Free Republic

When Doug Imbruce wanted to start an interactive video company in 2009, he had no luck finding investors in New York. So he moved to Silicon Valley — where venture capitalists were receptive to his pitch — and founded Qwiki. But in February, he decided that being so far away from the nation’s big media companies was stifling his start-up’s growth. So he moved back to New York, bringing the company with him. Qwiki, with 15 employees, now operates out of a SoHo loft space. “We went to Silicon Valley because they understood how big we wanted to get,” Mr....

John T. Rogers, age 26, grew up in rural West Texas, raised by a single mother who often worked three jobs to make ends meet. He says his 59-year-old mother remains fiscally conservative, refusing to spend a dime on herself, though she now earns a respectable income. But when it comes to spending, Rogers is not following in her footsteps. "Not to knock J.C. Penney's, but I definitely wanted to step up my style," he said. Earning $46,000 a year as a communications manager for a private, non-profit university in Denver hasn't held him back. He bought a hybrid Lexus...

From the moment that I found out my wife was pregnant with our first child, a son, I’ve thought of his development in terms of tech...

It may be years before you can take your hands off the wheel and have your car go where you tell it. But driverless cars are on their way and Florida is already embracing the vehicles, whose technology promises to save lives, create jobs and free minds from the grind of the road. Last month Florida became the second state to pass a bill allowing tests of self-driving cars. Lawmakers in places such as Florida and Nevada - the first state to legalize self-driving cars for testing - have realized that embracing the technology could be fruitful during tough economic...

One of the world’s most prolific bootleggers of Hollywood DVDs loves his morning farina. He has spent eight years churning out hundreds of thousands of copies of “The Hangover,” “Gran Torino” and other first-run movies from his small Long Island apartment to ship overseas. “Big Hy” — his handle among many loyal customers — would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. He is actually Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife. And he has sent every one of his copied...

In the clip ‘FPSRussia’, whose Call of Duty videos and real-life weapon demonstrations have earned him a cult following, shows off a quadrotor – a mini helicopter with four rotors - outfitted with a machine gun. The machine is controlled by a tablet computer and FPSRussia explains that a camera on front of the quadrotor gives him a ‘birds’ eye view’ of the target.

In a quirky example of new media getting tripped up over history, overseas press reports Thursday claimed that Harley-Davidson Inc. had built a new factory in Milwaukee - with the writers not realizing they were taking information from a 94-year-old magazine article. Trade publications as far away as India picked up the story, which originally ran in the May 1918 issue of Motorcyclist Magazine and was reprinted in the magazine's recent issue as a historical article. Those who used the information, without Motorcyclist Magazine's permission, apparently didn't get the back-in-time angle. One automotive publication in India wrote: "To make their...

Here’s some good news. M. J. McDermott’s wonderful video about why Americans don’t know math has exceeded 1,000,000 views. This is one of the best videos about education on the web. If you haven’t viewed it, please do. Running time is about 15 minutes. In this video, McDermott explains the flaws in so-called Reform Math, which was introduced to the country around 1985. Reform Math actually consists of more than a dozen separate but basically identical curricula. As fast as a community figures out that one of these things is bad, the so-called experts introduce another. These experts are diabolically...

Microsoft’s Windows Phone is in trouble. While HTC and Samsung have fallback plans, so does Nokia. Can Microsoft continue its lead as the third leg in the mobile two-horse race?

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. by Greg Swann Chapter 4. The greatest invention in the history of humanity. That chapter heading is really just a tease. WhatÂ’s the most important invention ever devised by the mind of man? Fathertongue, of course. All other inventions flow from it. Without it, we are badly-adapted hairless apes, ultimately doomed to an ignominious extinction. With it, human beings danced on the Moon. In the last chapter, I raised the idea of your being stranded on a desert island. ThatÂ’s a hugely unlikely scenario, but itÂ’s interesting to think about...

Which Science Fictional Scenario Is Most Likely to Happen in Your Lifetime? Science fiction is full of fantastic and horrifying scenarios, many of which seem like they could come true any time. But which of them is really going to materialize — and which is most likely to happen in your lifetime? Vote in our poll for the science fictional scenario that you're most likely to live to witness for yourself: Which Science Fictional Scenario Is Most Likely to Happen in Your Lifetime? Global Pandemic Moonbase World War III/Nuclear Apocalypse Suspended Animation The Singularity Something Else (See Comments) Martian Colony...

