Free Republic

Read full article at CNAS Some highlights: The U.S. military is at a high-stakes inflection point: it must take a series of much bigger and bolder steps to keep its military-technological edge over great power competitors such as China, or it could lose that edge within the decade... this conceptual shift toward great power competition has not been matched by a requisite re-alignment of concepts, culture, and service programs and budgets. The DoD is talking a far better game than it is actually playing. The proverbial clock is ticking, and while the Pentagon and Congress continue to make changes largely...

An overview of the antennas used for surveillance.

The British defense committee reported on Oct. 8 that there’s “clear evidence of collusion between Huawei and the Chinese state” and urged the government to urgently remove Huawei’s equipment from the country’s telecommunications infrastructure by 2025. In July, Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered that Huawei be purged from Britain’s 5G networks by 2027 amid fears of spying and sabotage, and following tough U.S. sanctions against the company affecting its supply of up-to-date chips. The defense committee report, however, states that the purging should be done years earlier even if it involves recompense for current operators. “The Government should take necessary...

While we often discuss expansion into the Solar System as a step leading to interstellar flight, the movement into space has its dark side, as author Daniel Deudney argues in a new book. As Kenneth Roy points out in the review that follows, it behooves everyone involved in space studies to understand what the counter-arguments are. Ken is a newly retired professional engineer who is currently living amidst, as he puts it, “the relics of the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” His professional career involved working for various Department of Energy (DOE) contractors in the fields of fire protection...

Open source RF hardware has been under development for several years, a boon for ham radio operators and academics. Open Research Institute anticipates that the Commerce Department will find that these technologies are unrestricted under the carve-out for open source in the EAR.

At a press conference held by ChinaÂ’s State Council Information Office on Sept. 16, Bai Chunli, the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), stated that in dealing with pressure from high-tech companies from the United States, CAS will strengthen its research on supercomputing systems and key materials in the next 10 years to help solve critical problems in these areas. But this sounds like a joke, as CAS is surrounded by scandals, driven by politics, and controlled by the Chinese regime.BaiÂ’s statement coincides with the strictest ban by the United States of supplying chips to Huawei. As such,...

China’s former finance minister Lou Jiwei warned in a recent speech that China’s “immature” 5G technology is likely to become a failed investment.In recent weeks, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has emphasized the need for the country’s economy to develop an “internal circulation system—in other words, having domestic sectors produce all the goods for Chinese consumption, from raw materials to manufacturing.The economy should “create a new development pattern where domestic and foreign markets can boost each other, with the domestic market as the mainstay,” Xi had said.But Lou said that China’s 5G innovations—heavily subsidized by Beijing—could become a “blockage point”...

Documented conversations between Tech Support staff and (technologically impaired) seniors.... Tech support: What kind of computer do you have? Customer: A white one... Tech support: Click on the 'my computer' icon on to the left of the screen. Customer: Your left or my left? ************************ Customer: Hi, good afternoon, this is Martha, I can't print. Every time I try, it says 'can’t find printer’. I've even lifted the printer and placed it in front of the monitor, but the computer still says he can't find it.. ************************* Customer: My keyboard is not working anymore. Tech support: Are you sure it's...

Free and cheap ham radio projects list by WA5VJB

An international team of scientists said Monday it had joined forces to combat the spread of anti-Semitism online with the help of artificial intelligence. The project Decoding Anti-Semitism includes discourse analysts, computational linguists and historians who will develop a "highly complex, AI-driven approach to identifying online anti-Semitism," the Alfred Landecker Foundation, which supports the project, said in a statement Monday. "In order to prevent more and more users from becoming radicalized on the web, it is important to identify the real dimensions of anti-Semitism - also taking into account the implicit forms that might become more explicit over time," said...

Short video describing an antenna etched on a printed circuit board. Antenna design is a log periodic dipole array that covers 400mhz - 1 ghz. Antenna is lightweight and packable and exhibits excellent real world performance for it's size and weight. Please check them out : http://www.wa5vjb.com/

Care and feeding of Software Defined Radios (used in surveillance) We will cover the various kinds of antennas available to optimized your SDR radio for different types of spectrum monitoring. We will also explain why RF filters are necessary on most SDR's and when Low Noise Amplifiers help, and when Low Noise Amplifiers hurt reception.

