Free Republic

A 1940 educational short by Bell Telephone to show customers that were recieving new dial phones how to use the new device, and why they were getting these new sets.

There are a hundred reasons why nuclear energy can play a massive role in the future of American power and prosperity.It creates high-paying jobs better than any other energy source. Its fuel sources are abundant. It fuels NASA’s most innovative projects. It offers a solution to conservation concerns without devastating the economy. And despite its sensationalist image, it is far safer than fossil fuels, and about the same in safety as solar and wind.“Nuclear provides 55% of our country’s clean energy, and about 20% of our power, and it’s one of the most reliable generators that we have on the...

What if forgetting your password for a website could cost you $200 million? That’s the situation facing a programmer living in San Francisco. From the Times: Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.

Amazon Web Services filed its response to Parler's lawsuit on Tuesday, blaming the social media platform favored by the far-right for filing a "meritless claim" against the cloud computing giant and citing a liability shield often maligned by President Donald Trump: Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934. AWS's legal brief argues that it is Parler, not Amazon (AMZN), that breached the terms of its contract and that Parler's removal from AWS's hosting platform was a "last resort." "This case is about Parler's demonstrated unwillingness and inability to remove from the servers of Amazon Web Services ('AWS') content that...

Now that Amazon Web Services has shut down Parler, will the social network rebuild elsewhere? Parler CEO John Matze says Parler will be back with "many competing for our business." Don't bet on it. There appears to be no major public cloud or hosting company willing to give Parler a home. But, even if there were, Parler would find it almost impossible to return anytime soon. Parler will need to build its own infrastructure.

Despite leaving the EU, London may be source its next main battle tank from France and Germany. According to industry reports, the United Kingdom may be interested in the jointly developed Franco-German Eurotank project to replace their aging Challenger 2 main battle tank, which though not a particularly aged tank, will eventually need replacement.

The U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) is preparing for a war in the Pacific against a near-peer adversary–that means China. One of their go-to weapons in the future could be a new type of long-range loitering munition or what could be described as a sort of kamikaze bomb. Changing Times In an effort to become more expeditionary and better prepared for combat in a littoral environment, big changes are coming to the United States Marine Corps. At the heart of the USMC’s pivot from land-based counterinsurgency warfare to their traditional maritime expeditionary role is a need to counter an increasingly aggressive...

A while back we heard a suggestion that it may be possible to use the 5th harmonic on R820T2 RTL-SDRs to receive frequencies much higher than the normal 1.766 GHz limit. After mentioning this to to Hayati Augen he has recently managed to implement this driver hack, and now R820T2 based RTL-SDRs can tune all the way up to 6 GHz if Hayati's experimental driver branch is used. Before everyone gets too excited, we need to temper expectations as sensitivity reduces the higher the frequency so an LNA may be required, imaging/aliasing is a major problem, and you will absolutely...

For those who are interested.....I monitor and track airplanes that fly over North Florida where I live, Civilian Passenger Planes, Military Planes and Private Aircraft, using a Raspberry Pi, ADS-B software from Flightaware.com, it's a hobby... Yesterday during a very busy day, all the traffic I was tracking just dropped off to almost nothing, I was convinced it was my equipment and started to investigate, changing cables, rebooting the Raspberry Pi, etc....nothing worked. I went on the Flightware Discussion boards looking for a solution and ran into an article just posted by someone else from Jacksonville who was reporting the...

Throughout the last year, there’s been a great deal of rancor related to Chinese-owned tech companies that do business in the United States. The Trump administration spent the better part of 2020 attempting to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok. The U.S. government has also devoted energies in recent years to cracking down on Chinese-made smartphone manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, with the FCC, last summer, declaring both companies threats to national security. More recently, security researchers discovered what they described as a “Chinese backdoor” in TCL’s Android TVs that are sold in the United States. The acting secretary of homeland security, Chad...

I received a log periodic antenna designed by ham radio operator WA5VJB from Kent Electronics. They are rated from 2 to 11 GHz, so this model will cover several of the ham bands. These antennas are made on PCB's and are ideal for use in the amateur microwave bands as compromise dish feeds. In this video I do a test of such a feed versus my patch antenna on the 3.4 GHz band. https://www.wa5vjb.com/products1.html I mounted one in place of the original dipole feed on a 2.4 GHz (13cm) gridpack at the same focal point. Whilst gain will be down...

