Free Republic

NASA’s Curiosity rover may not look like an urban menace, but the robot explorer will in fact be steadily tagging the Martian surface as it trundles, leaving a name-check of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory back home. The clandestine graffiti is thanks to part of the rover’s visual odometry system, John Graham-Cumming points out, which tracks the marks left by a series of asymmetrically arranged holes in the wheels. The position of those holes, however, isn’t random: in fact, it’s Morse Code.

It is time, the Chief Justice said, for the will of the people to be expressed through the political departments. You should not try to make the Supreme Court the final arbitrator of such political matters. It has not the wisdom for that. This election will now be held largely on the issue of Obama Care. If the President wins this will be seen as a vindication of that act and of the philosophy behind it. If the President fails of election the Act will be repealed, and there is an opportunity for the United States to turn back and...

Just got my 35 dollar Raspberry Pi Debian Linux computer and thought I'd show fellow freepers how to get on the web and freep on the cheap. It's a Linux setup so it's pretty secure compared to Windows. I'm installing a web server on it now (Apache) and trying to get a cheap USB wifi dongle to work so I can disconnect the ethernet cable...the less cables the better! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNX5Fdt7uu4&feature=youtu.be

A House Committee has voted that the Attorney General is in contempt of Congress. The vote was along party lines, which is a pity, because the contempt is obvious and definitely indicated. This should not be a Party Lines affair. The Congress is the Grand Inquest of the Nation, and constitutionally is empowered to see that the President does indeed take care to see that the laws are faithfully enforced. There is no compelling reason for withholding the documents demanded by Congress in this matter. To make it more interesting the President has bought into the ownership of Fast and...

Israeli newspaper Maariv reported Tuesday that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu refused to commit before U.S. President Barack Obama that Israel would not attack Iran before the U.S. presidential elections.

My friend out in New Mexico set up an automatic game camera aimed at his water pans he puts out for birds. This is a snap he got last night of a Bobcat carrying a hapless mouse...it's very cute :-)

Mossad director Tamir Pardo is in Washington for talks about a possible attack on Iran's nuclear installations, Israel's Channel 2 reported on Tuesday. Pardo's visit, which would usually be conducted in secret, was revealed by US Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, 78, who made the faux pax at committee hearing. The hearing was broadcast live by US television. Feinstein said she had spoken with Pardo, who also met the CIA director David Petraeus, adding that the Mossad chief had mentioned the possibility of unilateral Israeli action against Iran.

Israeli officials told visiting USS Chief Joint of Staffs Martin Dempsey that it would give President Barack Obama no more than 12 hours notice if and when it attacks Iran, The London Times reported Sunday. The Netanyahu government also will not coordinate with the United States an attack on the Islamic Republic, according to the report, the latest in a number of suposed scenarios concerning cooperation or lack of it between Jerusalem and Washington.

Hollywood would use SOPA to make it possible for anyone to single-handedly take down any site on the Internet, without the action of a court, just because anyone with access to that site (say, a commenter) used it to link to copyrighted content. What does Hollywood think? That if they win this level of power, the Internet will stop happening in the rest of the world? ................... To paraphrase our last president, Hollywood hates your freedom. There, I said it. Hollywood is the Al Qaeda of content. It clings to an antediluvian notion of how media should be created and...

Russia has given Iran its bear hug and warns Israel and the West that an attack on Tehran would be considered an attack on Moscow. The threat heightens the prospect of World War III in the event of a military strike on Iran. “Iran is our neighbor,” Russia's outgoing ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, told reporters in Brussels. “And if Iran is involved in any military action, it’s a direct threat to our security.”

A claim by Wikileaks that documents it released last week provide evidence of a "secret new industry" of mass surveillance was as breathless as previous pronouncements from Julian Assange's organization. But the material does provide a stark reminder that our online activities are easily snooped upon, and suggests that governments or police around the world can easily go shopping for tools to capture whatever information they want from us. The take-home for ordinary computer users is that the privacy and security safeguards they use—including passwords and even encryption tools—present only minor obstacles to what one researcher calls the "cyber security...

