Free Republic

Kevin Hayes feels like the luckiest man alive. Three years ago, the 43-year-old Melbourne man was in Canberra and lost the $5000 Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR camera his wife bought him for his birthday, and he had all but given up hope of getting it back when he found out about the website stolencamerafinder.com M The site helped him track the lost or stolen camera to a man who works at a Sydney tattoo parlour a few weeks ago and NSW Police have since collected it. Hayes expects to have his camera back any day now, and NSW...

(CNSNews.com) - There were only 1.75 full-time private-sector workers in the United States last year for each person receiving benefits from Social Security, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Social Security board of trustees. That means that for each husband and wife who worked full-time in the private sector last year there was a Social Security recipient somewhere in the country taking benefits from the federal government. Most state and local workers are part of the Social Security system and pay Social Security taxes; and, since 1984, all federal workers have been part of the...

Germany—buoyed by its cadre of family-owned niche companies—appears to be weathering the global slowdown, countering fears that Europe's economic powerhouse faces a sharp downturn that could deepen the region's debt crisis. A pair of bullish reports, on German employment and manufacturing, were reassuring on Wednesday: Unemployment remained at its lowest level in nearly two decades last month, while July machine orders jumped 9% from a year earlier. The latest data suggest that Europe's largest economy, which is expected to grow 3% this year, remains resilient, even as evidence mounts that the U.S. and much of the rest of the world...

A proposed law designed to fight child pornography has rankled privacy advocates because it would require Internet service providers to keep 12-month logs of customers' names, credit card information, and other identifying information that are tied to temporarily assigned network addresses. Opponents say the law wouldn't markedly help lock up child pornographers and pedophiles, but rather would treat all Americans as criminals so that if law enforcement feels it has a need to find out who visited a website or posted a particular bit of content online, it can. The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that the same data could become...

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has proposed to begin collecting data on the race, gender identity, ethnicity, disability status, primary language, sex and sexual orientation of every patient and every citizen. The federal government needs to hear from you! DEADLINE - The deadline for your public comments is this coming Monday, August 1st at 11:59 p.m. EDT. However, if you plan to mail your comment by U.S. Post, it must be postmarked today, Wed, July 27.

The DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) today announced a major step toward creating one of the world's fastest scientific networks to accelerate research in fields ranging from advanced energy solutions to particle physics. Known as the Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI), the effort represents a $62 million multi-year investment by the DOE Office of Science in next-generation networking technology. "As science becomes increasingly data-driven and global in scale, it's critical that we create an infrastructure that will enable our scientists to collaborate and compete successfully in the search for solutions to some of the world's biggest challenges in energy,"...

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee is weighing fresh concerns about the sweeping nature of domestic spying using one controversial section of the Patriot Act. This particular part of that law is notable because it has been divisive for years — and because during those years President Obama has quietly moved from being a Senator skeptical of the provisions to being an enthusiastic spy chief whose Administration embraces them. Last Tuesday the committee met to consider the worries of some members, mostly Democrats, who say the Justice Department has drafted a breathtakingly broad interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act....

Diskeeper Corp developed "ExpressCache," software that enhances operating speed of personal computers (PCs) by using a small-capacity SSD as a cache for HDD, and demonstrated it at Computex Taipei 2011. In the demonstration, operations such as booting Windows 7 and launching applications were compared between a PC equipped with a 500-Gbyte HDD (5,400rpm) and a PC using the same hardware in addition to an 8-Gbyte SSD for a cache (made by SanDisk Corp, connected via mSATA). As a result, the software and the SDD halved the time it takes to perform those operations. ExpressCache is software that monitors the read/write...

Using executable program files to hide data with steganographySteganography is a form of security through obscurity in which information is hidden within an unusual medium. An artist might paint a coded message into a portrait, for instance, or an author embed words in the text. A traditional paper watermark is a well-known example of steganography in action. At first glance, there would appear to be nothing unusual about the work, but a recipient aware of the presence of the hidden message would be able to extract it easily. In the computer age, steganography has become more of a science than...