A high school student held onto a 2016 video of a young girl saying a racial slur, then posted it online after she had chosen to attend her dream school, the New York Times reported. “I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” 18-year-old Jimmy Galligan told the New York Times. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation. In 2019, Galligan was sent a three-second Snapchat video of fellow Heritage High School student Mimi Groves saying “I can drive” before uttering a racial slur. When...

You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."--George Orwell, 1984 It had the potential for disaster. Early in the morning of Monday, December 15, 2020, Google suffered a major worldwide outage in which all of its internet-connected services crashed, including Nest, Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube. The outage only lasted an hour, but it was a chilling reminder of how reliant the world has become on internet-connected technologies to do everything from unlocking doors and turning up the...

Imagine: Blank ballot paper pre-printed over the entire surface with “Q” codes in permanent inks not visible to the naked eye, and then provided to all states ONLY from the Federal Election Comission to state election offices. States then use that paper to print the “human readable” ballot in permanent black ink. Those ballots are then “read” by optical scanners also provided ONLY by the FEC and whose software source code and construction specs are publicly available to all citizens interested. Those optical scanners then retain all scanned ballots in locked compartments, whose keys are also issued to state elections...

In May 2016, a student enrolled in a high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher, the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover deleted messages from the phone. According to the arrest affidavit, investigators discovered the student and teacher frequently messaged each other, “I love you.” Two days later, the teacher was booked into the county jail for sexual assault of a child. The Cellebrite used to gather evidence in that case was...

We’re hearing Gestapo thrown around a lot lately. It’s almost as though the legions of easily-propagandized ignorants wore out the constant mis-use of Nazi, Fascist and Hitler. Most of the Gestapo iterations of this are complete nonsense. Most. Not all. The Chinese Communist government’s police state apparatus is the modern day equivalent of the Gestapo. A report leaked to the Washington Post shows that the Chinese Communist government has tested, and is presumably using, AI facial recognition software developed by Huawei to identify the Muslim ethnic minority of Uighurs and alert police — read, Gestapo. The Post story reports: “The...

A college student with a desire to alleviate his father's suffering has invented an app that helps people with PTSD stop having night terrors.Tyler Skluzacek's father, Patrick, a US Army Commander with PTSD, was suffering from debilitating night terrors.Patrick served in Iraq in 2007 and at night his dreams took him back to Fallujah. He could only fall asleep with the help of alcohol and pills -- and his life slowly fell apart."[I] pretty much lost everything," he told NPR, fighting back tears. "My house, everything, my job, everything went."Tyler was a senior at Macalester College when he entered a...

A high-level Chinese official acknowledged at a forum on Nov. 28 that many of China’s investment projects in the semiconductor industry were short-sighted and ultimately failed. Wang Zhijun, one of the deputy ministers at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, made the comments while speaking at the China Development Forum hosted by the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, according to Chinese state-run media. What’s happening now in the semiconductor industry has happened to other Chinese sectors, such as steel, cement, and photovoltaics, leading to production overcapacity, said Wang. He said the semiconductor industry needed greater supervision and that companies...

A lot is known about the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, but many of its details will remain very much shrouded in mystery. This week the action to correct hardware issues that contributed to the crash of a single-engine F-35A Lightning II that was part of the 58th Fighter Squadron, 33rd Fighter Wing in May will remain a secret. The F-35 Joint Program Office announced the decision on Monday. “Explicit details related to corrective actions have the potential to compromise operational security,” a JPO spokeswoman told Air Force magazine, without elaborating. What the JPO did confirm is...

To adapt former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's famous 2002 press statement, the world's next big shooting war will be a consequential event masked by known unknowns. The human historical record tells us a major armed (kinetic) conflict involving powerful nations will eventually erupt. Given contemporary economic interdependence and the lethality of modern weaponry, the conflict will have disruptive global consequences, many of them grim. However, what geopolitical issues shape and misshape The Next Big War; who wages the hostility and for what reasons; how the combatants prepare to wage it; where and how the combatants engage; and how the...