Free Republic

EVEN by Brooklyn standards, it was a curious spectacle: a dozen mechanical contraptions sat on a white tablecloth, emitting occasional clacks and dings. Shoppers peered at the display, excited but hesitant, as if they’d stumbled upon a trove of strange inventions from a Jules Verne fantasy. Some snapped pictures with their iPhones. “Can I touch it?” a young woman asked. Permission granted, she poked two buttons at once. The machine jammed. She recoiled as if it had bitten her. “I’m in love with all of them,” said Louis Smith, 28, a lanky drummer from Williamsburg. Five minutes later, he had...

I humbly suggest the following neologism: Progluddite (pronounced like troglodyte). Definition: a misinformed, misguided political ideologue who believes that technological regression will force humanity to build a New Age Utopia. On its face, the word Progluddite seems nonsensical. It is an oxymoronic pairing of Progressive (one who is interested in new ideas) and Luddite (one who rejects new technology). However, the word is merely a reflection of the self-contradictory nature of progressive notions.

The Khan Academy has its roots in a series of educational YouTube videos that founder Sal Khan began making several years ago to tutor his cousin. The videos struck a chord among those who came across them, Sinha said. As the videos became increasingly popular, the organization got a big break last fall, when it received a total of about $3.5 million in grants from Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The nonprofit Advertisement now has a Mountain View office and a half-dozen staff members. It's still attracting attention -- NBC Nightly News recently featured the program and...

KOREAN ELECTONICS GIANT Samsung has announced a slim external 3D Blu-ray combo drive for the PC market. The SE-406A optical disk drive comes with Cyberlink Truetheater software and will play Blu-ray and 3D content, if the PC it's plugged into supports these formats. It also reads and writes CDs and DVDs and is USB powered. An interesting feature is the ability for the drive to transform 2D DVD movies into 3D ones. It is not clear how it does this and how good or convincing the finished product is, but it might tempt a number of people interested in seeing...

New product from Bourque Industries is far stronger than current standard, first to protect against rifle fire, joins other revolutionary Bourque Industries products TUCSON, Ariz.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bourque Industries, Inc. (OTC:BORK) will unveil its new Kryronized aluminum alloy ballistic helmet at a live-fire demonstration in Mesa, Ariz. This new technology will bring unprecedented ballistic protection – the ability to withstand rifle fire – to military and law enforcement personnel in a package that meets all other required specifications (not an April Fool's joke, Ed.). To the best knowledge of Bourque Industries, no other available technology can provide a similar level of protection...

“What’s the word I’m looking for?” One of the most common phrases and an especially annoying one if you’re still scratching your brain for that missing word hours later. If English is your second language, you might as well spend your life carrying a heavy dictionary to avoid the constant headache. Encountering this problem themselves, two Israelis, Onn Freund and Jonathan Raz have developed PhraseUp – a website that aims to fill in your missing word. Raz recently told Israeli website Newsgeek: “A few days ago I was writing in English, and knew I want to write ‘we have performed...

You’ve probably all become familiar with face recognition software like Picasa, Windows Live Photo Gallery or even on Facebook. Going one step further, on Sunday in Israel Microsoft unveiled OneVision, a technology that can track and identify anyone not just in photos, but in video. Face recognition in video is an emerging technology that could have significant impact on user experience in fields such as television, gaming, and communication. With OneVision, a television or an Xbox will be able to recognize people in your living room; your home videos could be annotated automatically and become searchable. TV viewers will also...

It sounded too good to be true -- and it was. An ambitious plan to make Los Angeles Community College District a national leader in green technology and renewable energy appears to be in shambles ... (skip) ... Given the high level of publicity that LACCD received for its green initiatives, there is a danger that these revelations will damage the credibility of other green projects on campuses nationwide. It is important to note that the problems besetting LACCD went far beyond the district's green initiatives. The LA Times articles exposed issues at every level of governance from the trustees...

It sounded too good to be true -- and it was. An ambitious plan to make Los Angeles Community College District a national leader in green technology and renewable energy appears to be in shambles ... (skip) ... Given the high level of publicity that LACCD received for its green initiatives, there is a danger that these revelations will damage the credibility of other green projects on campuses nationwide. It is important to note that the problems besetting LACCD went far beyond the district's green initiatives. The LA Times articles exposed issues at every level of governance from the trustees...

