligence about the rise of ISIS was included in the PDB, or the President’s Daily Brief, for at least a year before the group took large swaths of territory beginning in June.The official, who asked not to be identified because the PDB is...

Russia's policy on Western technology is clear: The country can live without it, especially if key issues like economic sanctions, NSA spying and GPS cooperation aren't resolved to its leader's satisfaction. It looks like this tough stance extends to US-designed computer chips too, as a Russian business newspaper is reporting that state departments and state-run companies will no longer purchase PCs built around Intel or AMD processors. Instead, starting in 2015, the government will order up to one million devices annually based on the "Baikal" processor, which is manufactured by a domestic company called T-Platforms.

My daughter just Honorably separated out of the Navy at the end of February after 8 1/2 years. Current TS and is looking for headhunters for Intel/Strike/TLAM. She's willing to contract to EU or ME. Does anyone have contacts for this type of position?

The $300 million payout from tech giants like Google and Apple to settle a lawsuit brought by employees makes it clear that Silicon Valley is out for profit, not to change the world. Silicon Valley’s biggest names—Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe—reached a settlement today in a contentious $3 billion anti-trust suit brought by workers who accused the tech giants of secretly colluding to not recruit each other’s employees. The workers won, but not much, receiving only a rumored $300 million, a small fraction of the billions the companies might have been forced to pay had they been found guilty in...

It is the talk of the Valley. A high-stakes negotiation is taking place in Silicon Valley among some of the biggest names in the industry — Apple and Google among them — over accusations that they were involved in a collusion to prevent their employees from being hired at rival companies. The employees filed a class-action suit, contending that the illegal hiring practices cost employees $9 billion in lost wages. Now the companies are locked in mediation sessions, hoping to settle the case in the next several weeks. The question being whispered all over town now is how much will...

Graphene is slated as the major breakthrough of this century. Infact it could very well propel the semiconductor a couple of decades easily (compared to the performance trend via Moore’s law ). Graphene transistors are more than capable of being clocked at 500Ghz so you get the idea of what Samsung is claiming to have achieved: a replicateable production process of Graphene nodes.Graphene.Experimental gFET Graphene Production – Scientific breakthrough of this century to be used in CPUs* of wearable devicesOK, I admit, I was being slightly sarcastic when I wrote the headline. It seems sort of ironic that if Samsung’s...

Using the LA Times’s trusty blacklist database, Nate Silver ran the numbers on donations from people who work at Fortune 500 Silicon Valley companies and discovered that a majority of every company’s employees donated towards defeating the ban. Every company, that is, except one.I want you to go grab some pliers, crack open your computer console, and join me in tearing the processor right out of that sucker. Political correctness begins on your own desktop, my friends. The Los Angeles Times maintains a database of contributions for and against Proposition 8. The database includes the names of a donor’s employer,...

Immigration reform advocates are fond of citing broad support for their cause. But in fact the coalition behind the Senate Gang of Eight comprehensive reform bill is fragile and loosely cobbled together. How could Big Labor and the Chamber of Commerce and the tech world and Big Agriculture all unite behind one bill? Very tentatively. It wouldn't take much to break the coalition apart. And if that happens, the effort to enact comprehensive immigration reform could blow up, not just for the moment, but for some time to come. And there are signs that is exactly what is occurring now....

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents. Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in...

Some tech industry heavyweights took to Twitter on Monday to vent their frustration with the user-unfriendly state of television in the broadband Internet age. The conversation pointed out the conflicts between the freedom to chose that users crave and the content gatekeepers who are reluctant to change from business as usual. BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield documented the Twitter conversation in a blog post Tuesday. It started when Jason Hirschhorn, CEO of Redef, complained about the cost of cable and what he received in return. "It's amazing to me that I pay a cable company $250/month and I can't view all...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp plans to reduce its global workforce of 107,000 by about 5 percent this year as the chipmaker, struggling with falling personal-computer sales, reprioritizes toward faster-growing areas, a company spokesman said on Friday. The announcement comes a day after Intel posted a fourth-quarter earnings report that did little to dispel concerns about a slowing PC industry. "This is part of aligning our human resources to meet business needs," spokesman Chris Kraeuter told Reuters on Friday.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp (INTC), hit by slumping personal computer sales, has put off opening a major chip factory that President Barack Obama once held up as an example of U.S. manufacturing potential. The "Fab 42" facility built in Chandler, Arizona, originally slated as a $5 billion project that in late 2013 would start producing Intel's most advanced chips, will remain closed for the foreseeable future while other factories at the same site are upgraded, said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. Intel's decision not open the chip plant was first reported by the Arizona Republic on Tuesday.

