Free Republic

Facebook is now reported to be slamming the door on Barack Hussein Obama With the proverbial horse long out of the barn, the ubiquitous Facebook is now reported to be slamming the door on Barack Hussein Obama. “An upcoming code change means Obama’s groundbreaking 2012 outreach on the site won’t happen again.” (Yahoo, Nov. 17, 2014) Thanks a lot for nothing, Mark Zuckerberg. The fix is already in and you, now advertising for an Executive Amnesty on an unwilling America, have already handed the potential collapse of Western society to the O Man on a silver Facebook platter. Not much...

President Obama is urging the Federal Communications Commission to exert more control over the Internet. “As it stands now, the whole web environment is chaotic and anarchic,” Obama observed. “Anyone can pretty much do whatever he wants. There is no perceived obligation to serve society’s broader needs.” For the time being, Obama disavowed his authority “to command this independent agency to extend its power over this medium. I am patiently waiting for them to do what they should. However, my patience is not infinite. I will act unilaterally if it becomes necessary that I do so to implement the change...

Earlier today I wrote about the way the official Obamacare website has apparently recruited people to post thousands of comments each, creating the appearance of mass support, a variant on the traditional astroturfing strategy of creating bogus grassroots organizations. Big Fur Hat of iOTW Report has spotted what looks very much like a Craigslist ad recruiting trolls to post positive or negative comments on left-wing or conservative websites, respectively. The text in full, as well as a screen capture (in case the ad is removed), follow: We are a large social activism organization that advocates on behalf of issues including...

<p>"Pack it in, we're done here," snapped University of California Professor Emeritus James Clyden, who helped announce the scientists' findings at a grim press conference. "It's all on Canada's shoulders now," added Clyden, shuddering.</p> <p>"What is happening on these blogs is cyber-bullying and I believe that this is a crime. The people running these blogs are criminals,” Sisk said. “Frankly, I’m done with it.”</p>

Two Twitter accounts belonging to American racial segregation org Ku Klux Klan, @KuKluxKlanUSA and @YourKKKCentral, have been seized by Anonymous as part of the hacker-activist entity's new campaign, #OpKKK. At 6:31pm PST Anonymous said it has knocked the website belonging to "Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan" -- the group responsible for the Ferguson threats -- offline....

By the time John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for his great American novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, he had been dead for 12 years. Toole reportedly killed himself in part due to years of frustration over unsuccessful attempts to get his outrageously funny book about New Orleans published. It was only after his mother browbeat author Walker Percy into taking up the cause that Louisiana State University Press published the book in 1980. The following year, it won the Pulitzer for fiction. It went from being considered a cult classic to a must-read: More than 1.5 million copies...

Of course the real story is being overlooked here... WASHINGTON – A Justice Department official on Friday defended the legality of a program to scoop up data from thousands of mobile phones as the secret operation came under scrutiny from lawmakers and caught the federal agency that regulates the nation’s airwaves by surprise. The Justice Department, without formally acknowledging the existence of the program, defended the legality of the operation by the U.S. Marshals Service, saying the agency doesn’t maintain a database of everyday Americans’ cellphones. Whether they maintain such a database is immaterial to the underlying issue, which is...

It's official. A racially offensive tweet cost Dallas English high school teacher Vinita Hegwood her job. The trustees of the Duncanville Independent School District, in a special meeting on Friday morning, confirmed her discharge over a comment she made on her personal Twitter account about the Ferguson shooting that resulted in the death of Michael Brown. The trustees stressed that it gave Hegwood, a teacher for 20 years, an opportunity to explain her side, but they nevertheless decided to fire her. Hegwood actually resigned from Duncanville High School, although she was suspended without pay first following her tweet. Hegwood told...

One professor’s million-dollar campaign against conservatives, courtesy of the taxpayer Leftist speech suppressors are at it again, but this time they’re apparently being subsidized by the American taxpayer. On Monday, House Committee on Science, Space and Technology Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) sent a letter to the head of the National Science Foundation (NSF), demanding information about the nearly $1 million spent on the “Truthy” data-mining project that monitors political speech on Twitter. “The committee and taxpayers deserve to know how NSF decided to award a large grant for a project that proposed to develop standards for online political speech...

Dear Freerepublicans, I came across your great Free Republic website about four years ago when I was googling the internet looking for information that can help us deciding on a formal name for our newly born daughter. Fourteenth November is celebrated as children’s day in India. 150 years ago, India’s first prime minister was born this day. Today, let me extend a long overdue ‘Thank You’ to this useful website and its inspiring members for the help that I received without you not even knowing about it. In the West, every formal name has an associated predictable child hood name....

