Free Republic

The observable universe contains more than 100 billion galaxies. Our galaxy alone, popularly known as the Milky Way, has more than 100 billion stars. Does that make you yearn for those days of yesteryear when many followed the thought of Aristotle and Ptolemy: Five planets plus the sun and the moon circling Earth? Was it easier to evangelize before people thought of Earth as a little sphere circling a fifth-rate star on a minor galaxy’s periphery -- so why should God care about us? A century ago scientists of course knew the Earth moved, but many still thought we were...

Auto makers and Silicon Valley are locked in a fight to control the dashboard display... The current state of play is a confused free-for-all as the two industries circle each other warily. Some car makers are turning over their dashboard operating systems to Alphabet’s Google entirely. Others, including Ford Motor Co. and Daimler AG , wager they can muster the technological chops to compete... With his wife’s 2016 Mazda CX-5, he can’t figure out how to turn off the radio. “We can turn it down,” he said. “But off is apparently a complex process we haven’t been able to figure...

Internal discussion threads exclusively obtained by Breitbart News shows Google employees in meltdown over the tech giant’s decision to include the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, Kay Coles James, on an artificial intelligence advisory council. Multiple Google employees in the thread also engaged in outright smears against the Heritage Foundation. Google employees accused the think-tank of transphobia, homophobia, and “extremism,” of viewing LGBT people as “sub-human,” questioning their “humanity,” and supporting “exterminationist” views. “Would we even consider having a virulent anti­-semite on the advisory board? How about an avowed racist or white supremacist?” asked one Google employee. “This seems...

Russia wants to copy China. Reliance on American servers, and American technology is a serious threat to the privacy of Russian citizens. Russia wants to cut itself off from the global internet. Here’s what that really means. The plan is going to be tricky to pull off, both technically and politically, but the Kremlin has set its sights on self-sufficiency. by Charlotte Jee March 21, 2019 In the next two weeks, Russia is planning to attempt something no other country has tried before. It’s going to test whether it can disconnect from the rest of the world electronically while keeping...

Joe Barnard has spent the last three years pioneering DIY landing technologies for amateur rockets and now the aerospace industry is paying attention. SHARETWEET by Daniel Oberhaus | Sep 21 2018, 8:00pm Image: Joe Barnard / BPS Space SHARETWEET To call Joe Barnard an “amateur” rocketeer is something of a misnomer. As the founder of Barnard Propulsion Systems (BPS), a small business making flight hardware for other amateur rocketeers, the 25-year-old Nashville resident is working on cracking propulsive landings for model rockets. This is the same principle that allows SpaceX to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rockets...

It’s true: it’s that time of year again, already. Time to reset your clocks.In addition to death and taxes we are now required to surrender an hour of our time to government; tomorrow morning at 2:00 AM you are mandated to turn your clock ahead one hour (unless you live in Arizona or Hawaii where they successfully rebelled against this tyranny years ago). What they do with our hour is anybody’s guess but when we finally get it back next November I know it will be greatly devalued.Like the dollarIn the past you could protest by refusing to adjust your...

February 19, 2019 |   Today, China released a new grand plan for the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen and Guangzhou would be the four key cities of the bay area and the core engines for regional development.Finance, Insurance Industry Support for Hong Kong The plan supports Hong Kong as an international finance, transport and trade center as well as an aviation hub, promoting the development of high-end and high-value-added financial, commercial, trading, logistics and professional services. The insurance sector will be one of the biggest winners under the plan for the new economic...

February 22, 2019 |   Salvatore Cezar Pais is a US Navy researcher. Salvatore has three amazing patents that would be incredible breakthroughs in physics if they are true. The least extreme is a patent for Piezoelectricity-Induced Room Temperature Superconductor. The other two patents are gravity wave generator and inertial mass reduction.If these could be realized as technologies then we are talking Star Trek level spaceships. The gravitational wave generator could be used for propellentless propulsion to near the speed of light. Being able to reduce inertia would also mean capabilities which currently seem beyond known physics.The more likely situation...

Self-driving cars could be more likely to hit and kill black people due to flaws in the software used to detect objects, researchers have warned. In a pre-publication scientific paper, researchers from the University of Georgia found that computer vision systems are better at detecting people with lighter skin tones.

