Free Republic

American cable giant Spectrum is raising its TV, internet and phone plan prices in July. Spectrum's internet base price will increase by $3 a month for all plans beginning in July, CNET reported. The provider's home phone plans and TV Select service will also increase by $3 in some states. It is the second time Spectrum - one of America's main cable providers along with Comcast Xfinity, DirecTV and Dish - has hiked it rates this year alone. In January, Spectrum raised its low-income plan from $20 to $25 a month. At the same time in January it also raised...

ESPN and other Disney-owned channels have gone dark on Charter's Spectrum cable service, as the two companies intensify their dispute over fees. Disney pulled ESPN, ABC and its other cable channels off Spectrum on Thursday night, the eve of college football's first big games and the middle of US Open tennis coverage. Spectrum serves huge markets including New York and Los Angeles and has some 32 million customers, many of whom are now fuming at the loss of sports coverage. At the moment Disney pulled the plug, ESPN was carrying a college football game between Florida and No. 14 Utah...

NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd was pilloried on social media on Sunday for suggesting that “there is a lot of scientific research that says gender is a spectrum” and that sex is not “binary.” Todd made the comment during a spirited interview on Sunday with GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has argued for limitations on gender affirming treatments for those under the age of 18. “Below the age of 18, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to say that we won’t allow genital mutilation or chemical castration through puberty blockers,” Ramaswamy, the biopharmaceutical mogul and author, told Todd...

Differences in Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome (right) and a control (left) organoid. (Papes et al., Nature Communications, 2022) ================================================================== Scientists have uncovered changes in neurological structure that could underlie the autism spectrum disorder known as Pitt Hopkins syndrome, thanks to the help of lab-grown brains developed from human cells. Furthermore, the researchers were able to recover lost genetic functions through the use of two different gene therapy strategies – hinting at the possibility of treatments that could one day give those with the condition new options in improving their quality of life. Pitt Hopkins syndrome is a neurodevelopmental condition stemming from a...

House lawmakers want the Trump administration to investigate reports that a wealthy foundation used an offshore shell company to give millions of dollars to environmental activists opposed to U.S. energy development. “If you connect the dots, it is clear that Russia is funding U.S. environmental groups in an effort to suppress our domestic oil and gas industry, specifically hydraulic fracking,” Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith said Friday. Smith and Texas Republican Rep. Randy Weber asked Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to investigate whether or not environmentalists were funneling money to U.S. environmental groups through a Bermuda-based shell company. Republicans are pitching...

Sorry for the vanity, but I have been watching the news on this for a week and have not seen an article. I noticed at some point last week that I can not longer get to Parler.com while at home. It does not connect on my computer, or on either of my two phones while using my home wi-fi. When I connect to a VPN on either phone (I have a work and personal cell phone), or if I use cellular data Parler.com and the Parler app work just fine. The error I get is "server not found". Has anyone...

Mainers affected by nationwide Spectrum outage Erin Keller 4/5/2021 Mainers statewide are without Spectrum TV and internet service Monday evening. a sign on the side of a building© Provided by WCSH-TV Portland, ME NEWS CENTER Maine has heard from people experiencing outages from Portland to Bristol to Bangor. This appears to be part of a nationwide outage. In a tweet, Spectrum responded to the issue and said it is working as quickly as possible to restore service and could be back by 10 p.m. in Portland. We are aware of an issue affecting services at this time for Spectrum customers...

  FREEING UP RESOURCES: President Donald J. Trump is taking decisive action to release more spectrum for commercial use, strengthening the United States’ leadership in 5G communications. At the President’s direction, the Administration announced that 100 megahertz of contiguous, coast-to-coast mid-band spectrum will be made available for commercial 5G deployment. This spectrum will give Americans access to the greatest 5G networks in the world, leading to cutting-edge innovation, economic prosperity, and strong national security. The American wireless industry will be able to build and operate 5G networks nationwide using the 3.45-3.55 GHz band.Through collaboration with the Department of Defense, the...

A self-described progressive activist, who helped found an advocacy group in Pittsburgh that supports autistic people, is mounting a challenge against longtime incumbent state Rep. Harry Readshaw. Jessica Benham, 28, of the South Side Slopes, is bidding for the Democratic nomination in the 36th legislative district, shaping her candidacy after the campaigns of a number of progressive women who have toppled longtime Democratic incumbents in the past two years. Her campaign is framing the race that way, too, and in a recent email, used the secondary headline to proclaim “Progressive Benham to challenge conservative incumbent Harry Readshaw.” “In some ways,...

