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In this post, I defer to my father, Charles Husson, who spent 30 years at NASA’s Langley Research Center as a systems engineer and program manager. From launching test payloads off Wallops Island, VA, in the late 1950′s to troubleshooting the Viking I Lander in the late 1970′s, and subsequently on loan to the Defense Department from NASA in the 80′s, he has been on the cutting edge of technology and has a unique view of how government and industry worked together to move this country into true “high-tech.” He was particularly fired up about one comment Obama made during...

Remember when Pew and some of its friends got caught with their hands in the cookie jar a few years ago on the issue of campaign finance reform? Now “net neutrality,” another dubious “reform,” is in the news, and once again Pew is under fire. In the earlier controversy, Sean Treglia, a former Pew staffer, explained to some journalists in 2004 at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism how Pew and 7 other left-of-center foundations created a snowball of research, “grassroots” groups, and more, all in order to fool Congress and the courts into imagining that Americans believed they had too...

China Tuesday denied that its stealth fighter J-20 was developed with stolen US technology, claiming that it was a “masterpiece” of its technological innovation, shortly after an Indian-American was jailed for 32 years by an American court for leaking military secrets to Beijing. Chinese defence officials and military analysts insisted that the country's J-20 stealth fighter jet, which was test flown this month, is a result of the country's own efforts, state-run Global Times reported. "It's not the first time foreign media has smeared newly unveiled Chinese military technologies. It's meaningless to respond to such a speculation," an unnamed official...

After the near-disaster of Apollo 13 some ten months earlier, NASA and the Apollo program badly needed a successful mission. Apollo 14 delivered this more than adequately, although at times it was a close call. The landing site for this mission was the Fra Mauro Formation at the edge of the Imbrium Basin, re-targeted from the ill-fated Apollo 13 flight. Apollo 14 is significant as the first lunar mission to make landfall in a region other than the flat mare topography of the earlier landings. It features a hilly, hummocky, ridge-like topography, and was thought likely to contain ejecta from...

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Chinese officials recently unveiled a new, high-tech stealth fighter that could pose a significant threat to American air superiority - and some of its technology, it turns out, may well have come from the U.S. itself. Balkan military officials and other experts have told The Associated Press that in all probability the Chinese gleaned some of their technological know-how from an American F-117 Nighthawk that was shot down over Serbia in 1999. Nighthawks were the world's first stealth fighters, planes that were very hard for radar to detect. But on March 27, 1999, during NATO's aerial bombing of Serbia in...

Small businesses have a new scam to worry about: criminal job applicants who want to hack into online bank accounts. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a warning Wednesday about a new twist on a long-running computer fraud technique, known as Automated Clearing House fraud. With ACH fraud, criminals install malicious software on a small business' computer and use it to log into the company's online bank account. They set up bogus fund transfers, adding fake employees or payees, and then move the money offshore. Scammers can move hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of hours using...

South Korea has been negotiating with Russia to receive advanced defence technology as part of debt repayments, officials said Tuesday. Russia has so far provided South Korea with weapons worth $740 million as a way of repaying some $1.3 billion in debts dating back to the days of the Soviet Union. Seoul is now in talks on the transfer of cutting-edge technology from Moscow, the South's Defence Acquisition Programme Administration said. "We have yet to complete negotiations with Russia," a spokesman for the state agency controlled by the defence ministry told AFP, without giving details. Yonhap news agency quoted a...

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Georgia authorities are investigating the discovery of six loaded shotguns aimed at a food plot that were rigged to be fired through a network of Web-controlled cameras. The Augusta Chronicle reported the guns were discovered last fall on Georgia Power Company right of way in rural south Georgia. The set up was discovered by a utility contractor and it was reported to the U.S. Office of Homeland Security. The newspaper reported that a bulletin circulated by the Office of Homeland Security said it appeared that the rig was only intended for illegal hunting in an area known...

