Free Republic

Thomas Torres, age 54, was the target of a Connecticut State Police SWAT raid shortly before Christmas two years ago. The Spanish-speaking, subsidized housing resident of New Haven was living in a building infested with drug dealers and prostitutes. He kept his door closed unless given a damn good reason to do otherwise. He didn’t have the drugs the police were looking for and told them so, repeatedly, despite the language barrier, after the raiding party knocked down his door. What followed was the trashing of his apartment and a physical altercation between the unarmed middle-aged man on disability and...

At InfoDocket there is a story describing the project to digitize the Vatican Library.Get this! EMC Corporation has today announced that it is providing 2.8 petabytes of storage to help the Vatican Apostolic Library digitize its entire catalogue of historic manuscripts and incunabula (a book or pamphlet printed before 1501). One of the oldest libraries in the world, the Vatican Apostolic Library holds many of the rarest and most valuable documents in existence including the 42 line Latin Bible of Gutenberg, the first book printed with movable type and dating between 1451 and 1455. Do you remember “Doc’s” reaction to...

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources says it's notifying about 5,000 people after an employee accessed their driving and motor vehicle records without authorization. The agency said in a statement Tuesday that the employee is no longer employed by the DNR. Spokesman Chris Niskanen says he can't elaborate on that. The DNR says it has asked the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate. No charges have been filed so far. The DNR says its own investigation found no indication the data was sold, disclosed to others or used for criminal purposes. But the agency is advising the 5,000 affected people...

Most cultural institutions and research laboratories still rely on magnetic tape to archive their collections. Hitachi recently announced that it has developed a medium that can outlast not only this old-school format but also CDs, DVDs, hard drives and MP3s. The electronics giant partnered with Kyoto University's Kiyotaka Miura to develop “semiperpetual” slivers of quartz glass that Hitachi says can preserve information for hundreds of millions of years with virtually no degradation. The prototype is made of a square of quartz two centimeters wide and two millimeters thick. It houses four layers of dots that are created with a femtosecond...

DEADLINE FOR PUBLIC COMMENT: Thursday, December 20. The MN Dept of Health wants your comments on patient consent before accessing private medical records, on having to inform patients about unauthorized access to medical records, and on whether patients should be able to see the electronic logs that show exactly who accessed their medical records, when, where, and why.  States have power to write real privacy laws. Help legislators take a strong stand for real consent, limited consent, and the right to stay off the National Health Information Network. The NHIN is being created by $27 billion from the Recovery Act (stimulus). It...

Yes, the federal government is growing, as measured by its outlays of money. However, if one compares these to the size of the overall economy, the increases are less dramatic than many claim. Total federal outlays during the first three fiscal years of the Obama administration averaged 24 percent of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, which measures the value of all final goods and services produced in our economy. That was an all-time high. But 30 years ago, during the first three fiscal years of the Reagan administration, they averaged 22.5 percent. Whether an increase of 1.5 percentage points over...

I spent a lot of time following the interpretations that many on here had been offering in regards to the polls. They made sense and that appeals to the Spock side of me. Yes, I'm a nerd. I'm looking for those who are interested in understanding why our interpretation of the polls failed to begin sharing their continued observations.

Are You Better Off Than You Were at the End of the Bush Administration? A Data-Based Assessment I've heard a lot about the "four years ago" comparison. Four years ago, we were on the cusp of Don Luskin’s famous prediction (“... we're on the brink not of recession, but of accelerating prosperity.”), and Phill Gramm had two months earlier decried the ongoing “mental recession”. [0] It seems to me the more appropriate marker is the last election, in 2008Q4. We can then assess what the data tells us about 2012Q2 vis a vis 2008Q4. Aggregate Measures of Activity and Income...

A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated siting system which addresses USHCN siting issues and data adjustments. The new improved assessment, for the years 1979 to 2008,...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Twitter will provide biannual reports about U.S. and foreign government demands for information about its users, just as Google has been doing for the past two years. The first batch of data posted Monday on Twitter's website shows the online messaging service processed 849 government requests about its users during the first half of this year. Twitter says it gave officials at least part of what they wanted 63 percent of the time.

On the sixth floor of a sleek office building here, more than 150 techies are quietly peeling back the layers of your life. They know what you read and where you shop, what kind of work you do and who you count as friends. They also know who your mother voted for in the last election. The depth and breadth of the Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation — from data mining to online organizing — reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election. It makes the...

Climategate, the 2009 exposure of misconduct at the University of East Anglia, was a terrible blow to the reputation of climatology, and indeed to that of British and American science. Although that story hasn’t been in the news in recent months, new evidence of similar scientific wrongdoing continues to emerge, with a new scandal hitting the climate blogosphere just a few days ago.And central to the newest story is one of the Climategate scientists: Keith Briffa, an expert in reconstructing historical temperature records from tree rings. More particularly, the recent scandal involves a tree-ring record Briffa prepared for a...

Greenland's glaciers are not speeding up as much as previously thought, researchers have estimated. As a result, the ice rivers may be contributing "significantly less" to sea-level rise than had been thought. Previous studies had estimated that the nation's glaciers would double their flow by 2010 and continue to maintain that speed, they explained. But the team, writing in Science, said the glaciers could eventually flow faster than earlier studies estimated. The team of US researchers based their findings on data stretching back to 2000-2001, collected from more than 200 outlet glaciers. "So far, on average, we are seeing about...

AT&T decided to pay up after a California small claims court judge ruled it was unfair to throttle a cellphone data plan advertised as unlimited. Matt Spaccarelli, 39, challenged AT&T in February after he noticed his 4G network wasn’t operating as fast as it should. Spaccarelli is among the 5% of AT&T customers who use the most data. He told the court speeds slowed once he used 1.5GB to 2GB of data after the billing cycle began. The judge said slowing down data violated AT&T’s unlimited data plan terms and ordered AT&T pay $850 plus $85 for court costs.

AT&T’s questionable policy with regard to unlimited smartphone data plan holders recently found its way back into the limelight following a new wave of subscriber complaints. The nation’s No.2 carrier no longer offers an unlimited data plan to smartphone users, though many subscribers on its network still have grandfathered plans that provide an unlimited amount of smartphone data each month. Subscribers who approach the top 5% of unlimited data users in a single billing period see their data speeds throttled, however, and countless users have found that AT&T is now beginning to throttle users after less than 2GB of data...

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.