Free Republic

Excerpt: Social networking—that is, the ability to use free form methods of communication from many to many, now, in an instantaneous fashion—changes the balance of power in society away from highly organized vehicles of state control towards people in their own lives. What has happened in Iran, in Egypt, in Tunisia—and what will happen in other societies over the next few years—demonstrates the enormous political and social importance of social networking. But everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use....

My wife has convinced me that I should really start making plans to finally tear down my old shop and build a proper one in its place. I have in mind a 20 x 16 footprint building with a second story for storage with a barn shaped roof. I've sketched things out on paper but I need to have a proper print for the permit and for the contractors who are going to build it for me, not to mention coming up with a cost and a budget for the construction. I don't want to reinvent the wheel trying to...

I have need of a software program, but I don't even know the right terminology to describe it for searching. I spend a lot of time out of town running projects on customer's sites. I have to keep track of hours, expenses, samples, etc. I would like a very simple to use program where I enter all this information each evening and it tracks and compiles it automatically. I've looked at some of the PM programs out there and they're about 1000x what I need. I could built something like this myself in Excel, but I would certainly think somebody...

Investors, Angels, High Tech Investment Capital Sought for iSiT Software - Google, IBM Ranked First Place StartupBy Helen Katzman Israel News Agency Tel Aviv , Israel ---- February 15, 2011 ...... Say you're reading a news or feature article on the Internet from Google News, The New York Times, AP, Reuters, Wikipedia or a Blog regarding a hard to believe, a new state-of-the art mobile phone that just seems too good to be true. Maybe you just read reports about violent riots in Egypt, Yemen or Iran or perhaps a news story about a raging forest fire in California or...

Language is arguably what makes us most human. Even the smartest and chattiest of the animal kingdom have nothing on our lingual cognition.In computer science, the Holy Grail has long been to build software that understands — and can interact with — natural human language. But dreams of a real-life Johnny 5 or C-3PO have always been dashed on the great gulf between raw processing power and the architecture of the human mind. Computers are great at crunching large sets of numbers. The mind excels at assumption and nuance.Enter Watson, an artificial intelligence project from IBM that’s over five years...

La Familia drug cartel is selling not just drugs, but also counterfeit Microsoft Office computer software, according the Redmond, Wash., tech giant. Microsoft showed off unauthorized copies of its Office 2007 software in Paris today which the company said it found for sale in Mexico. The pirated copies of Office were marked with La Familia cartel's rectangular "FMM" logo that the Microsoft says proves the link between the counterfeiting and the organized crime group, according to a Bloomberg report. "This is the real side, the scary side of counterfeiting and it plagues the world," said David Finn, Microsoft's associate general...

Microsoft's new gaming system Kinect is getting a little kinky.....Experts say a new 3D sex game is going to be huge in the world of interactive gaming.....

Yesterday I had a request from a client for a network diagram for a system I’m designing, and normally I create such drawings as a PNG file. But this client said “no, I need it in Visio, or similar style so we can edit it”. I have avoided Microsoft Visio in the past, mainly because of its price tag: $249.99 for the basic version, and a whopping $999.99 for the premium version!**********************************snip********************************************* So I want to share “Dia”, short for “Diagram”. Its detailed, open source, and most importantly, free. It also has a community springing up that is adding shape...

ThThe fundamental building block for all future avionics software on the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter has entered flight testing on an F-35 test jet. BF-04 lifts off on its 24th flight on November 6 2010. Pilot was Lt Col Matt Taylor. block 1, the first of three principal software-development blocks for the F-35’s mission systems, made its inaugural flight on Nov. 5 in the F-35B short takeoff/ vertical landing (STOVL) aircraft known as BF-4. The functional check flight from Naval Air Station Patuxent River lasted 1.5 hours, and all planned test points were accomplished. “Getting this software...

From the High Level Logic (HLL) Open Source Project blog. When are we going to have AI, one survey asks? It's a question relevant to HLL because so much of the thought behind the HLL design comes from the history of AI research and current technology that has come from AI research. The answer to the question when, with reference to HLL, is now. (Or at least as soon as version 1.0 is ready.) And that's no reason to get worried. As the description of HLL claims, you don't even need a high-powered computer science background to build applications...