Only about half of new drugs approved in the last decade had comparative effectiveness data available at the time of their approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and approximately two-thirds of new drugs had this information available when alternative treatment options existed, according to a study in the May 4 issue of JAMA. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110503161400.htm

AP Vehicles are parked inside the compound of a house where it is believed Usama bin Laden lived in Abbottabad, Pakistan, May 2. Usama bin Laden's body sank to the bottom of the Arabian Sea Monday morning after he was buried in accordance with Islamic practice. But while his death marked the end of one counterterror mission -- a big one -- it could unlock new clues as intelligence analysts start to review the materials captured at bin Laden's Pakistan compound during the raid. Along with bin Laden's body, electronics and hard drives were seized by U.S. forces following the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Commerce Department investigation has found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of federal climate researchers whose e-mails were leaked in the debate over global climate change. The report Thursday from the department's inspector general is the latest to exonerate climate scientists whose communications with the Climate Research Unit at England's University of East Anglia were stolen and made public in 2009.

Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, contradicts testimony that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano gave the House Homeland Security Commmittee on Wednesday in which she said that the U.S. government had secured “effective control of the great majority” of the both the northern and southern borders. According to the data that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has provided to CNSNews.com, as of Sept. 30, 2010

An app distributed by Google's Android Market has collected private data from millions of users and forwarded it to servers China, validating Apple's uniquely strong stance on mobile security in the iPhone App Store. The exploit, tied to an app that appeared to simply load free custom background wallpapers, was downloaded "anywhere from 1.1 million to 4.6 million times. The exact number isn’t known because the Android Market doesn’t offer precise data," according to a report by Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat. The app "collects a user’s browsing history, text messages, your phone’s SIM card number, subscriber identification, and even your...

Criminal investigations "are being frustrated" because no law currently exists to force Internet providers to keep track of what their customers are doing, the U.S. Department of Justice will announce tomorrow. CNET obtained a copy of the department's position on mandatory data retention--saying Congress should strike a "more appropriate balance" between privacy and police concerns--that will be announced at a House of Representatives hearing tomorrow.

(Reuters) - Oil slipped on Thursday as markets weighed disappointing U.S. jobless claims data and the prospect OPEC would raise output should prices break above $100 a barrel for an extended period. A delegate from a Gulf OPEC member state said OPEC will only hold an emergency meeting if oil bursts into triple digits and stays there, although the group's Gulf members could informally add supply if needed. Brent crude rallied to near $99 a barrel earlier this week, raising concerns it could break past $100, driving up fuel costs and threatening the fragile economic recovery. U.S. weekly initial unemployment...

Government agencies around the world make billions of bits of raw data available to the public each day, but this data is often in difficult formats or so widely spread around the Web it is virtually unusable to the public and scientists who seek to use this valuable information in their research. Computer scientists within the Tetherless World Research Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed an application to help solve the problem. A collaboration with scientific publisher Elsevier, the application utilizes the U.S. government data warehouse, Data.gov, to provide scientists with easy and direct access to government data sets...

New Census Data Brings Good News for DemocratsBy John Aloysius Farrell Posted: December 21, 2010 Today's U.S. Census Bureau report will confirm what average Americans have known, and political scientists have recognized, for decades: the Sun Belt states continue to gain population, members of Congress and votes in the Electoral College at the expense of their northern counterparts. The weather down South and out West is better. Superficial analysis will hail this as a political windfall for Republicans, largely because Texas is expected to pick up four congressional seats. Recent history, however, warns against such claims. In winning three of...

Hackers steal McDonald's customer dataCompromised information includes names, postal and e-mail addresses, phone numbers and age-verification data By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service December 11, 2010 10:41 AM ET McDonald's is working with law enforcement authorities after malicious hackers broke into another company's databases and stole information about an undetermined number of the fast food chain's customers. McDonald's has also alerted potentially affected customers via e-mail and through a message on its website. "We have been informed by one of our long-time business partners, Arc Worldwide, that limited customer information collected in connection with certain McDonald’s websites and promotions...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New U.S. claims for jobless benefits hit their lowest level in more than two years last week while consumer spending rose for a fourth straight month in October, suggesting the economy is nearing a self-sustaining recovery. The picture was further brightened by another report on Wednesday that showed consumer sentiment in November reached its highest level since June, likely reflecting the surge in stock prices in the wake of a Federal Reserve decision to again loosen monetary policy. But the upbeat mood was tempered somewhat by unexpected declines in new home sales and in orders for long-lasting...

