Free Republic

An experiment going up outside of Chicago will attempt to measure the intimate connections among information, matter and spacetime. If it works, it could rewrite the rules for 21st-century physicsCraig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. This is not a metaphor. Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with an intrinsic jitter, the busy hum of static. This hum comes not from particles bouncing...

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...

Is the password to an encrypted laptop more like a key to a lock or a handwritten key to a secret code? That is the question a federal court will probably have to answer in deciding whether a Colorado woman must give the feds the password to an encrypted laptop seized in her bedroom, according to CNET News' Privacy Inc. blog.Ramona Fricosu wouldn't have to provide the password, but rather enter it herself to release the material being sought by the U.S. Department of Justice. But her lawyer, Philip Dubois, is objecting to the disclosure. Fricosu is facing bank fraud,...

Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, working with federal law enforcement agents, has brought down the world's largest spam network, Rustock. Rustock, at its peak, was a botnet of around 2 million spam-sending zombies capable of sending out 30 billion spam email per day. Microsoft's wholesale slaughter of Rustock could reduce worldwide spam output by up to 39%. Rustock was taken down, piece by piece, in a similar way to the Mega-D botnet. First the master controllers, the machines that send out commands to enslaved zombies, were identified. Microsoft quickly seized some of these machines located in the U.S. for further analysis,...

The New York Times The long road to download Wired’s digital iPad magazine. This morning I decide to try a little experiment: I opened up my iPad, clicked on the little Wired icon and purchased the magazine’s latest digital issue. After I agreed to fork over $4, it began downloading. For the next phase of the experiment, I grabbed my car keys, left my apartment and drove about 12 blocks to a local magazine store in Brooklyn, where I also purchased the latest issue of Wired magazine, this time in print. I didn’t run any red lights, or speed, or...

The revolution in Egypt is being masterminded by a phalanx of young Internet executives in the Big Apple’s SoHo specially set up for fomenting revolutions, and the unwitting American taxpayer is paying for it. When it comes to Revolution, today’s third world, digital activists are being better trained than anything to be found in Sun Tzu’s famed Art of War,

Clink link. If you'd come today you would have reached a whole nation; Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication. Or Twitter, Facebook, Google... ...check to see what accommodations are in area... ...Joseph just bought a donkey and a cow...

The battle of the copyright is a long and sordid tale on the internet. Most folks are familiar with the old days of Napster, and the record companies suing the pants off of soccer-Moms because their kids had downloaded songs to the family computer. More recently as technology has continued to advance, we have seen movie companies also come into the fold along with the music companies, often suing to shut down websites that host torrent files of copyrighted material, as well as still going after the individual on occasion. At the end of the day though, most folks aren't...

The Amazon.com Kindle e-reader and bookstore have reached a "tipping point," the company said Monday, with Kindle titles outselling hardcover books on the massive online marketplace for the first time. "We've reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle--the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189," Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in an announcement release, referring to last month's price drop for the device. "In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers...

(CBS)  A CBS News investigation last month found that nearly every digital copier built after 2002 stores an image of documents copied, scanned or emailed by the machine on hard drives. CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports parents and students at Dos Palos High School in Sacramento found out the hard way recently, when CBS affiliate KOVR pulled hundreds of student names, home addresses, cell phone and social security numbers off the hard drive of an old school copier. "The fact that information that we treat very, very carefully somehow got out of our system and is out...

When it comes to computer technology, thin is always in. It's indisputable that the thinner, lighter, clearer, the better when dealing with the latest computer gadget. This keyboard is the epitome of the high standards expected of the technological version of the fashion industry. It's based on image as well, that is, image recognition technology. It judges clicking depending on the image of the size and where your finger touches the keyboard.

When it comes to computer technology, thin is always in. It’s indisputable that the thinner, lighter, clearer, the better when dealing with the latest computer gadget. This keyboard is the epitome of the high standards expected of the technological version of the fashion industry. It’s based on image as well, that is, image recognition technology.

This figure shows the energy density and the power density of nano vacuum tubes in comparison to other energy storage devices. Credit: H?bler and Osuagwu. (PhysOrg.com) -- Physicists theorize that quantum phenomena could provide a major boost to batteries, with the potential to increase energy density up to 10 times that of lithium ion batteries. According to a new proposal, billions of nanoscale capacitors could take advantage of quantum effects to overcome electric arcing, an electrical breakdown phenomenon which limits the amount of charge that conventional capacitors can store. In their study, Alfred Hubler and Onyeama Osuagwu, both of the...