Insurgents Used Cell Phone Geotags to Destroy AH-64s in Iraq Here’s a battlefield safety issue that some people have been warning about—and others have been ignoring—for a while now; an enemy using social media and cellphone geotagging to identify the precise location of troops on a battlefield. When you take a photo with your cellphone, the gps coordinates of the location you took the picture is embedded into the image. When you upload said photo onto the internet for all to see, people can pull the location data from that picture. If you think this is just people being paranoid...

The new Sprinkles Cupcake ATM in Beverly Hills has been hyped up for a few weeks now. More details in Average Betty’s video post here. But would the crazy-cool idea for an ATM that dispences freshly baked cupcakes actually be successful? Would the cupcakes be tasty and moist? How many flavors would there be to choose from? Well after my visit to the ATM this weekend to pick up a few vegan red velvet cupcakes with my husband – I can give you my review of the experience.. My First Cupcake-Run at the 24-hour ATM. We were leaving Saturday brunch...

The recovery of objects obscured by scattering is an important goal in imaging and has been approached by exploiting, for example, coherence properties, ballistic photons or penetrating wavelengths. Common methods use scattered light transmitted through an occluding material, although these fail if the occluder is opaque. Light is scattered not only by transmission through objects, but also by multiple reflection from diffuse surfaces in a scene. This reflected light contains information about the scene that becomes mixed by the diffuse reflections before reaching the image sensor. This mixing is difficult to decode using traditional cameras. Here we report the combination...

Some employers and college are asking to see applicants' Facebook pages from job applicants and student athletes, according to a report on Tuesday. MSNBC's Red Tape Chronicles blog said job applicants at the Maryland Department of Corrections have been asked to log into their accounts so that interviewers could see their wall posts, friends, photos and anything else they may have behind the social network's privacy wall... ...Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens said many such school and employer policies appear to violate the site's terms.

British researchers say they've developed a laser process that can "uncopy" toner ink from paper as an alternative to traditional recycling. Scientists at the University of Cambridge say the process involves short laser pulses to erase words and images by heating the printed material to the point that it vaporizes. The technique works with commonly used papers and toner inks and is more eco-friendly than recycling, they said. "When you fire the laser, it hits the thin toner layer and heats it up until the point that you vaporize it," researcher David Leal-Ayala told the BBC. "Toner is mostly composed...

While the U.S. Army knows its soldiers live in the modern world and carry location-aware, socially networked smartphones, it is reiterating the dangers of broadcasting too much information, because oversharing could cost lives. "Someone with the right software and the wrong motivation could download the photo and extract the coordinates from the metadata." As civilians, we're constantly giving out warnings about the dangers of revealing real-time locations via Facebook and Foursquare check-ins, or via tweets. We also tell you how to disable location tracking in your smartphones. Not only does it make individuals vulnerable to stalking, but also to robbery...

Researchers believe that new "thinking caps", could help provide super-human strength, highly enhanced concentration or thought-controlled weaponry. A British ethics group is investigating the ethical dilemmas posed by inventions that interfere with the brain's inner workings. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCB) has launched a consultation on the risks posed by such new technologies, the global market for which it says is worth $8bn (£5bn) and "growing fast. With the prospect of future conflicts between armies controlling weapons with their minds, the Council, an independent body, is wanting to identify what issues that come with blurring the lines between humans...

How to Build a Speech-Jamming Gun Japanese researchers build a gun capable of stopping speakers in mid-sentence. The drone of speakers who won't stop is an inevitable experience at conferences, meetings, cinemas, and public libraries. Today, Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University, both in Japan, present a radical solution: a speech-jamming device that forces recalcitrant speakers into submission. The idea is simple. Psychologists have known for some years that it is almost impossible to speak when your words are replayed to you with a delay of...

Modern corporate culture is in L-O-V-E, love with meetings (and any opportunity to engage in groupthink). But if you look back, history's real intellectual heavyweights weren't "team players." Intellectual giants like DaVinci, Einstein, and even Steve Wozniak, all developed their best works in near solitude. Quiet, by Susan Cain, examines why the world's best thinkers have usually been lone wolves. March 5, 1975. A cold and drizzly evening in Menlo Park, California. Thirty unprepossessing-looking engineers gather in the garage of an unemployed colleague named Gordon French. They call themselves the Homebrew Computer Club, and this is their first meeting. Their...