The face of the Israeli terror machine may have reared its ugly head again in the world. This time it has produced yet another massive act of sabotage at an IRG missile base west of Teheran..... However, an Israeli source with extensive senior political and military experience provides an exclusive report that it was the work of the Mossad in collaboration with the MEK. It is widely known within intelligence circles that the Israelis use the MEK for varied acts of espionage and terror ranging from fraudulent Iranian memos alleging work on nuclear trigger devices to assassinations of nuclear scientists...

Those of you who saw Bibi’s speech at the UN - that Temple of Hypocrisy and Moral Turpitude - will have noticed the polite but tepid applause from a few along with the deafening silence from oh, so many of the international delegates. I fear that calling, nay begging, for peace by successive Israeli Prime Ministers is an exercise in futility. The stark fact, which nobody wants to hear, is that Islam will never make peace with a non-Muslim state, especially if the Muslim foot trod triumphal upon that same territory once occupied in the name of Allah. Even though...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNRXpDIX0uQ

The IDF has increased its presence along Israel's borders with Syria and Lebanon over threats of renewed clashes similar to those on “Nakba Day.” Organizers of the anti-Israel marches earlier in the week are calling for a similar march Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, beginning after mosque services end. Calls to Arabs to march on Israel have gone forth on social networks, and have gathered tens of thousands of responses. A group calling itself the “Intifada Youth Committee” called for “A march in memory of the Nakba Day martyrs, [a march] from surrounding countries and from Gaza on Israel's...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was quick on the draw Thursday in voicing clear displeasure with President Barack Obama’s mideast policy speech. “Israel appreciates President Obama’s commitment to peace,” the response began, curtly. “Israel believes that for peace to endure between Israelis and Palestinians, the viability of a Palestinian state cannot come at the expense of the viability of the one and only Jewish state.” “That is why Prime Minister Netanyahu expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004, which were overwhelmingly supported by both Houses of Congress.” “Among other things,” Netanyahu reminded...

US President Barack Obama dramatically changed US foreign policy - sandbagging Israel and aligning himself with PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas' preconditions for talks - when he called Thursday for a "full and phased withdraw of Israeli forces" from "occupied Palestinian lands" to the 1949 armistice borders that Israel's former Foreign Minister and UN ambassador in 1967, Abba Eban, referred to as the "Auschwitz borders." Obama's comments came during his much anticipated policy address at the State Department in which he outlined the United State's new foreign policy for the Middle East and North Africa in light of the "spring revolutions"...

Las Vegas-based lawfirm Righthaven has been suing everyone from bloggers to commenters -- anyone who has posted even a portion of the text or images to which it owns the rights. Righthaven doesn't actually make anything, they just buy the rights to stories and images that have gone viral on the web. Now, according to the Las Vegas Sun, Righthaven has scored what Ars Technica aptly describes as an "own goal": Not only did a Federal judge reject Righthaven's case against the non-profit Center for Intercultural Organizing, the judge also declared that non-profits may re-print entire articles from news outlets...

I hadn’t intended to write anything about health insurance reform, in large part because the debate has become so utterly poisonous, but also in part because I felt that the important issues have been adequately dealt with elsewhere. Well, there’s something that isn’t really being discussed and should be, because it cuts to the heart of how health insurance works, and may be the hinge upon which the PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) succeeds or fails. One would think that that would be discussed all over the place, but it’s not, neither in the liberal press (which I...

Two neuroscientists say that a now-extinct race of humans had big eyes, child-like faces, and an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens. The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the intuitively attractive, almost irresistible idea that the whole great process leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessors. The pre-Darwin theories of evolution were built around this idea; in fact, Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) great and radical contribution was to throw out the notion of “progress” and replace it with selection from among a set of random variations. But...