Free Republic

See for example this thread first. A novel plan to design nukes On-line simulation of flukes It straddles the line 'tween Darwin and Design The thread ought to bring out the kooks!

I read that it used to cost about $70 on average for a computer geek to walk from cubicle to cubicle to install the needed software on individual PCs at different work stations. Now, IBM has 200 people in Toronto running a software installation factory for clients worldwide. Packages are delivered over the Internet to machines at 20 cents per PC. Whoa! Big difference! Giants in the PC market don't have the luxury of making gradual changes in the way they do things anymore. Indian companies have rewritten the rules of competition - because Indians can do it cheaper and...

Visual Studio 2005 Express Announcements! Dear Visual Studio Express community, We are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer Express will be free permanently! Prior to this pricing announcement, Visual Studio Express Editions were promotionally discounted to be free for one year, starting on November 7th, 2005. With this announcement, the promotional discount for Visual Studio Express is now permanent and Express will continue to be free. http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/

Polish computing sience students 2nd in ICPC World Final 13.04.2006 A team of students from the Jagiellonian University has come second at the 30th annual World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery - International Collegiate Programming Contest held in San Antonio, Texas. The ICPC is one of the world's most prestigious university competitions in computing sciences and engineering. More than 5600 teams representing 1733 universities from 84 countries participated in regional contests held last fall. The top 83 teams qualified for the 2006 ACM-ICPC World Finals. This year’s edition has been won by representatives of the University of Saratov,...

SAN ANTONIO - A team of three students from Russia proved their brainy prowess Wednesday, winning an academic competition in which they had just five hours to solve perplexing computing puzzles such as how to connect gears of a clock when given a specific shaft speed. ADVERTISEMENT "I am pleased with our performance today. It feels pretty good," Igor Kulkin, 21, said after his team from Saratov State University won the 2006 Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest. Working in teams of three, contestants in the 30th annual event had five hours to solve 10 problems that would...

<p>IBM today announced free software and educational resources to help developers in Russia build and deploy innovative applications based on open standards and open source.</p> <p>IBM provided ebizQ with the following details.</p> <p>Tapping into the booming software development market in Russia, IBM is giving software developers, architects and students free access to software and hundreds of new tools and technical and educational resources that will enable them to more easily build open standards-based applications.</p>

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23, 2006 – Survey forms will go out in the mail this week to 10,000 servicemembers and Department of Defense civilian employees overseas to determine what they're looking for in radio programming provided by American Forces Network. The survey will help American Forces Radio and Television Service, AFN's parent organization, provide better radio programming of music, news and talk that lives up to its audience's desires, Warren Lee, AFRTS plans and operations officer, said in an interview. The goal, he said, is "to serve our overseas audience with the information and entertainment that they want and need to...

CHICAGO, Dec. 5 (UPI) -- A new regulation advocated by the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission may change the way cable network providers price services -- leading some to offer programming on an a la carte basis and enabling consumers to choose exactly the kind of programming they want delivered, experts tell United Press International's Networking. The policy proposal, for so-called a la carte programming, is designed by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, an appointee of President Bush, to drive down the pricing of cable packages and improve programming content. By Gene Koprowski

There are no unions in India's information technology sector now and the billionaire chairman of the country's top software exporter wants to keep it that way. "The unionization of the sector would certainly be a retrograde step. It will unnecessary damage the growth of the industry as global clients will get concerned about whether they should be sending business to India," said Wipro's (nyse: WIT - news - people ) Azim Premji, according to the Hindustan Times newspaper. The IT sector is a key component in India's $17 billion in annual earnings from outsourcing. Companies such as Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO...

Microsoft has signed on to promote a new programming language intended to replace BASIC as the first step students take towards learning how to code. The Kid's Programming Language, or KPL, was developed under the direction of Jonah Stagner, and his colleagues, ex-Microsoft program manager Jon Schwartz and former NCR engineer Walt Morrison. The three run the software consultancy Morrison-Schwartz Inc. "One of the things we realized is that we all learned programming on some flavor of BASIC when we started. You're not going to learn how to program in BASIC anymore," said Morrison, in an interview. "We wanted something...

Poland top of the codes Poland is now in the lead in the worldwide TopCoder computer programming competition, with Warsaw University top in the academic category. Slawek Szefs reports. TopCoder is a continuous world-wide programming competition with weekly sessions and a huge annual tournament with onsite finals. Poland has just assumed the lead in the national category, while Warsaw University is at the top of the academic contest. Poland has even left behind such a superpower as the United States in TopCoder's country ranking. Russia, Canada and China follow next in line. Warsaw University occupies first place among academic centers,...