The Trump re-election campaign’s wireless open access proposal was a poorly vetted scheme possibly intended to score political points. It was squelched almost immediately after it became public, as shocked White House staff members complained that it contradicted the administration’s support for competing wireless networks. The twist? Open access wireless is actually a terrific idea. Some forward-thinking Democrats and public interest advocates have been pushing it for decades. The concept, promoted by Republican operatives such as Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove, is for a network supporting fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology to operate on a wholesale basis. Carriers such as AT&T,...

There’s been no end to the complaints on the left (and portions of the right as well) about President Trump’s use of tariffs to attempt to craft better trade deals for the United States. The results have been a mixed bag thus far, with some efforts delivering results (see: Mexico and Canada) and others seeming to fall short (the auto industry is a good example there). But some of the greatest consternation on display around punditry panels has been caused by the President’s aggressive stance toward China, arguably our largest trading partner. Trump’s complaints about their habitual theft of...

A Florida mom and pediatrician warned parents to better monitor their children’s internet activity after she found a disturbing clip that appeared to encourage children to harm themselves, inserted into gaming videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids. Dr. Free Hess, from Gainesville, Florida, found the 9-second-long suicide instructions sandwiched between clips of the Nintendo game Splatoon last week and shared it online to caution other parents. "Remember kids, sideways for attention, longways for results," a man said while demonstrating the cutting motion on his arm. "End it." The man, identified by CBS News as YouTuber Filthy Frank, has over 6.2...

Virtually everything that you do online and offline is being monitored, tracked or recorded by someone. Could you imagine what life would be like if the government compiled all of that information into a giant database and used it to punish those that had engaged in politically-incorrect behavior? Here in the United States, Internet censorship has escalated dramatically, but over in China the government is cracking down on a much wider array of online and offline activities. If you fail to make a credit card payment, get into an argument in public or say the wrong thing on social media,...

A group of Microsoft workers is demanding the company cancel a contract supplying the U.S. Army with HoloLens headsets that they say would turn real-world battlefields into a video game. Microsoft's head-mounted HoloLens displays use augmented reality, which means viewers can see virtual imagery superimposed over the scenery in front of them. A letter signed by more than 50 Microsoft employees Friday and circulated on an internal messaging board said the technology could help soldiers spot — and kill — adversaries on the battlefield....

In early February, Google announced that its home security and alarm system Nest Secure would be getting an update. Users, the company said, could now enable its virtual-assistant technology, Google Assistant. The problem: Nest users didn't know a microphone existed on their security device to begin with. The existence of a microphone on the Nest Guard, which is the alarm, keypad, and motion-sensor component in the Nest Secure offering, was never disclosed in any of the product material for the device.

A top Iranian official says his country possesses the chemical and technical abilities to produce a nuclear weapon, the Washington Free Beacon reported citing Farsi language remarks that were independently translated for the news site. The translation quoted Ahmad Khatami, a senior member of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, which has close ties to the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. He noted in recent remarks that the ability to possess a nuclear missile “is vital for Iran to confront the U.S. and its allies,” as noted in Farsi language comments made over the weekend.

Your smart lightbulb is probably storing your wifi password in the clear, ready to be recovered by wily dumpster-divers; Limited Results discovered the security worst-practice during a teardown of a Lifx bulb; and that's just for starters: the bulbs also store their RSA private key and root passwords in the clear and have no security measures to prevent malicious reflashings of their ROMs with exploits, network probes and other nasties.

Full tile: Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else IF BEZOS WERE the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic. That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with...

Editor's note: This column was authored by Lindsay Marchello. Remember the firestorm that surrounded the Covington controversy? People were convinced that a group of white Catholic teenagers harassed and mocked a Native American activist, but the truth turned out to be much more complex. Unfortunately, things are only bound to get worse. As the Covington Affair makes clear, our outrage culture isn’t ready for deep fake technology. But, it doesn’t matter—it’s almost here anyway.Deep fakes are manipulated videos that can produce fake, hyper-realistic images and audio of people, that are almost impossible to tell apart from reality. It’s what film director...

Rhino Hide will provide Advanced Building Technologies with $7 million of bulletproof linings for Border Patrol. Rhino Hide... is a mixture that's pumped into the interior of wall sections where it hardens and become bulletproof. ABT is contracting with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to provide between 2,000-3,000 mobile structures for border patrol agents working on the Southern U.S. border. The structures would be used for border patrol to operate drones out of or possibly sleep in.