The following is an internal memo sent on behalf of NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller: Dear AREPS, Thank you for all of your varying feedback on the Juan Williams situation. Let me offer some further clarification about why we terminated his contract early. First, a critical distinction has been lost in this debate. NPR News analysts have a distinctive role and set of responsibilities. This is a very different role than that of a commentator or columnist. News analysts may not take personal public positions on controversial issues; doing so undermines their credibility as analysts, and that’s what’s happened...

The New York City teachers union is fighting the release of data that tries to gauge the effectiveness of 12,000 of its members, saying the measuring system is too flawed to make teachers' names public. The city Department of Education was set to release the data Wednesday, spurred by public-records requests from news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal. But the United Federation of Teachers threatened a lawsuit, and the DOE delayed its plans. A DOE spokeswoman said that unless a court interferes, the city intends to make them public Friday.

Today, September 16, 2010, we have had 365 graphs of the day published in American Thinker. Each day for the last year, our Graph of the Day included one or more short quotes, a graph of some kind, and some statistics, usually related in some manner. We let the quotes, graphs, and statistics speak for themselves -- no added commentary. After a year of that, allow me to add some commentary. I did pick the subject material myself, so there is no denying the graphs were "biased" in that sense -- in the same sense that any publication is...

Reid Campaign blamed for trying to capture data belonging to Angle Supporters RENO, NV – U.S. Senator Harry Reid’s campaign was forced to take down a website that falsely represented itself as Sharron Angle’s campaign website and attempted to deceive Angle supporters into giving their personal information to the Reid campaign. Reid’s campaign received a Cease and Desist Notice complaining of “nefarious actions,” including the abuses of proprietary materials from the Angle campaign website and for potentially violating the privacy of supporters who may have been submitting personal information to be used for U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s campaign. According...

My 8GB SDHC card recived a small bit of damage on an exposed corner, opposite of the leads. The computer won't read the card so my data is trapped. I have a ton of music on it so I'm anxious to recover my tunes. Any ideas as to how I can recover the data?

By Tom Foremski - March 8, 2010 Wayne Rosing, when he was VP of Engineering at Google, once told me that Google saves every bit of data from people's searches and puts it onto tapes and ship it off to a storage facility. Why does Google collect all that data I asked? We don't know, but we collect it all, he said. These days Google has a better answer but it continues to save all that data. Yes, Google will tell people that it removes data after 18 months but that is not strictly true. It removes the data that...

"We're gonna change the whole system. We're not gonna put a new battery in the system. No, no, we want a new system". -- Van Jones Glenn Beck talking about Google story -- Google is too far deeply in bed with the US government -- there are some 20 attorneys general investigating this. Something doesn't seem right. Please research this. I don't know what it is, but have a feeling it has something to do with internet regulations, net neutrality. I've been writing about this for weeks in my weekly column at World Net Daily. Keeping an eye on this...

Satellite systems in space keyed to detect nuclear events and environmental gasses currently face a kind of data logjam because their increasingly powerful sensors produce more information than their available bandwidth can easily transmit. Experiments conducted by Sandia National Laboratories at the International Space Station preliminarily indicate that the problem could be remedied by orbiting more complex computer chips to pre-reduce the large data stream. While increased satellite on-board computing capabilities ideally would mean that only the most useful information would be transmitted to Earth, an unresolved question had been how well the latest in computing electronics would fare in...

LONDON – A strong set of U.S. jobs data Friday failed to shore up confidence in world markets as stocks plunged again amid mounting fears that Europe's debt crisis could spread and derail the global economic recovery. In Britain, where investors were grappling with uncertain general election results, the FTSE 100 index slid 209.98 points, or 4 percent, at 5,051.01, while the pound oscillated wildly. Germany's DAX slid 226.05 points, or 3.8 percent, to 5,682.21 while the CAC-40 in France was 112.56 points, or 3.2 percent, lower at 3,443.55. And on Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 210.09...

Privacy campaigners have long advocated that we should own our data, and we should be able to do what we like with it. So why has an attempt to put this into law caused a minor panic? A Michigan Senator has introduced a Bill giving individuals the right to request the removal of personal data from websites. Last week, Facebook unilaterally exposed the "interests" - the likes and dislikes - of hundreds of millions of its users, data they had previously thought was private. The Cyber Privacy Bill (HR 5108) would give users some redress. In fact, Facebook wouldn't even...