Even the cable networks that are today’s multi-revenue stream darlings are destined for the same “digital destruction” as advertising-supported broadcast television, newspapers and other traditional media. It’s just a matter of time. That likely scenario from former News Corp. president and COO Peter Chernin, represents the final blow to media conglomerates. which currently rely on their cable networks for at least 60 percent of their profits. Whether niche cable programming can survive and thrive in a streaming on-demand video world “is the single biggest question facing the media industry,” Chernin said Wednesday during a roundtable discussion USC Annenberg School for...

Simple poll question today: Did you make the switch to digital television? A Daily Poll.

  Make no mistake: I do not merely hate computers. I loathe, fear, despise, curse, and have constant torture and dismemberment fantasies about them. I know there are others out there like me, an entire unorganized underground. I've talked to some of them, in conspiratorial whispers. We are not cyberterrorists -- viruses hurt us more than anyone else. But we need a support network. We need a manifesto.   This isn't it.   The university that employs me gave every one of its nearly 1,000 professors a free computer. Having had no luck with IBM PCs in the past, I...

The long-awaited switch from analog to digital TV took place last Friday, and if you're like most people, you weren't aware of it. But if you are poor and/or stupid, you've probably had a rough weekend. "Nearly 700,000 calls were received by a federal hot line this week from people confused about the nationwide switch from analog to digital TV broadcasts that occurred Friday. About a third of the calls were about federal coupons to pay for digital converter boxes." Does that really say, "federal coupons for digital converter boxes?" "The largest volume of calls came from the Chicago area..."...

LOS ANGELES - Nearly 700,000 calls were received by a federal hot line this week from people confused about the nationwide switch from analog to digital TV broadcasts that occurred Friday. The Federal Communications Commission said Saturday that about 317,450 calls went into the help line, 1-888-CALL-FCC, on Friday alone, the day analog signals were cut off. About a third of the calls were about federal coupons to pay for digital converter boxes, an indication that at least 100,000 people still didn't have the right equipment to receive digital signals.

The big DTV moment is here - like New Year's Eve, labor pains or the millennium.. For once, a technology change is not driven by the youn. Senior citizens are the most prepared, according to Neilsen. Yes, the old folks rule.

Once upon a time (at the zenith of 20th century analog media), maintaining an on-site, in-house library crammed full of archived periodicals and rows and rows of hefty, solemn reference books, was all the rage at large media organizations. In 2009, not so much. Today, yet another bricks-and-mortar media bibliothèque fell victim to the digital age. This afternoon, in an email to his staff, David Westin, the president of ABC News, announced that ABC News will be converting its existing research library on the second floor of its 47th street building into a smaller, more cyber-focused "Digital Research Facility." "Our...

<p>Last week, an auction for a book by Capt. Richard Phillips, the merchant-ship hero who saved his crew from pirates, drew top bids of around $500,000—half the seven-figure advance it had been expected to fetch.</p> <p>At least that book had bidders. In February, the William Morris Agency failed to find any takers for a Britney Spears memoir.</p>

The head of America's National Security Agency says that America needs to build a digital warfare force for the future, according to reports. Lt Gen Keith Alexander, who also heads the Pentagon's new Cyber Command, outlined his views in a report for the House Armed Services subcommittee. In it, he stated that the US needed to reorganise its offensive and defensive cyber operations. The general also said more resources and training were needed. The report, part of which was outlined in an Associated Press news agency story, is due to be presented to the subcommittee on Tuesday. During the past...

Many states are looking for ways to increase their tax revenue by taxing purchases made online. This extends to third party solicitors located in another state. Our Constitution infers that states are restricted from enacting laws that burden or restrict interstate commerce. Let’s stop this tax now.

"....This technology is about to be used, albeit in a more subtle fashion, against American citizens in a highly classified and covert operation to mind control and manipulate the entire population into ‘compliance’ with our New World order overlords. The technology will utilize a combination of HAARP transmitters, GWEN towers, microwave cell phone towers, and the soon-to-be-mandatory High Definition Digital TV that will enter your home via: a) cable, b) satellite, c) HD TVs, or d) those oh-so-easy-to-obtain “digital converter boxes” that the government is so anxious to help you obtain and underwrite most of the cost on your...

Neil Schield knows the grim state of the music business as well as anyone; last May, he was laid off from a company at the vanguard of digital music distribution. But this month, Schield began an unlikely second act: He opened a brick-and-mortar record store in Echo Park, with racks of tasteful inventory carrying price tags as high as $100 -- all presumed liabilities in an age when "digital" and "free" seem to rule the day. For added chutzpah, Schield's shop, Origami Vinyl, exclusively stocks new vinyl LPs, presumed not long ago to be as dead as eight-track tapes. Moreover,...

I'm looking to purchase a small digital camera and need feedback from FReepers. Experiences, likes,dislikes, models, makes......

