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I'm shopping for a new printer for my business; I'm hoping to buy it early next year. Any advice from tech-savvy Freepers who are business owners? Key features I need are: 1. I'm looking for a color laser printer 2. It has to last a long time (my HP 2100 black & white printer lasted more than ten years before I replaced it a few years ago). 3. Despite the long life, I don't use it a lot. I typically print less than 200 sheets in a month. 4. Printing sheets as large as 11"x17" would be a nice feature,...

When the Trump administration blocked the merger of Qualcomm and Broadcom it singled out the risk that the deal would give Huawei an advantage in developing 5G technology. Bloomberg quoted an analyst in China who sees the arrest as the result of the national security White House staff pushing back against the Wall Street-friendly China doves in the White House, led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who pushed for the trade truce.

Heather Mac Donald has written and spoken extensively about how identity politics is hampering America’s ability to maintain its dominance in STEM fields. Our main competitors, most notably China, are focused on making sure the best scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are doing the work. They care nothing about gender. And they spend virtually every dollar related to STEM on hard research and analysis. The U.S., by contrast, is preoccupied with the gender and (to a lesser extent) the race and ethnicity of who is in the lab. And we pour money into promoting identity politics in STEM. Indeed, Elizabeth Harrington...

Mastercard, Microsoft to Advance Digital Identity Innovations https://newsroom.mastercard.com/press-releases/mastercard-microsoft-join-forces-to-advance-digital-identity-innovations/#__prclt=IarCgTyK Mastercard, Microsoft Join Forces to Advance Digital Identity Innovations PURCHASE, N.Y. and REDMOND, Wash. – December 3, 2018 – Mastercard (NYSE: MA) and Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) today announced a strategic collaboration to improve how people manage and use their digital identity. Currently, verifying your identity online is still dependent on physical or digital proof managed by a central party, whether it’s your passport number, your proof of address, driver’s license, user credentials or other means. This dependence places a huge burden on individuals, who have to successfully remember hundreds of passwords...

Patents recently issued to Google provide a window into their development activities. While it’s no guarantee of a future product, it is a sure indication of what’s of interest to them. What we’ve given up in privacy to Google, Facebook, and others thus far is minuscule compared to what is coming if these companies get their way. These patents tell us that Google is developing smart-home products that are capable of eavesdropping on us throughout our home in order to learn more about us and better target us with advertising. It goes much further than the current Google Home speaker...

Highlights • Last year, Infosys had announced setting up of four such hubs and hiring about 10,000 locals in the US by 2019 • Infosys has hired over 6,200 American workers since May 2017...

DOVER, N.H. — An Amazon Echo device could play a role in a double-homicide case in Farmington. A judge has ordered Amazon to turn over recordings that might have been captured by an Echo smart speaker in the Farmington house where two women were stabbed to death in January 2017.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAfiATTQufk

Brightly colored molecular models line two walls of Yet-Ming Chiang’s office at MIT. Chiang, a materials science professor and serial battery entrepreneur, has spent much of his career studying how slightly different arrangements of those sticks and spheres add up to radically different outcomes in energy storage. But he and his colleague, Venkat Viswanathan, are taking a different approach to reach their next goal, altering not the composition of the batteries but the alignment of the compounds within them. By applying magnetic forces to straighten the tortuous path that lithium ions navigate through the electrodes, the scientists believe, they could...

In 1973 OPEC countries imposed an oil embargo to retaliate for US support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Drivers endured soaring gasoline prices, blocks-long lines, hours wasted waiting to refuel vehicles, and restrictions on which days they could buy fuel. America was vulnerable to those blackmail sanctions because we imported “too much” oil – though it was just 30% of our crude.The fracking revolution (horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing) and other factors changed that dramatically. The United States now produces more crude oil than at any time since 1970.But now we face new, potentially far greater dangers –...