Chapter 1Chapter 2Prepare yourself for a surprise ending. Do that now to avoid confusion later. Around 1990, I met with an industrial engineering professor who had been working for years with artificial intelligence technology. We had a long chat about the possibility of completely automated factories. This was still a decade before frequent online purchasing and customer management systems. But it seemed reasonable to contemplate a future in which everything from initial customer contact, sales, accounting, instructions to the factory floor, robotic manufacturing on demand, packaging, right out to the shipping dock would be fully automated. Even if you've never...

Link to Chapter 1I understood the differences between what application developers wanted to do and what the “artificial intelligence” technology of the late 1980s supported. They were not the sort of differences that one might use to contract to update a software application. What had been, in effect, a broad survey of application needs resulted in a snap-shot of a more basic set of technical requirements. This snap-shot taught me much about the path of development of software technology generally, decades into the future. Much of that future would evolve with or without me, as developers pushed to realize their...

As a young man, when I enjoyed idle time and my daydreams tended to wander in strange directions, I found myself considering a rather unimaginative question. As computer languages and tools have evolved to higher and higher levels - “bottom-up” - where will they eventually reach? Where's the top? To put this contemplation in perspective, the year was 1985. The computer under my desk was a first generation Texas Instruments PC with two floppy disk drives. Ethernet cables were being strung through our offices to network our computers for the first time, allowing messages to stream around the building...

Techies - I seek a software solution that will do this: Enable my Windows PC to be a telephone/ speakerphone plugged in to the PSTN via an UTP/RJ-11 jack out the modem, NOT a VOIP ( a la Skype ) phone emulator connected to the Internet via RJ-45/TCP/IP. I recognize this involves a modem. This stuff used to be bundled freeware with PCs and has fallen out of fashion. What's out there now?

Lockheed Martin, dogged by a whistleblower lawsuit charging the company built lousy and possibly dangerous software for the F-35, is breathing a little easier this afternoon as a judge dismissed the suit. According to my colleague Bob Fox at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (the F-35’s home town paper), U.S. District Court Judge Terry Means recently threw out the 2006 suit filed by Sylvester Davis, a former software engineer on the program. “Davis, Means said in the ruling, ‘fails to allege the dates of any false claim or any information regarding the documents Lockheed submitted to the government for payment,” according...

Wouldn't it be nice if a comment on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) would attract a lot of attention (for my blog, I'm thinking)? Thousands of people googling 'SOA' come right to my site and find out more about HLL. I can't expect that, because I'm provoked on this occasion to comment in response to a discussion that started in January of last year. VP and Research Director of The Burton Group, Anne Thomas Manes wrote an article entitled, SOA is Dead; Long Live Services. Burton Group surveys IT R&D and provides business consulting services. They have a particular interest...

IntroductionAn application programmer spends six months perfecting a set of components commonly needed in the large company that employs him. Some of the components were particularly tricky and key pieces required very high quality, reliable and complex exception handling. It has all been tuned to run quickly and efficiently. Thorough testing has demonstrated his success. Part of his idea of “perfection” was to build in a way that the software, even many of the individual components, could easily be reused. But it is surprisingly likely that no one outside of a small group within the project will ever hear of...

A piece of highly sophisticated malicious software that has infected an unknown number of power plants, pipelines and factories over the past year is the first program designed to cause serious damage in the physical world, security experts are warning. The Stuxnet computer worm spreads through previously unknown holes in Microsoft’s Windows operating system and then looks for a type of software made by Siemens and used to control industrial components, including valves and brakes. “It is not speculation that this is the first directed cyber weapon”, or one aimed at a specific real-world process, said Joe Weiss, a US...

In 1982, operatives from the USSR’s Committee for State Security– known internationally as the KGB– celebrated the procurement of a very elusive bit of Western technology. The Soviets were developing a highly lucrative pipeline to carry natural gas across the expanse of Siberia, but they lacked the software to manage the complex array of pumps, valves, turbines, and storage facilities that the system would require. The United States possessed such software, but the US government had predictably turned down their Cold War opponent’s request to purchase the product. Never ones to allow the limitations of the law to dictate their...

FOR Iran’s beleaguered opposition, the internet is a potent weapon and a big hope. During the Green movement’s protests in 2009, activists used Twitter and Facebook, often from mobile phones, to upload videos of police brutality and spread messages of support and news of new demonstrations. The authorities responded not only by cracking heads, but cracking computers: trying to trace users, block services and close websites. Outsiders found the struggle inspirational. Austin Heap, a 26-year-old hacker born in Ohio, decided to develop anticensorship software to foil the authorities’ efforts. He named the product Haystack, and began earlier this year to...