The digital transition has left some confused, but a Joplin man was down right frustrated with the switch. So frustrated, in fact, that he peppered his television set with gunfire. Police responded to the man's house Wednesday after reports of shots being fired inside. Turns out the 70-year-old gunman was livid over losing cable and could not get his digital converter box to work. Police took Walter Hoover into custody after a brief standoff and charged him with unlawful use of a firearm. Hoover's wife told police that he had been drinking before the incident.

DTV Transition Partially Occurs, World Doesn't End Federal call center easily handles user calls, problems... 05:58PM Thursday Feb 19 2009 by Karl Bode About 421 of the nation's roughly 1,800 stations made the transition to digital broadcasts on the originally scheduled date (February 17), and so far the world has continued rotating. Fears that consumers weren't ready for the switch resulted in Congress extending the deadline into June, though TV stations were given the right to cut over ahead of the deadline -- as long as they got permission from the FCC. According to the Associated Press, the Federal call...

The House of Representatives Thursday voted to postpone the country's shift from analog to digital TV broadcasts until June 12. TV stations are scheduled to shut off their analog, over-the-air signals on Feb. 17. Many Democrats contended that millions of consumers were still not prepared for the switch. Older TV sets that aren't equipped or modified to receive digital signals will go dark once the transition occurs. The Senate twice okayed a delay, most recently on Jan. 29 Thursday's House vote was 264-158. A majority of House members voted last week to push back the implementation of digital TV. But...

It's hard for the hillbilly to say goodbye to certain things. Like the rims off the tire of some 1970s-era muscle car that rusts in the front yard. Or the old lady moo-moo, a fashion style that slips easily from the bedroom to caseworker waiting room. Some hillbillies have a hard time saying goodbye to people. That's why the Protection From Abuse, or the PFA, order was invented. But, nothing has been harder to say goodbye to than analog television.

WASHINGTON, Jan 28 (Reuters) - An effort to delay the Feb. 17 deadline for a nationwide switch to digital television failed in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday after Republicans blocked the move. The legislation is backed by President Barack Obama and already passed the U.S. Senate. However, it failed to gain the required two-thirds support in the House under special rules adopted for the vote.

WASHINGTON – The Senate on Monday voted unanimously to postpone the upcoming transition from analog to digital television broadcasting by four months to June 12 — setting the stage for Congress to pass the proposal as early as Tuesday. Monday's Senate vote is a big victory for the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress, who have been pushing for a delay amid growing concerns that too many Americans won't be ready for the currently scheduled Feb. 17 changeover. The Nielsen Co. estimates that more than 6.5 million U.S. households that rely on analog television sets to pick up over-the-air broadcast...

<p>WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama is urging Congress to postpone the Feb. 17 switch from analog to digital television broadcasting, arguing that too many Americans who rely on analog TV sets to pick up over-the-air channels won't be ready.</p>

A pair of call centers logged around 900 calls yesterday, but organizers of Hawaii's early switch to digital TV are calling the mission a success. The state shut off analog TV yesterday at noon, and did so with what appears to be a manageable level of issues from viewers. "There were no major surprises," says Hawaii Association of Broadcasters President Chris Leonard. There was a wide range of questions from viewers, some wondering how to hook up their converter boxes and some wondering why they weren't receiving a signal. Despite the state's-and the nation's-considerable efforts to spread the DTV message,...

The Obama Transition Team released today the new official portrait of President-elect Barack Obama, to be hung in federal office buildings from Limestone, Maine, to Wasilla, Alaska (and on to Honolulu, natch) after he takes the oath of office on January 20.

President-elect Barack Obama, as part of the effort to revive the economy, has proposed a massive effort to modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic. Here's the audacious plan: Computerize all health records within five years. The quality of health care for all Americans gets a big boost, and costs decline. Sounds good. But it won't be easy. In fact, many hurdles stand in the way. Only about 8% of the nation's 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation....

Consumers Union is urging Congress to delay the nation's transition to digital television, saying the program to help TV viewers prepare for the switch next month has been underfunded and poorly implemented. In a letter sent last night to President Bush, President-elect Barack Obama, House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the consumer advocacy group said Congress should push back the transition "until a plan is in place to minimize the number of consumers who will lose TV signals." The request comes two days after the federal government said it...

The Federal Communications Commission sponsored a Nascar race car as part of its effort to inform Americans that on Feb. 18, television signals transmitted over the air will be transmitted solely in digital format. Old TV sets will no longer work. It paid $350,000 to emblazon “The Digital TV Transition” and other phrases on a Ford driven by David Gilliland. So how’s that going? In November, the car crashed during a Nascar race in Phoenix. It was the second crash in as many months. And how is the digital TV transition going? According to critics, about as well, despite a...

