Free Republic

Racing across the U.S. in your taco truck, you must fight off animals mutated by fallout from a nuclear war, and you must also turn them into delicious filling for the tacos you sell inside fortified towns. Your mission: Make it to the Canadian city of Winnipeg. You are “Gunman Taco Truck.” “It’s pretty much only a game that a kid would come up with,” says Brenda Romero, a videogame designer for more than 30 years and the mother of Donovan Romero-Brathwaite, the 10-year-old inventor of the game. And yet GTT already has been licensed by a videogame publisher for...

The US military is in danger of losing its technological advantage unless it invests in research and finds ways to build innovative weapons much faster, top officials said Thursday. The Pentagon unveiled an initiative to streamline its bureaucracy and tap into technological breakthroughs in the private sector amid growing anxiety that American forces' longtime hi-tech edge is slipping away. The measures reflected "an overriding concern that our technological superiority is at risk," Frank Kendall, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, wrote in a report. "Potential adversaries are challenging the US lead in conventional military capability in ways not seen since the...

Late last month a mysterious patch suddenly appeared as an Optional entry in the Windows Automatic Update chute. At the time I wrote: Conjecture at this point: It's somehow related to the ability to upgrade directly from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10. But of course, the official documentation doesn't say anything of the sort. The crows have come home to roost and, thanks to a German researcher named Gerard Himmelein at heise.de, we now have a more thorough understanding of exactly what Microsoft's dishing out (a Google English translation of the post is available). Yesterday Jan Willem Aldershoff...

Electric carmaker Tesla announced Friday it delivered a "record" number of vehicles in the first quarter, as it began more timely reporting of sales figures. The California firm started by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk said it sold 10,030 cars in the first three months of 2015. "This was a new company record for the most cars delivered in a quarter and represents a 55 percent increase over the first quarter last year," the company said in a statement. Going forward, Tesla said it would publish the number of new car deliveries within three days of quarter end. "We have decided...

Imagine you need to have an almost exact copy of an object. Now imagine that you can just pull your smartphone out of your pocket, take a snapshot with its integrated 3-D imager, send it to your 3-D printer, and within minutes you have reproduced a replica accurate to within microns of the original object. This feat may soon be possible because of a tiny new, tiny high-resolution 3-D imager developed at Caltech. Any time you want to make an exact copy of an object with a 3-D printer, the first step is to produce a high-resolution scan of the...

Quad High-Definition. That's a phrase you're likely to see more and more of this year, as Seoul, Korea-based LG Display announced Friday it is launching a 5.5-inch QHD LCD panel for smartphones. So what? This launch, said LG Display, happens to represent "a quantum jump" in color gamut, brightness and contrast ratio, touch function, power consumption and thinness. The company's high color gamut technology can provide more accurate colors in red and green; LG Display reported a 20 percent improvement in color gamut with this technology. The display provides a 120 percent color gamut, exceeding the 100 percent gamut offered...

About three days after it received a lavish new funding round, Meerkat died an ugly and embarrassing death. It is hard to decide whether the Great Meerkat Debacle that has unfolded over the past week is a tragedy or a comedy — probably a bit of both. The mobile streaming app that had whipped U.S. tech journalists into a frenzy announced $14 million in new funding on Thursday. Money poured in from Jared Leto, Greylock Partners and other illustrious sources. On the same day, Twitter launched its rival streaming app called Periscope. Apparently, investors didn’t stop to ponder why Meerkat...

Full Committee Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2015 Time: 10:00 AM Location: Dirksen 226 Presiding: Chairman Grassley Member Statements Senator Chuck Grassley R (IA) Adobe Acrobat Document Download Statement Senator Patrick Leahy D (VT) Adobe Acrobat Document Download Statement Witnesses Mr. Richard Trumka President AFL-CIO Washington , D.C. Adobe Acrobat DocumentTrumka Testimony Professor Ron Hira Associate Professor of Public Policy Howard University Washington , D.C. (SNIP)

On March 4, a woman in Mariposa County, about 70 miles north of Fresno, reported several items stolen from her home, including a smart TV, a Wi-Fi Blu-ray, laptop computer, wires and a surround sound system, the Mariposa County Sheriff's Office said Friday. A few days later, the woman discovered that movies were being watched on her Netflix account, which was linked to the stolen TV and Blu-ray, according to the sheriff's office. Using Netflix and IP address information, authorities traced the internet usage to Bobby Alexander of Mariposa, officials said.

President Barack Obama hosted a science fair at the White House on Monday. The president saw 35 projects from student teams from across the country who won various competitions, and one of those students is from the Bay Area. Ruchi Pandya is a senior at Lynbrook High in San Jose. Using tiny carbon nanofibers, Ruchi created a thumbnail-sized sensor that may one day save a lot of lives. “I can actually, with one drop of blood, tell you what a certain protein concentration in your bloodstream is. That’s an indicator for cardiac arrest,” Ruchi told KPIX 5 via Skype. Which...