 The worst rub is the learning curve. There needs to be a hierarchy of the most common tasks.  Audacity is free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds.   "Audacity is available for Windows, Mac, Linux; and other operating systems. Check their feature list, wiki, and forum."  Audacity is a great success, a user-community produced and managed application program that does what it's supposed to. Years ago you used to have to pay for this software, now it's free, but you have to invest your time in learning how to use it. The worst rub is the learning curve. So many...

Another polar vortex may or may not be on its way, but winter means heat bills no matter what. Unless, of course, you get your heat for free from a cabinet full of servers that's sitting in your living room. If you live in Germany, it’s possible! Cloud&Heat is a cloud infrastructure company that has started distributing its servers to people who want to store them in exchange for free heat in their homes or offices. Since servers generate so much excess heat and cloud companies have to spend a lot to cool them, the idea to repurpose the waste...

American information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) companies should take a serious look at the Philippines, which continues to be an “ideal location for customer service and technical support outsourcing,” the Philippine ambassador to the US advised. Ambassador Jose L. Cuisia, Jr. made this pitch to business executives and decision makers from Wall Street and Fortune 500 firms who attended a networking event hosted recently by the Philippine Consulate General in New York and the Seven Seven Corporate Group. “The IT-BPM industry has been the fastest growing industry in the Philippines in the last 10 years,” Cuisia said as...

The U.S. military sent a giant C-17 cargo plane to an air show in China this week as a way to strengthen its relationship with the People’s Liberation Army there, despite fears among security and policy experts that doing so puts American technology secrets in jeopardy and also risks angering an important Asia ally. The decision to send a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III to the China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition at the Zhuhai Jinwan airport starting Tuesday is fraught for a number of reasons, defense and security officials told Defense One, noting that President Barack Obama’s arrival in the...

HANGZHOU China (Reuters) - E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd reported more than $9 billion in sales on China's Singles' Day on Tuesday, illustrating the buying power of the Chinese consumer and the importance of the event in the retail calendar. Real-time figures on a giant screen at Alibaba's sprawling Hangzhou campus surged past 2013's record to 57.1 billion yuan ($9.3 billion) just after midnight after Chinese and overseas shoppers snapped up heavily discounted goods online. The shopping day, similar to Cyber Monday and Black Friday in the United States, comes less than eight weeks after Alibaba's record $25 billion...

Image courtesy of gatewaypundit.com While the media and pundits focus on the legal threats to Obamacare (which may not really be threats), there’s really a more mundane existential threat to its ever becoming a major part of our society.  It doesn’t work.  I don’t mean that it’s unworkable in a political or economic sense (although it is in both senses).  I mean that it’s flat-out not working to use it—that the crown jewel of Obamacare, healthcare.gov, is a steaming pile of web-based horse manure. Leave it to the federal government to mismanage any sizable project.  I mean they’ve had...

One of the things that have prevented 3D printed guns from gaining popularity with the mainstream is the fact that they can't fire more than several rounds without wearing out. The plastic used to make the body of the gun is simply too fragile to accommodate the force of firing. A 25-year-old machinist has found an easy, although time-consuming, way to solve this problem. Michael Crumling has developed ammunition he calls .314 Atlas, after the .314-inch caliber and the Atlas lathe he used to make his bullets. Each bullet designed by Crumling is buried deep inside and reinforced with a...

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently found that properties of graphene aerogel could be used to enhance energy storage for electric vehicles and other high-power energy storage applications. The research will appear as the cover article in the Nov. 14 issue of the Journal of Materials Chemistry A. Personal electronics such as cell phones and laptops could get a boost from some of the lightest materials in the world. Lawrence Livermore researchers have turned to graphene aerogel for enhanced electrical energy storage that eventually could be used to smooth out power fluctuations in the energy grid. The team found...

When was the last time you used your computer's disc drive? What about your DVD player? E-waste is all around us, but as the brilliant Instructables user behind this $60 3D printer proves, there's plenty to be done with it—if you've got some engineering chops. Last week we wrote about the world's smallest 3D printer, which costs less than $300 and prints resin. But an Instructables user named Mikelllc has gone way further, uploading his designs for a 3D printer made from 80 percent recycled e-waste and costing roughly $60. Part of the idea, he writes, is to "help us...

The Internet is moving to a shopping center near you. In Fort Wayne, Ind., a vacated Target store is about to be home to rows of computer servers, network routers and Ethernet cables courtesy of a local data-center operator. In Jackson, Miss., a former McRae’s department store will get the same treatment next year. And one quadrant of the Marley Station Mall south of Baltimore is already occupied by a data-center company that last year offered to buy out the rest of the building. As America’s retailers struggle to keep up with online shopping, the Internet is starting to settle...