Boston’s broadcast TV viewers can find out if their tubes are ready for next year’s digital switch on Tuesday when more than two dozen local stations and cable providers take part in “DTV Day.” Old-style analog TV sets that aren’t hooked up to cable - think rabbit ear antennas - won’t get a picture come Feb. 17 unless they’re hooked up to a converter box. Cable and satellite customers won’t be affected by the digital switch. Viewers can find out if their TVs are digital ready by turning to WGBH-TV (Ch. 2) from 5 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. If their...

...Then God your Father spoke, "It won't be long now children before your televisions will be completely useless and that they'll contain The Chip..."

Since MP3s first became popular a decade ago, music industry executives have obsessed over this question: when would digital music revenue finally surpass compact disc sales? For Atlantic Records, the label that in years past has delivered artists like Ray Charles, John Coltrane and Led Zeppelin, that time, apparently, is now. Atlantic, a unit of Warner Music Group, says it has reached a milestone that no other major record label has hit: more than half of its music sales in the United States are now from digital products, like downloads on iTunes and ring tones for cellphones. “We’re like a...

(IsraelNN.com) As part of its ongoing jihad against Israel, the Hamas terrorist organization has adopted a new mission, recently unveiled at its booth at a digital communications exhibition in Iran: hacking Israeli websites. A new Hamas-affiliated group, calling itself "The Digital Intifada," introduced itself in late October at the second annual National Exhibition and Festival of Digital Media in Tehran, according to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC). The objective of "The Digital Intifada" is to develop anti-Jewish websites and encourage the criminal hacking of Israeli governmental and non-governmental websites. At...

British Pop Stars Form Group to Demand More Power Saturday, October 4, 2008 1:30 PM LONDON -- Some of Britain's biggest music stars announced Saturday they are banding together to demand greater control over their music in the digital age. Radiohead, Robbie Williams and Kaiser Chiefs are among more than 60 founding members of the Featured Artists' Coalition. The group says it wants musicians rather than record labels to retain control over the rights to their music. It says new technology is rapidly changing the music industry, and artists are often left out when their songs are distributed over the...

MAURICE SKLAR MINISTRIES Buy Postage Seven Signs of the Times Maurice Sklar Mar 12 2007 05:21PM 1. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17) “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes...

Pope Benedict will text message thousands of young Catholics on their mobile phones during World Youth Day in Sydney in July, hoping going digital will help him connect better with a younger audience. The Pope will text daily messages of inspiration and hope during the six-day Sydney event while digital prayer walls will be erected at event sites and the church will set up a Catholic social networking Web site akin to a Catholic Facebook. The Catholic Church said it decided to use technology to connect to the estimated 225,000 young Catholics expected to attend the World Youth Day (WYD)...

WASHINGTON (AP) - For months, TV viewers have been told by government, by industry and by the media that if they already subscribe to cable, there's no need to worry about the coming transition to digital broadcasting. So cable customer Doris Spurk was surprised to learn that thanks to the transition, she would have to rent a converter box for $5.95 per month, per television set, plus pay for a $60 service call to install it. With five televisions in her home, the conversion would increase her bill by 75 percent. "It really ticks us off," the 63-year-old central Florida...

SAN FRANCISCO – Most people gave up on their vinyl music collection two decades ago, when compact discs all but nudged LPs off store shelves for good. If you held onto any favorites, DJ equipment maker Numark Inc. is looking to breathe new life into them with a USB-equipped turntable. It can pipe the tunes of yesteryear into your computer, where you can store them in digital form – or load them onto a media player and take them on the road. The Numark TTX USB ($399) is a sturdy, DJ quality turntable with well-fashioned components and nice styling. Nothing...

"What's shocking about the report isn't what it covers (or that Ars is cited in footnotes 126 and 211), but what it leaves out: it doesn't contain a single extended discussion of the fact that the US has been slipping in a worldwide broadband rankings throughout the decade. That hugely significant fact doesn't mean that the current approach isn't working or that the US is becoming a Luddite paradise, but it does suggest that there are other approaches to be considered, approaches that have proved successful in real-world conditions. As broadband continues to be a key driver of economic opportunity...

Digital photo frames containing malware have been found, heads up! http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=3807 http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=3787

LAS VEGAS - Best Buy Inc.'s chief executive said Tuesday that he is "very nervous" about being able to supply customers with the millions of digital TV converter boxes needed ahead of the shutdown of most analog TV transmissions in 13 months. "I think it's one of the biggest risks our industry has," vice chairman and CEO Brad Anderson told an industry audience at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Full-power television stations will turn off their analog signal on Feb. 17, 2009, after which they will broadcast in digital only. Viewers who receive their signals through an...