Free Republic

Virginia Tech officials gave out more than $8.5 million on Monday to people who were wounded, lost loved ones or survived the shootings at the Blacksburg campus on April 16. The "bulk" of the money, according to university President Charles Steger, was being disbursed "to 79 families and individuals." "There is no right way to disburse these monies, but we believe the best way to continue the healing is to put as much as possible in the hands of those who have suffered most," ... some of the recipients will get "the disbursements over time in the form of free...

I need some help from the Techies and Computer Nerds. I am the proud owner of a Power Mac G5 2.5Ghz. I want to upgrade the memory to 8G. I have a limited budget so I have been shopping around a little and have come across Ramjet.com which is offering 4G for $259. Edge memory goes for $273 for 4G Kingston $385 for 4G (I have had a Apple store employee tell me that Kingston works well in Macs). Simple Tech $1,969 for 4G (what did I say? STAGGERING). Does anyone have any experience with the memory sold by Ramjet...

By mimicking a brick-and-mortar molecular structure found in seashells, University of Michigan researchers created a composite plastic that's as strong as steel but lighter and transparent. It's made of layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble polymer that shares chemistry with white glue. Engineering professor Nicholas Kotov almost dubbed it "plastic steel," but the new material isn't quite stretchy enough to earn that name. Nevertheless, he says its further development could lead to lighter, stronger armor for soldiers or police and their vehicles. It could also be used in microelectromechanical devices, microfluidics, biomedical sensors and valves and unmanned aircraft. Kotov...

A team of astronomers have taken pictures of the stars that are sharper than anything produced by the Hubble telescope, at 50 thousandths of the cost. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), used a technique called “Lucky Imaging” to take the most detailed pictures of stars and nebulae ever produced – using a camera based on the ground. Images from ground-based telescopes are usually blurred by the Earth’s atmosphere - the same effect that makes the stars appear to twinkle when we look at them with the naked eye. The Cambridge/Caltech...

sea_stuart writes with a story from the Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, Australia. It is still communicating with the two Voyager spacecraft 30 years after they were launched and 18 years after Voyager 2 passed close by Neptune. Here's a little background on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. "The bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked... [T]he 1970s hardware is now our world's only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system's outer limits. Today Voyager 1 is humanity's most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometers from...

I have started using craigslist recently in regards to my job, quick question, is there a way to embed youtube video's in craigslist postings? or even in village voice backpages.com postings?On craigslist (or village voice backpages) is there any way to upload video in the ads or postings in any way?Or can you only link to a video instead of embed one in there?Before anyone asks, I work in real estate, and this would be really usefull.

ISPs in the U.S. experienced a service slowdown Monday after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were apparently sabotaged by gunfire. TeliaSonera, which lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut, said that the outage began around 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday night. When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot. "Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable," said Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera spokesman. The damage affected a large span of cable, more than two-thirds of a mile [1.1 km] long, near Cleveland, TeliaSonera said. The company...

Two students, 15 others hospitalized on day shooting memorial dedicated

What keeps you busy? With all of our so called “technological” advances, you don’t really have more time for yourself, do you? Admit it! None of us do. Most of the blessings of Western Civilization don’t feel like blessings. When your boss calls you on your cell phone on a Saturday for a status report, you flinch at your caller ID. When the “self checkout kiosk” at your local Home Depot can’t seem to read the bar code on your new ceiling fan, you sigh at the clerk. “A little help over here!” you say, with a tone of superior...

Some state lawmakers want to create a fund for victims of the April 16 shooting at Virginia Tech that left 33 people dead. Any significant action on the proposal is likely several months away -- the General Assembly meets in January -- but several state legislators say the idea is increasingly becoming a topic of conversation. "I feel it's altogether appropriate, in this case, for the commonwealth to do this," state Sen. John S. Edwards, D-Roanoke, said during a phone interview yesterday. "I would strongly support this." Edwards, whose district includes Blacksburg, the home of Virginia Tech, believes money for...

t was a slow Friday at Red Herring magazine. The receptionist at the Silicon Valley tech title had stepped away from her desk. So a messenger strolls in from the summer sunshine, finds a 20-something reporter on her first real job and hits her with an eviction notice. Red Herring has three days to pay the rent or get out. Word got around, fast. Then someone looked outside. There, driving up in a rented silver Mazda minivan is a correspondent with gossip blog Valleywag. Aaaaaaand she's got a camera. Silicon Valley is booming again. But if you work in tech...

North Carolina State University physicists have recently deduced a way to improve high-energy-density capacitors so that they can store up to seven times as much energy per unit volume than the common capacitor. High performance capacitors would enable hybrid and electric cars with much greater acceleration, better and faster steering of rockets and spacecraft, better regeneration of electricity when using brakes in electric cars, and improved lasers, among many other electrical applications. A capacitor is an energy storage device. Electrical energy is stored by a difference in charge between two metal surfaces. Unlike a battery, capacitors are designed to release...

U.S. consumers should be allowed to take phones along with them when they switch wireless carriers, and spectrum to be auctioned through the U.S. Federal Communications Commission should include rules requiring the winning bidders to sell access to competitors at wholesale rates, some U.S. lawmakers said Wednesday. Some members of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet also questioned what they called huge early termination fees on wireless telephone contracts. But other lawmakers and executives with wireless carriers questioned the need for new wireless regulations, saying an already competitive market protects customers. The U.S. wireless industry...

After a short downturn, the tech economy is back on the upswing. Hi-tech careers are on the rebound and, with the right college education and on-the-job training, your future looks bright. Professionals with technical training or degrees from online technical schools will find prime-time opportunities to advance their careers. Some of the top job seekers poised to laugh all the way to the bank in this resurgent tech economy: IT specialists, database administrators, high-tech marketing pros, and digital designers. We'll take a closer look at these individual careers by type, but first the good news numbers that are putting smiles...

Excerpt - ~ snip ~ We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions. ~ snip ~ The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the...

Think that all of the great Web sites have already been invented? Think again. The Internet is evolving in new and inventive ways thanks to mashups that pull data from all over the Web and to AJAX-based interfaces that give sites the same degree of interactivity and responsiveness that desktop apps possess. To keep you ahead of the curve, we've rounded up 25 innovative Web sites and services that are well worth watching. Some of them help you design your own personalized Web site mashups; others enable you to create video mixes, build wikis, share personal obsessions, and more. But...

So the Rice team decided to investigate using sound instead of radio waves. Bone is known to be a great conductor of sound, but so far it has only been used to transmit analogue signals in applications such as checking how bone is healing after a fracture, and in hearing aids that transmit sound from outside the skull to the auditory nerve. To see if bone could transmit digital signals over longer distances - to a headset, say, from a sensor worn on the wrist - the team applied a small vibrator to various parts of the body. When they...

The Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base has a long history of leading the cutting edge of aeronautical technology. With the airborne laser program, the center is leading the way in yet another area of futuristic weaponry, this time the use of directed energy, more commonly known as lasers. "Directed energy is transformative. It changes the way we fight wars," said Michael Rinn, deputy program manager for the airborne laser for The Boeing Co. The airborne laser is seen as a pathfinder for directed energy programs, working through the development issues of the new technology that...

SEATTLE — A 27-year-old man described as one of the world's most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail. Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using networks of compromised "zombie" computers to send out millions upon millions of spam e-mails. "He's one of the top 10 spammers in the world," said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company's Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. "He's a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day." • Click...

One of the coolest websites for pet owners that I just read about on the internet. Matchmaking Doggie style on the internet. Pet Socializing !!!