The number of students graduating with STEM degrees already far exceeds the number of STEM jobs available but powerful interests in the business community are pushing Congress to allow more foreign skilled workers into the country. Congress is considering new immigration laws that would flood the U.S. with “guest workers” from the Middle East and Asia, a plan some are calling an open invitation for jihadists to walk right through America’s front door. Critics say lawmakers – including top Republican leaders – are playing with fire and could jeopardize national security with the proposals to double or even triple...

The world’s first fully digital radio transmitter has been developed by Cambridge Consultants, paving the way for 5G high-speed broadband for mobile devices. Unlike software-defined radio (SDR), the breakthrough – named Pizzicato – is not a mixture of analogue and digital components but is completely digital, which can enable new ways of using the radio spectrum intelligently. When transmitting data, only low frequency signals of 1GHz or lower propagate well over distance or through walls, so they are in great demand. Expanding to make use of frequencies of 10GHz and beyond will require techniques such as meshing and beamforming...

Before Hillary Clinton’s news conference yesterday, Jen Psaki, the spokesperson for the United States Department of State, stated that the White House could not immediately released the former Secretary of State’s emails because “it will take several months” to redact all the classified things she sent. Despite this, Ms. Clinton then stated in her press conference, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.” Someone is not telling the truth. Either Ms. Psaki lied in order to prevent the immediate release of...

I’ve raised in prior posts (here and here) the issue of physical security of the clintonemail.com e-mal server, which is why were it was located and how it was set up matters. Last night, Mitch LaKind — who has experience setting up secure military e-mail servers — wrote me about the detailed issues surrounding Clinton’s approach. I’ll let him speak for himself (emphasis mine, though): As a former contractor to the Air Force, I personally managed the Microsoft Exchange servers that were installed at Thule Air Base. My experience with Microsoft Exchange goes back to 1997, when the earliest versions...

With YouTube to watch, Instagram pictures to take and Facebook, Snapchat and other social media platforms to explore, a generation of young Americans that used to turn to television for entertainment is finding its fix elsewhere. They are watching on-demand services, such as Netflix and Hulu and the BBC iPlayer but turning off “linear” TV, or tuning in at a set time on a set channel. This migration has been gradual but is starting to show up in the quarterly results of some of the world’s biggest media companies — and investors are beginning to notice.

The hunt for Earth-like planets around distant stars could soon become a lot easier thanks to a technique developed by researchers in Germany. In a paper published today, 18 February, in the New Journal of Physics, the team of researchers have successfully demonstrated how a solar telescope can be combined with a piece of technology that has already taken the physics world by storm—the laser frequency comb (LFC). It is expected the technique will allow a spectral analysis of distant stars with unprecedented accuracy, as well as advance research in other areas of astrophysics, such as detailed observations of the...

By dipping small pieces of an ordinary kitchen sponge into solutions of nanoscale electrode materials, scientists have created a light-weight, low-cost supercapacitor that benefits from the sponge's porous structure. The pores provide a large surface area for the electrode materials to attach to, leading to an increase in ion movement between the electrodes and the electrolyte that fills in the pores. Overall, the new supercapacitor exhibits a performance that is superior to that of one made of the same electrode materials but without the sponge. The researchers, led by Jun Ma at the University of South Australia, have published their...

Without a doubt, the biggest surprise from today's Windows 10 keynote at Microsoft's Redmond campus was the outfit unveiling its HoloLens headset. Dubbed as the "first fully untethered, holographic computer" the device and its capabilities looked pretty neat -- if a little fantastical -- onstage when Alex Kipman showed it off. But for all his talk about breaking down the walls between technology and people, there are a surprising amount of them around exactly what the device is packing under the hood. We asked every person at the event that we could (developers, public relations folks, engineers) about the specs...

Signal amplification is ubiquitous to all electronic and optoelectronic systems for communications, imaging and computing - its characteristics directly impact device performance. A new signal amplification process discovered by a team of University of California, San Diego researchers is now poised to fuel new generations of electrical and photonic devices - transforming the fields of communications, imaging and computing. In the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, the team describes their work behind this discovery. "For many years, the semiconductor industry has relied on photodetectors for optoelectrical conversion, followed by low-noise electronic amplifiers to convert optical signals into electronic...

A bipartisan group of six senators — including Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), the Gang of Eight member mulling a run for president — released the first bipartisan immigration bill of the new Congress, in the form of legislation to expand high-tech visas and green cards for immigrants. “Our bill is a commonsense, bipartisan approach to help ensure that those who have come here to be educated in high-tech fields are able to stay with their families and contribute to the economy and our society,” said Senate Finance Committee chairman Orrin Hatch (R., Utah), who headed up the effort. “I’m...