Freeper Rotorcraft Pilots...Kaman has been working on an UAV version of the KMax and their is a fire / water delivery version of it. Can American ingenuity combine the 2 and get a few to Japan to help cool the Reactors ASAP?Do we as a Nation "Still Have it"?I look forard to your responses....

Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., is the lead player in a legislative effort, already endorsed by a handful of other senators, that would spend $60 million to develop a program that would charge consumers for the costs of installing drunk-driving interlock devices in vehicles. The proposal, S.510, was introduced this week in the U.S. Senate by Udall, who was joined by Sens. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Bob Corker, R-Tenn., Al Franken, D-Minn., Amy Klobuchar D-Minn., West John D. Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. The legislation actually doesn't call for the technology to be installed in...

If you've got a working Gmail account, you might want to back it up every so often -- as many as 500,000 Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morn, and some of them are reporting (via Twitter and support forums) that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs had vanished by the time they were finally able to log on.

British forces in Afghanistan can now track Taliban fighters with revolutionary facial recognition technology harnessed to images beamed to the ground by giant spy-in-the-sky barrage balloons floating at 2,000ft.... Another hi-tech weapon being introduced is the Raptor pod fitted to RAF Tornado fighter jets. Raptors can detect even minute changes to the undergrowth, earth and rocks disturbed by insurgents as they lay roadside bombs. (ANI)

So where the heck are all the jobs? Eight-hundred billion in stimulus and $2 trillion in dollar-printing and all we got were a lousy 36,000 jobs last month. That's not even enough to absorb population growth. You can't blame the fact that 26 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed on lost housing jobs or globalization—those excuses are played out. To understand what's going on, you have to look behind the headlines. That 36,000 is a net number. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in December some 4,184,000 workers (seasonally adjusted) were hired, and 4,162,000 were "separated" (i.e., laid off...

Apple founder Steve Jobs has lost an alarming amount of weight and is reportedly sicker than has been previously admitted. The computer genius announced in late January that 'at my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health.' Since then Apple employees have claimed that he can still be seen at the company's headquarters in California and is also calling all the strategic shots from his home. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1357743/Cancer-stricken-Apple-boss-Steve-Jobs-just-weeks-live.html#ixzz1EC3GqzFQ

Who could have guessed that 4.3 billion Internet connections wouldn’t be enough? Certainly not Vint Cerf. In 1976, Mr. Cerf and his colleagues in the R.& D. office of the Defense Department had to make a judgment call: how much network address space should they allocate to an experiment connecting computers in an advanced data network? They debated the question for more than a year. Finally, with a deadline looming, Mr. Cerf decided on a number — 4.3 billion separate network addresses, each one representing a connected device — that seemed to provide more room to grow than his experiment...

Daniel Reetz loves trash bins. A big one in Fargo, N.D., was where he found most of the materials he used to build a scanner that was fast enough to scan a 400-page book in about 20 minutes without cracking the binding. The two Canon PowerShot A590 cameras and two lights that he lashed together with a few pieces of acrylic and wood cost him about $300 in all, considerably less than the $10,000 commercial book scanners on the market. When he was finished, Mr. Reetz, now 29 and working at Disney Research’s laboratories, put his 79-step how-to guide on...

Dear Digital Family of Friends: It is with great regret that I inform you that our beloved CEO Ken Olsen passed away, yesterday in Indiana, with his immediate family all around him. Ken had been in ill health for the last few months and was in Hospice care. Sad time for their family now, but Ken and Alliki had a wonderful life. It's sad to know that they both have now passed. More information will follow in the Boston Globe obituary sometime this week. I do believe there will be a Memorial Service (open to the public) to celebrate Ken's...

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE CASCADE, Md. — When Laurie Shifler was expecting her eighth child, she was so upset about a local hospital’s new policy restricting photographs of births that she started an online petition. Hundreds of people, near and far, signed it, many expressing outrage that a hospital would prevent parents from recording such a momentous occasion, one that could never be recaptured. The hospital, Meritus Medical Center, in nearby Hagerstown, bars all pictures and videos during birth — cellphones must be turned off — and allows picture-taking only after the baby has been delivered safely and the medical...

Seeing what has happened in Egypt and their ability to quickly shut down the internet got me to thinking about the possibility that at some time in the future OUR Government may try the same with us. Therefor I thought that to prepare for such an event should be planned by us (the citizens who would most likely to be effected as well as the people most likely to need alternatives to internet connections to stay in communications and keep upraised of events not being reported accurately (and intentionally). We would have to depend upon our telephones but that can...