Back in January last year, David Bond packed a rucksack, kissed his pregnant wife Katie and toddler Ivy, climbed into his Toyota Prius and drove away from home. Nobody knew where he was going – he didn’t even know himself. One thing he was sure about was this: “I’m going to leave my life behind and disappear,” he said. A 38-year-old Oxford graduate with a solid if unspectacular career in media, Bond wasn’t your typical runaway. But then, you might have said the same about Will Smith in Enemy of the State, or Robert Donat in The 39 Steps –...

A House of Commons investigation into the bogus climate data put out by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) found the practices “well within the norms for university-based research.” “Cooking the numbers in order to ensure continued grant funding is a common technique in the world of academia,” the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee report said. “To single out Professor Jones and his fellow climate researchers would impose a higher standard on them than is applied to others in the academic community.” The report said “demands that government-funded scientists be immune to the temptations of...

“If you think redistricting is always partisan and political which it is... it’s going to be on steroids this time.” – Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who will control the 2010 Census February 18, 2009 – President Barack Hussein Obama plans on seizing control of the U.S. Census Bureau from the Commerce Department and will be using it for political purposes in 2010. This power grab is illegal. Republican Sen. Judd Gregg (NH) had been chosen to head Commerce. He had accepted the invitation from Obama, but withdrew last week over concerns including the Census Bureau being removed from...

There’s a new paper out by Dr. Edward Long that does some interesting comparisons to NCDC’s raw data (prior to adjustments) that compares rural and urban station data, both raw and adjusted in the CONUS. The paper is titled Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw and Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural and Urban Station Sets. In it, Dr. Edward Long states: “The problem would seem to be the methodologies engendered in treatment for a mix of urban and rural locations; that the ‘adjustment’ protocol appears to accent to a warming effect rather than eliminate it. This, if correct, leaves...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Nearly 15 months after the Defense Department banned the use of external computer flash drives, officials have agreed to allow limited use of the convenient high-tech storage devices. The approved flash drives will be included in kits that the military will soon begin to distribute, with the first priority being troops in Afghanistan and Iraq who need the devices to carry or transfer critical data. Vice Adm. Carl V. Mauney, deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Command, told reporters Friday that initially only dozens will be sent to the war zone, but eventually more kits will be created...

The President launched a new government website on Monday called Climate.gov, hoping to prove once and for all that Global Warming is a reality, and not a myth, despite the fact that Climate Change scientists have been 'hiding the decline' for years and that the IPOCC's integrity has been strongly discredited. Nevertheless, it didn't take too long for skeptics to realize that the con artists at Climate.gov had intentionally omitted some of the sea ice data: The sea ice data, cited from NSIDC, stops in 2007. 2008 and 2009 sea ice data and imagery, available to even the simplest of...

AB 649 is Wisconsin's governor Doyle (D) highly touted bill to reduce CO2 emissions that adapt CA EPA regulations and mandate the way electricity is made 24% green to prevent "global warming". CO2 emissions does not cause "global warming" read "the Patterson effect (linked). Through CO2 hyperbole politicians saw a method to collect more taxes through a system known as "cap and trade" or worse yet hook up with producers of green energy devices (snip) CO2 hype also force-fed state and federal bureaus such as Clifornia's EPA into unmanageable unresponsive massive bureaucracies (snip)California EPA seems to have come up with...

Government posting wealth of data to InternetBy PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer Fri Jan 22, 2:28 pm ET WASHINGTON – The Obama administration on Friday is posting to the Internet a wealth of government data from all Cabinet-level departments, on topics ranging from child car seats to Medicare services. The mountain of newly available information comes a year and a day after President Barack Obama promised on his first full day on the job an open, transparent government. Under a Dec. 8 White House directive, each department must post online at least three collections of "high-value" government data that never...

Americans are known for gorging on food, but we're also gluttons of another sort: A new study finds that the average American consumes more than 34 gigabytes of video, music and words a day-and that's only on our free time. One byte of information is equivalent to one letter of text. One gigabyte is equal to roughly 8 minutes of high definition video. Thirty-four gigabytes of data would fit on about 7 DVD disks or 1.5 Blu-ray disks. A mix of old and new media contribute to our daily information diet, the study finds, including TV, radio, books, the Internet,...

There's plenty of cause to be skeptical of climate-change theology because global-warming advocates are secretive about their data. If climate-change research were all on the up-and-up, there would be no reason to hide it. So far, the spotlight has been on Britain's University of East Anglia and its refusal to release surface temperature data, which is by far the most comprehensive long-term data available on the subject kept anywhere in the world. In an effort to pooh-pooh the cover-up, global-warming activists are trying to reassure a curious public that this isn't a concern because some other data sources purportedly show...

