Free Republic

In our collective consciousness, the French have a reputation for scent. Cut into a wheel of Roquefort, uncork a vintage bottle of Petrus or a flacon of Parisian perfume and you'll smell what I mean. So, it should come as no surprise that French company, Olf-Action, has developed SMELLIT, a device designed to aromatically enhance the video games and movies of your home entertainment system. A cluster of what look like six miniature jet turbines affixed to a stand presumably will blast out synchronized odors that correspond with onscreen activity. SMELLIT hasn't officially been released yet, but it's due for...

Korea Oct 13, 2011 Kim the geek creates digital Achilles' heel By Andrei Lankov SEOUL - Recent visitors to Pyongyang are surprised by many things. They expect to go to the capital of an underdeveloped Stalinist nation, run by a crazy and brutal dictatorship. But the picture they see before them is remarkably different. No doubt, signs of ideological craziness and political repression abound: people are visibly afraid to talk to foreigners, the Internet is banned unconditionally, and posters glorifying the leader and his wisdom are ubiquitous. However, there are sights and sounds that do not fit easily into the...

Steve Jobs turned Eve's apple, the symbol of fallen humankind, into a religious icon for true believers in technology. But can salvation be downloaded? For every magical thing Steve Jobs revealed in his Apple keynote addresses, there were many other things he concealed. Like the devices he created, his life was more and more opaque even while becoming more and more celebrated. So his death this week came as a shock for nearly all of us, even though we knew that only grave illness could be keeping him from the company he co-founded and loved. He told us almost nothing...

The U.S. Department of Defense keeps seeking and developing advantages for today's unconventional warfare, ranging from Iron Man-like body suits to smart grenade launchers The U.S. military has evolved so fast in the post-September 11th era that much of its technology would be nearly unrecognizable to commanders, soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors only a few decades ago. Some of the biggest advances over the past decade have come with the development, application and integration of sophisticated information technology and robotics in daily operations.

Imagine being able to “print” an entire house. Or a four-course dinner. Or a complete mechanical device such as a cuckoo clock, fully assembled and ready to run. Or a printer capable of printing … yet another printer? These are no longer sci-fi flights of fancy. Rather, they are all real (though very early-stage) research projects underway at MIT, and just a few ways the Institute is pushing forward the boundaries of a technology it helped pioneer nearly two decades ago. A flurry of media stories this year have touted three-dimensional printing — or “3DP” — as the vanguard of...

Martin Fitcher, head of HTC’s U.S. operations, said Monday that he thinks the iPhone is losing its cachet among the younger generation. At least, that’s what he hears from his daughter’s classmates at Reed College in Portland, Ore. “I talked to a few of the kids on her floor,” Fitcher told a crowd at the Mobile Future Forward conference in downtown Seattle, GeekWire reported. “And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: ‘My dad has an iPhone.’ There’s an interesting thing that’s going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was.”...

National Security: The Sept. 11 commission stated that our biggest failure was one of imagination. Imagine an Iranian nuclear device detonating high over the American heartland. They're working on it. On the same day the 9/11 Commission issued its report, another commission issued a report on a threat that could change our world and way of life in ways we can scarcely imagine. It is a real and credible threat, and it is largely being ignored. The threat is a phenomenon known as electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, and demonstrates why the issue of homeland security extends beyond the need for...

CHANDLER, Ariz. - Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or on the floor. They are studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It’’ - but not in any traditional way. In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius. The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision...

Here are two gigantic concepts that will crack your head wide open.Neal Gabler, a journalist at the Norman Lear Center of the University of Southern California, recently published in the New York Times the opinion that our society “no longer thinks big,” that there are no more “intellectually challenging thoughts,” and, if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media.… Gabler is wrong on all counts. Not only have truly big ideas been advanced recently, but the mass media (apparently not the New York...

That's gonna leave a mark!

The government has plenty of mobile apps available at apps.usa.gov and you may as well download them, since you’ve already paid for them with your tax dollars. “You might be surprised when you see your face transformed into the face of an early human with the Smithsonian Institution’s first-ever mobile app,” claims the description of MEanderthal. The application allows people to take photographs of their face and morph them into that of Neanderthals. Want to find that perfect name for your baby? Use the Baby Name Playroom app from the Social Security Administration. “Search the most popular baby names of...

Facebook’s ubiquitous ‘like’ button found on countless websites accessible in Germany was declared in violation of the country’s strict privacy laws by a state data protection official on Friday. Hackers gather around the computer campfire (11 Aug 11) Thilo Weichert, who works for the data protection centre of the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, said the social network’s application allowing internet users to express their appreciation of something online, illegally cobbled together a profile of their web habits. “Facebook can trace every click on a website, how long I’m on it, what I’m interested in,” he said. According to Weichert,...

Tito We have reported earlier of the possible transfer of the U.S. stealth fighter technology to China from the Serb Army which got its hands on it from the downed Stealth Bomber F11 during NATO's bombing campaign in 1999, as it was reported by other sources as well. This will not be the first time for such significant, possibly turning-point, military transfers to originate in the Balkans. The MA theses of Mehta Coleman Armstrong named "'A Rat Hole to be Watched'? CIA Analyses of the Tito-Stalin Split, 1948-1950" talks about the same type of transfer of the top military technology...

<p>Wearable electronics usually trade flexibility for computing power, but engineers have created a new ultrathin device from silicon that can stick to skin like a temporary tattoo and are powerful enough to read brain signals.</p> <p>"You can't change the biology so you really have to redefine the nature of electronics," said John A. Rogers, the University of Illinois engineering professor who led the development. He and his colleagues describe the skinlike electronic device in a forthcoming article of the journal Science.</p>

A hair-thin electronic patch that adheres to the skin like a temporary tattoo could transform medical sensing, computer gaming and even spy operations, according to a US study published Thursday.

If everything in technology seems unreal these days, it could be because a culture of fakeness is going mainstream. Technology is being challenged on all sides by a rising tide of the phony, the fake, the counterfeit, the hoax, and the bald-faced lie.The Dumb IE User Hoax Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser have lower IQs than users of alternative browsers, according to a widely circulated story in the past week. Too bad the story is fake. And just about everybody fell for it.The original hoax story reported that a company called ApTiquant conducted a study to rank the relative...

On July 7, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio spoke on the future of America’s space program. “When this final shuttle mission draws to a close, many Americans will be startled by the realization that we don't have an answer to the question: What's next for NASA?” he said. “We know that our commercial space partners are working to fill some of the gaps in our human space flight capabilities, and that is a promising development that we should encourage. But we need NASA to lead.” I follow one of those commercial space partners,Space Exploration Technologies, also known as SpaceX, on Facebook....

Space exploration is not only critical in refusing to surrender the battlefield of space – our next serious theater of war -- to our present and future adversaries; it also necessary in retaining US technological superiority and being able to utilize the energy and mineral resources of the Solar system essential for future global prosperity. The major problem is that It is not just NASA but the whole of the US space industry that is in trouble. It is laying off men and women by the thousand; their skills and experience will be lost forever. Reconstituting the ability to build...

Gerald Celente, publisher of The Trends Journal, discusses why we are heading into the greatest recession, US is bankrupt by proxy, the inevitability of war, and the uselessness of higher education.

Link only - Israel, U.S. Strike F-35 Technology Deal