Surprising Findings: - Traditional hospitals, according to 57% of people, will be obsolete in the future - Majority of people (84%) would be willing to share their personal health information to advance and lower costs in the health care system - More than 70% of people are receptive to using toilet sensors, prescription bottle sensors and swallowed health monitors - 72% of those surveyed would be willing to see a doctor via video conference for non-urgent appointments - 66% of people say they would prefer a care regimen that is designed specifically for them based on their genetic profile or...

Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the original author of the Patriot Act, says Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be prosecuted for lying to Congress. "Lying to Congress is a federal offense, and Clapper ought to be fired and prosecuted for it," the Wisconsin Republican said in an interview with The Hill. He said the Justice Department should prosecute Clapper for giving false testimony during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March. During that hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper whether the National Security Agency (NSA) collects data on millions of Americans. Clapper insisted that the NSA does not...

Israel was among those who warned Kenya's government of the high risk of an attack before the deadly assault on a Nairobi mall by Islamist terrorists, security sources have told the AFP news agency. Cabinet ministers and Kenya's army chief had received information warning of a plan to carry out a major attack, the officials told the news agency, confirming an intelligence report leaked in Kenyan newspapers.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The intelligence linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an alleged chemical weapons attack that killed at least 100 people is no "slam dunk," with questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria's chemical weapons stores and doubts about whether Assad himself ordered the strike, U.S. intelligence officials say. snip However, multiple U.S. officials used the phrase "not a slam dunk" to describe the intelligence picture - a reference to then-CIA Director George Tenet's insistence in 2002 that U.S. intelligence showing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk" - intelligence...

Texas Instruments just put a chip through the heart of Intel’s Thunderbolt folly with their new HD3SS2521 DockPort controller. This little $1.85 chip both vastly simplifies the user experience and shines a harsh light on what Intel can’t do with a closed and 75x more expensive solution. If you haven’t been paying attention, DockPort is the sane and open answer to Intel’s still broken and anti-user Light Peak/Thunderbolt interface. Formerly called Lightning Bolt, DockPort was AMD’s answer to the non-solution that Intel tried to spin Thunderbolt as. Several years in Thunderbolt is achieving some of the features promised at release...

The White House dismissed the bulk of President Barack Obama’s premier panel of outside intelligence advisers earlier this year, leaving the blue-ribbon commission largely vacant as the public furor built over the National Security Agency’s widespread tracking of Americans’ telephone calls. The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board stood 14 members strong through 2012, but the White House website was recently updated to show the panel’s roster shrinking to just four people. In the past four years, the high-powered group has waded into the implications of WikiLeaks for intelligence sharing, and urged retooling of America’s spy agencies as the United States withdraws...

So far, tablets based on Intel Atom system-on-chips have not managed to gain popularity on the market mainly due to rather high prices as well as scarce availability. However, this is going to change with Intel Corp.’s next-generation Atom “ValleyView” microprocessors and Bay Trail-T platforms. According to chief executive of Intel, next-gen tablets will cost $150 or even less. “We believe what [Bay Trail platforms] really does it allows us to get into these markets that we are not in, in a big way today. [There will be] tablets [at] $199 and below, some you are going to see...

A couple of weeks ago, the British government found itself under considerable fire at home for their connection to the NSA’s PRISM program. A number of MPs demanded answers from David Cameron’s Tory government about whether British intelligence was bypassing UK law in order to spy on its subjects by having the NSA collect the data from their Internet for them. At the time, I wondered whether the Brits were doing the same for the NSA on their own, comparing it to the Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train, with its famous “criss cross” murder plot (or the more humorous...