Electronic skins that perform the same sensory functions as human skin could mean big things for the fields of robotics and medical devices, and scientists are not solely focused on just the pleasant ones. Researchers in Australia have succeeded in developing an artificial skin that responds to painful stimuli in the same way real skin does, which they see as an important step towards intelligent machines and prosthetics. It mightn’t seem like the most practical of goals, but researchers have been working to develop electronic skins that allow robots and prostheses to feel pain for quite some time. These technologies...

Peter Kreeft, a philosophy prof at Boston College, has the charism of talking across normally impenetrable borders, so, he's a Christian who talks to Atheists, and respects them. He's criticizing George Lucas' 'Star Wars' philosophy. This is at a podcast at http://peterkreeft.com/audio/44_star-wars/peter-kreeft_star-wars.mp3 queued to about 23:05. He's talking about classifying magic, technology, religion and science, in terms of either a structuralist or a functionalist, a static or a dynamic perspective. The ordering of the list of 4 things above is an attempt to be agnostic about which of the 4 things are put into pairs.A standard, static-structuralist arrangement is for...

Breitbart News technology reporter Allum Bokhari appeared on the Liz Callaway show on TALK 94.5 FM WTKN last week, to discuss revelations in his upcoming book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase The Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which features interviews with insiders from Google, Facebook, and other companies. A source close to Google and other tech giants has said that the book, which lifts the lid on Big Tech’s four-year plot to undermine the Trump movement and influence the election, will “shake the foundations of Silicon Valley.” “The things I’ve heard from my sources inside Silicon Valley is...

With COVID here to stay, at least for the near term, retailers are reevaluating their digital strategies and in-store experiences—and that means more than rolling out new safety protocols. Brands and retailers must take a holistic approach to design relevant, safe, and enjoyable retail tech solutions that reflect consumers’ preferences and behaviors. The phrase “new normal” is overused but spot-on: COVID has accelerated changes in consumer shopping behavior, and those changes aren’t going anywhere. According to McKinsey research, the pandemic has contributed to a surge in e-commerce, a decline in discretionary spending, and a preference for trusted brands. These trends...

Nano-diamond self-charging batteries could disrupt energy as we know it Here shown as a small, circuit board mounted design, the nano diamond battery has the potential to totally upend the energy equation since it never needs charging and lasts many, many years NDB California company NDB says its nano-diamond batteries will absolutely upend the energy equation, acting like tiny nuclear generators. They will blow any energy density comparison out of the water, lasting anywhere from a decade to 28,000 years without ever needing a charge. They will offer higher power density than lithium-ion. They will be nigh-on indestructible and...

Like it or not, the U.S. is already fighting an economic and technological cold war against China. While we should aim to eventually return to the optimism and promise of a broad China/U.S. partnership, the time for that is not now. This is a major challenge to our country, and we must do everything we can to avoid losing our economic leadership. By now, we all know the rivalry in 5G and AI, part of China’s $1.4 trillion technology commitment. Less attention has been given to an equally consequential struggle: who will control our future global financial systems. The power...

While this column isn't about the threat posed by Transformers, it is about a robot apocalypse that's going to ravage the Midwest. I know, I know, the last thing you want to hear about right now is another imminent doomsday -- aren't global warming and COVID-19 and murder hornets and measles and the ever-present specter of thermonuclear war and the possibility of hyper-intelligent toilet lampreys enough? Well, it's likely you haven't heard too much about this particular apocalypse because it's not a sexy blood-and-guts kind. Instead of armies of Terminators hunting down handfuls of survivors for their sweet sweet spinal...

Northwest of beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories. Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles. The institute is a basic research facility. Its computer scientists inquire into artificial intelligence’s fundamental mysteries. Their more practical innovations—iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases, the People’s Liberation Army.