While rumors of a possible Verizon-compatible iPhone in 2010 persist, one analyst has predicted that Apple will instead bring the iPhone to another GSM-based carrier in the U.S.: T-Mobile. In a note to investors released this week, Doug Reid of Thomas Weisel Partners said his firm believes that T-Mobile, and not Verizon, will be the beneficiary when Apple's exclusive agreement with AT&T expires next year... AT&T's exclusive contract with Apple for the iPhone is due to expire in 2010... While the iPhone in its current iteration is compatible with T-Mobile's network, it is not capable of connecting to its high-speed...

The private sector reports last week stated there were almost 200,000 jobs fewer in the private sector. Also the numbers were. Plus the weekly jobless claims have been hovering around 500,000 for the past month. 400,000 is considered break even. This report should not be trusted, it was put out temporarily to take the pressure on Obama and to get health care thru.

After the leaked email scandal, the University of East Anglia has been forced to admit they threw away the raw temperature data they used to make their predictions of anthropogenic global warming. They claim they only kept the 'adjusted' data. That is one sure-fire way to prevent skeptics from checking your calculations. Based on what programmers have learned from examining the leaked code the University of East Anglia used to calculate the 'Hockey Stick Graph,' their calculations definitely need rechecking.

The past couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations about the baloney practices that pass as sound science about climate change.

The Obama administration on Friday touted reports of 640,000 stimulus jobs, the latest economic numbers and the backing of a Republican governor to try to undercut GOP attacks on the effect of its massive $787 billion package. Reports released Friday afternoon showed that stimulus projects, such as highway and other infrastructure work, have directly saved or created 640,329 jobs, Vice President Joe Biden said. White House officials said a total of about 1 million jobs have been created or saved by the stimulus when taking into account the roughly 400,000 jobs that come from the economic effect of tax cuts,...

Debate about the impact of the $787 billion stimulus continued this week. “Thanks largely to the Recovery Act,” Larry Summers argued, “we have walked a substantial distance back from the economic abyss and are on the path toward economic recovery.” Yet the latest data from the Department of Commerce continue to show that only an insubstantial part of this distance was due to the stimulus. The table shows the latest Department of Commerce estimates of the contributions of consumption, investment, net exports, and government spending to the improvement in GDP growth from the first to second quarter. Growth improved by...

If you own a T-Mobile/Microsoft Sidekick smartphone I don’t have to tell you this. But if you are among the millions who don’t: on October 1st literally every user of the Sidekick data service lost the private personal records – emails, notes, calendar entries, contacts, etc. — they had stored on the system. Initially, it was believed that information was now lost forever. The official statement from Microsoft/Danger (the latter being the company that builds the Sidekick) and T-Mobile is that the data “almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”

Where the problem truly arises is where problems occur whenever individual rights and individual property collide with the demands of an increasingly statist government and with genuine communitarian needs and requirements for security of the state. Any treatment of individuals in a free society must be based on the recognition that a citizen – and even a visitor to this free land – is innocent until proven guilty, and that he or she must be treated with utmost respect unless and until we have probable cause to view him or her as a potential threat. Even then, the assumption must...

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, America’s preeminent gun control organization, recently issued a report suggesting that states with “weak gun laws” are the nation’s major sources of “crime guns.” But as with other Brady reports, a deeper examination is in order before accepting their conclusions. Curious turnaround Earlier this year, the Brady Campaign claimed that the Tiahrt Amendment restricted law enforcement from accessing ATF trace data: The so-called Tiahrt Amendment (named after Congressman Todd Tiahrt of Kansas) includes several riders attached annually to Justice Department appropriations legislation since 2004 that make it harder for law enforcement to prevent...

BOSTON (AP) -- When Shanghai blogger Isaac Mao tried to watch a YouTube clip of Chinese police beating Tibetans, all he got was an error message... ...Mao thought the error -- just after the one-year anniversary of a crackdown on Tibetan protesters in China -- was too suspicious to be coincidental, so he reported it on a new Harvard-based Web site that tracks online censorship... ...Zittrain started Herdict in February -- a month before China's block began -- to aggregate reports of online inaccessibility and help users detect government censorship on the Web as soon as it happens. Having tracked...