It appears Charter is blocking Free Republic in SC. I am able to connect via my Cellphone. My final solution for a good fix: I installed SetupVPN extension in Firefox. Very easy to use, I now have access to Free Republic again. My outage started yesterday around 5 PM, still out. I had this happen once before about 5 years ago., the issue went away after a day.

I am perennially asked whether I do or do not “believe” in autism. I suspect that on most occasions, it’s a test. Nonetheless, it’s a fair question that usually takes this form: “I know you don’t believe in ADHD; but do you believe in autism?” To be clear, it would be absurd of me to deny that there are children – plenty of them, relatively speaking – who frequently exhibit behaviors associated with the bogus diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder). Those kids are problematic, for sure. But no one has ever proven that they “have” something. Childhood behavior disorders...

"We Truly Don't Know What It Is" --Mystery Milky-Way Spectrum of Light Observed 'Not Produced By Any Known Emission' April 17, 2018   "We use special telescopes to catch X-ray light in the sky, and while looking at these X-rays, the telescopes noticed an unexpected feature and captured a spectrum of light, which is not produced by any known atomic emission," said University of Miami astrophysicist Nico Cappelluti. "This emission line is now called the 3.5 kiloelectron volt (keV). One interpretation of this emission line is that it's produced by the decay of dark matter." "This 3.5 keV emission line is...

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Internet, and for some, their phones and TVs went down at 1 a.m. 11/23/17, courtesy of some apparently disgruntled electrical union employee of Spectrum. It just came back up a few minutes ago! So thousands of people could not watch the Thanksgiving parade at Macys, get Black Friday shopping bargains, or read the latest on FR. This is like the 4th act of union vandalism against Spectrum and therefore against its customers. They don't care that we are grievously inconvenienced or may have emergency need for phone services. I spit on them. There is a $50K reward for the perp(s)....

Video at link is 1:24 minutes in length and was uploaded around 12:50 PST. The video displays a map of regions of outages all occurring in the same place for 3 separate entities (Comcast, Spectrum, Level 3). The vlogger provided the following link for use in learning more about the outages: http://downdetector.com/status/comcast-xfinity/map/ You can change the company viewed but the link is currently set to Comcast-Xfinity.

Spectrum News examines the recent crackdown on immigration and its impact on the lives and businesses of immigrants in America, in the one-hour special, "Immigration in America."

The television screen went dark a month ago as Daniel Fitzgerald watched “American Pickers” on the History Channel. Perplexed, he grabbed the remote and surfed through CNN, Disney, Comedy Central and the rest of the standard cable lineup. Many of them were gone, too. In their place was a black background with a small block of text advising him that his subscription no longer provided those channels. “I thought, ‘What the hell? I just paid the cable bill,’” Fitzgerald recalled last week in the tiny Lexington [Kentucky] apartment he shares with his disabled 16-year-old son. Fitzgerald called Spectrum, the subsidiary...

It’s a month out from the start of the Dodgers’ 2017 regular season. Do you know where your SportsNet LA channel might be? Any optimistic plans to expand distribution for the team-owned 24/7 network continues to be in a contradictory holding pattern, even as outside forces mount that some predict will ultimately break the stalemate that began four years ago. Charter Communications, which bought out Time Warner Cable last year and was ready to take a fresh approach at negotiations, concedes it does not anticipate any sort of revived agreement in the near future with any more cable or satellite...

A pick for the "best" new product at the Shot Show is a highly subjective thing.  The item that most impressed me was at the Taurus booth.  It is the likely replacement for the Taurus 738 TCP, the Taurus Spectrum. It seems that Taurus has not been able to keep up with demand for the 738. The 738 has an excellent reputation for reliability. It is small, easy to conceal, and is in the popular .380 caliber.  I liked the ergonomics of the 738.  So why has Taurus introduced what appears to be a replacement for the 738? First,...

Full title: AT&T and DirecTV colluded in an illegal plot that kept Dodgers games off the air, DOJ lawsuit alleges AT&T and DirecTV acted as ringleaders in an illegal plot against the Dodgers Channel that kept Los Angeles sports fans from watching their favorite team on television, according to a major lawsuit filed Wednesday by the Justice Department. The anti-collusion suit alleges that DirecTV -- and its corporate parent, AT&T -- shared private negotiating information in 2014 with other TV providers, including Cox Communications and Charter Communications, in order to gain a collective advantage over Time Warner Cable, which was...