I am looking to shed all things Google, starting with my gmail account. I opened it in 2007 with the thought that I would have it for decades as Google was a behemoth of a company which would not disappear and which could be trusted. But alas, I now have not an ounce of trust in Google. So much is tied to my gmail account that I want to make a move to a company which will 1) stand the test of time and 2) can be trusted. I am quite sure I am not the only person thinking this...

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources. There are two ways for spies to alter the guts of computer equipment. One, known as interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning. One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack:...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — High above Yemen’s rebel-held city of Hodeida, a drone controlled by Emirati forces hovered as an SUV carrying a top Shiite Houthi rebel official turned onto a small street and stopped, waiting for another vehicle in its convoy to catch up. Seconds later, the SUV exploded in flames, killing Saleh al-Samad, a top political figure. The drone that fired that missile in April was not one of the many American aircraft that have been buzzing across the skies of Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001. It was Chinese.. Across the Middle East,...

Answer, by Fredric Brown, is a science fiction short story first published in 1954. Since the complete text appears on the Internet in several places, I'm assuming that it's in the public domain. Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing. He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch  that would connect, all at once, all of...

Humans have figured out lots of ways to shape metal -- casting it with a mold, stamping it, drilling holes and milling surfaces in a machine shop, even zapping it with a laser. Well, now you can add a new method: 3D printing. A number of companies offer metal 3D printing, which creates products and components layer by layer with a computer-controlled system tracing its lineage to ordinary inkjet printers. But on Monday, printing giant HP announced it's entered the market with the ambition to dramatically lower prices, courtesy of a $400,000 product called the Metal Jet. "We're really going...

When investigative journalist Julia Angwin worked for ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization became known as “big tech’s scariest watchdog.” By partnering with programmers and data scientists, Angwin pioneered the work of studying big tech’s algorithms — the secret codes that have an enormous effect on everyday American life. Her findings shed light on how companies like Facebook were creating tools that could be used to promote racial bias, fraudulent schemes and extremist content. Now, with a $20 million gift from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, she and her partner at ProPublica, data journalist Jeff Larson, are starting The Markup, a news...

In 1969, it was space travel. Today, the world’s most tech-savvy nations are in a race for 5G – networks that operate 100 times more quickly than today’s cellular networks. So what’s behind this competition to achieve 5G? First, buffering and lag will be a thing of the past, reducing the download time of a two-hour movie – which now requires six minutes – to only 3.6 seconds. But the impacts of 5G are more far-reaching than faster download speeds on our mobile devices. 5G allows for the lighting-speed transmission of massive amounts of data, making the potential applications of...

“LIKE Florence in the Renaissance.” That is a common description of what it is like to live in Silicon Valley. America’s technology capital has an outsize influence on the world’s economy, stockmarkets and culture. This small portion of land running from San Jose to San Francisco is home to three of the world’s five most valuable companies. Giants such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Netflix all claim Silicon Valley as their birthplace and home, as do trailblazers such as Airbnb, Tesla and Uber. The Bay Area has the 19th-largest economy in the world, ranking above Switzerland and Saudi Arabia. The...

The Clinton Administration notified Congress today that it had approved the export of technology to China to permit the launching of a communications satellite aboard a Chinese rocket next month.President Clinton said in a letter to Congress that the transfer would not harm national security or significantly improve China's military capability in space. The President was required under a 1998 law to certify that all such technology exports are in the national interest.The certification was the first such notice to Congress under the law, which was passed in the aftermath of a Congressional uproar last year over the transfer of...

According to the ImportGenius website that tracks the import/export activity at shipping docks, the U.S. Army Contracting Command received the 3D mobile air-defense radar system from Ukraine. The notice by the ImportGenius said that the U.S. Army Contracting Command center in Orlando has received 3D mobile air-defense radar system, called the 36D6M1-1, from Ukraine through SFTC “Progress”. The 36D6M1-1is a mobile 3D airspace surveillance radar system that was developed by the SE “Scientific and Production Complex “Iskra” and is designed to be used as a part of modern automated Air Defense systems, Anti-Aircraft Missile Complexes and to detect low flying...