When will the mockery of the Catholic Church cease? Not anytime soon it seems. Penance – the new free iPhone application that allows users to anonymously “confess” their sins to other users, and to give “absolution,” makes a mockery not only of the Church and the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but also of the Church’s structure. By “confessing” and “absolving,” users are able to accrue “horns” or “halos.” The more notable “confessors” are ranked with titles such as “Saints” to “Bishops,” “Cardinals,” and “Holy Father/Mother of the Church.” The highest ranking users are allowed to issue week-long edicts to those below...

IBM has announced its fifth annual Next Five in Five – a list of five technologies that the company believes “have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years.” While there are no flying cars or robot servants on the list, there are holographic friends, air-powered batteries, personal environmental sensors, customized commutes and building-heating computers.3D telepresence It may not be a flying car, but it’s definitely one we’ve seen in sci-fi movies before – the ability to converse with a life-size holographic image of another person in real time. The futurists at...

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Here's how serious people transcend ideological differences. And we don't need no stinkin' 'no labels' badges. All the talk lately of “bipartisan consensus” and the smug No Labels movement brought back to mind the surely apocryphal but truthy story of the Russian visiting a U.S. Senate aide shortly after the fall of Communism in the old USSR. “Please explain two-party system,” the Russian asked, having no experience with multi-party democracy. “It’s simple,” explained the Senate staff veteran. “We have two parties in America—the stupid party and the evil party. Since I’m a Republican, I’m in the stupid party, and...

The year’s most significant new technology was a disruptive product made by Apple. This year, the editors of TIME Magazine chose for its Person of the Year award a young, enterprising 27-year old male who built a social networking website that has 500 million users and now has a net worth of $30 billion. Man, that’s so 2006. I mean, was 2010 so crappy that the only real choice was between an obnoxious, ethically-challenged egotistic Web 2.0 billionaire Wunderkind or an Information Technology terrorist pretending to be a journalist and Internet activist? Couldn’t they come up with someone who...

The hippies at the World Wildlife Fund have created their very own file format, WWF. One catch, you have install their own propitiatory software to view it. Unlike other file formats, such as PDFs, this one saves the environment by preventing you from printing it, ever. You can feel good while running your PC to read a document.

Stop worrying about when the hard drive in your computer will die. Google wants to kill it permanently anyway. The new Google Chrome operating system, which was unveiled Tuesday, as well as hints and suggestions from Apple and Microsoft, offers us a preview of the PC of the future. And it will come without that familiar whirring disk that has been the data heart of the PC for the past 25 years. The Chrome OS will at first be available on all-black laptops from Samsung and Acer. And because the new platform stores everything -- files, applications, data bits and...

Randal O'Toole discusses the inefficiency of high-speed rail trains with John Stossel on Fox Business.

SANTA CRUZ -- The Los Gatos startup that pledged to turn greenhouse gas into cement has landed its first job: a sidewalk in the city of Santa Cruz. While a relatively small project, the 400-foot walkway off Morrissey Boulevard will serve as a big test for plans by the environmentally minded Calera Corp. to capture carbon dioxide exhaust from the Moss Landing Power Plant and fashion it into commercially viable construction materials, like cement. "We're at the point where we want to start using our materials in the built-in environment," said Martin Devenney, vice president of materials development at Calera....

A new gun the US military hopes will help take on the Taliban has been unveiled. A US soldier prepares to fire the XM-25 Called the XM-25 it has been described by the US Army as a 'game changer'. It uses a laser guidance system and specially developed 25mm high explosive rounds which can be programmed to detonate over a target. Richard Audette helped develop it for the US Army and says it's a big leap forward because it's the first small arms weapon to use smart technology. Full solution "The way a soldier operates this is basically find your...

As computer networks grow and grow, certain companies that provide the hardware, software and services to help send data on these networks figure to be in a pretty good position. So you usually don’t have to look too far down the IBD 100 list of top stocks to find the top networking names. The definition of a networking company can get hazy, but in this post we’re going down only to No. 38 to identify the top 5 networking stocks.