MEMRI hosted an event on Capitol Hill last June titled "Must-See Saudi TV." The event was sponsored by Senators Santorum, Schumer, and Collins and analyzed television programs broadcast by stations funded and controlled by the Saudi Arabian government, such as TV1, TV2, and satellite channels such as Al-Majd and Iqra TV. Shows featured leading Saudi religious figures, professors, members of the royal family, government leaders, and intellectuals. Certain messages and themes surfaced again and again: calls for the annihilation of Christian and Jews; anti-American and anti-Semitic declarations; rallying cries for jihad and terrorism, and incitement against American troops in Iraq.

We need PBS, but we could do without the politics. You know what would be fun, and actually helpful? If in the latest struggle over funding for public television, people said what they know to be true. The argument, once again, is about whether PBS has a liberal bias. There are charges and countercharges, studies, specific instances cited of subtle partiality here and obvious side-taking there. But arguing over whether PBS is and has long been politically liberal is like arguing over whether the ocean is and has long been wet. Of course it is, and everyone knows it. Not...

"America is slipping!" It's become a standard lead, guaranteed to grab readers' attention. Add in a few alarmist quotes from self-serving lobbyists with hidden agendas, along with the obligatory conclusion that "Education is the answer," and you've got the economic horror movie that Americans love so much to watch. CNET News.com has got this formula down pat. Its piece, Can Johnny still program?, laments that in the annual collegiate programming contest held by the Association for Computing Machinery, the best that any American team could do this year was a miserable 17th place. The United States hasn't won a world...

The old news: PBS is still a liberal monstrosity transforming the hard-earned dollars of many Bush-loving taxpayers into fire-breathing Bush-loathing programming. The new development: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has plans to get serious about seeking a better balance of political views on PBS. From the sound of the New York Times front page on May 2, they must have been waving smelling salts in the face of liberal reporters. Kenneth Tomlinson, the "Republican" chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was said to be pressing aggressively to correct "what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias." The Times approach,...

Russian fined for virus-writing exploits By John Leyden Published Thursday 18th November 2004 13:24 GMT A Russian member of well-known 29A virus writers group has been fined 3,000 roubles (approximately £57) after he admitted writing malicious code. Eugene Suchkov (AKA Whale), from the little-known Russian republic of Udmurtia, admitted writing the Stepan and Gastropod viruses. He posted live code for the viruses alongside the source code necessary to create variants onto a number of underground virus exchange websites. Neither of these viruses spread. The nickname Whale comes from the name of a virus rather than any reference to Suchkov's physical...

EXCLUSIVE The Sound Of Doomsday The hills are alive ... with the sound of explosions and death     By ALEX PEAKETHE BBC has secret plans to boost morale after a nuclear war — by screening The Sound Of Music. The 1965 Julie Andrews classic was picked to top the Beeb’s doomsday schedule because of its “feelgood” factor, it was revealed yesterday. The musical is in a list of TV and radio programmes to be broadcast to survivors for 100 days from 20 secret underground bunkers. Academic Dr Ian Bradley, who uncovered the plans, revealed yesterday: “Shortly after the...

With the success of "The Passion of the Christ" still reverberating throughout Hollywood while viewers increasingly tune into digital cable as an alternative, it's not surprising that TBN gains favor among new viewers as the family-friendly network.

Soon, our knowledge of life processes will let us program cells as we do computers.Back in the 1940s, John Von Neumann—a giant in the development of modern computers—investigated the theoretical possibilities of self-reproduction. He essentially asserted that a self-reproducible machine would require a “tape” or other description of itself. During reproduction, this tape would serve as the set of instructions for building a copy of the machine and would itself be copied to create the seed necessary for the next generation. DNA, of course, turned out to have precisely these properties. What a beautiful story! One of the very first...

LOS ANGELES, April 2, 2004—Jody Eldred Productions today announced it has just completed filming and is in the final stages of production on an inspirational documentary called, “Changed Lives: Miracles of The Passion,” which will air nationwide Easter weekend. With rave reviews from Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” this one-hour T.V. special was shot in High Definition and documents the true stories of people whose lives have been forever changed by Mel Gibson’s incredible motion picture “The Passion of The Christ.” “I knew instantly that people’s lives were going to be...