Free Republic

Texas State Senator Bob Hall, a former USAF Colonel and himself an EMP expert, characterizes as "equivalent to treason" the behavior of the electric utilities and their lobbyists: "As a Texas State Senator who tried in the 2015 legislative session to get a bill passed to harden the Texas grid against an EMP attack or nature's GMD, I learned first hand the strong control the electric power company lobby has on elected officials. We did manage to get a weak bill passed in the Senate but the power companies had it killed in the House. A very deceitful document which...

The US Navy is pursuing a multi-pronged approach to fielding energy weapons by the end of the decade, with the hopes of upgrading its 30 kilowatt laser gun to 100 kw or more, and giving its electromagnetic railgun a higher repetition rate. Rear Adm. Bryant Fuller, chief engineer at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), said in a panel presentation at the Directed Energy Summit, hosted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Booz Allen Hamilton, that both follow-on technologies should be in the hands of sailors in the fleet by 2020. “Sometime in the very near future” the...

Scientists and engineers at Arizona State University, in Tempe, have created the first lasers that can shine light over the full spectrum of visible colors. The device’s inventors suggest the laser could find use in video displays, solid-state lighting, and a laser-based version of Wi-Fi. Although previous research has created red, blue, green and other lasers, each of these lasers usually only emitted one color of light. Creating a monolithic structure capable of emitting red, green, and blue all at once has proven difficult because it requires combining very different semiconductors. Growing such mismatched crystals right next to each other...

Using powerful computer simulations, researchers from Brown University have identified a material with a higher melting point than any known substance. The computations, described in the journal Physical Review B (Rapid Communications), showed that a material made with just the right amounts of hafnium, nitrogen, and carbon would have a melting point of more than 4,400 kelvins (7,460 degrees Fahrenheit). That's about two-thirds the temperature at the surface of the sun, and 200 kelvins higher than the highest melting point ever recorded experimentally. The experimental record-holder is a substance made from the elements hafnium, tantalum, and carbon (Hf-Ta-C). But these...

Physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity.

2326 GMT (7:26 p.m. EDT) The first stage liquid oxygen tank is conditioned for flight. 2322 GMT (7:22 p.m. EDT) Launch minus 45 minutes! This is the ascent timeline to be followed by the United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket in launching the Air Force’s WGS 7 communications satellite. 2316 GMT (7:16 p.m. EDT) The flight slews and commanding tests for the vehicle steering systems are being performed. The first stage Common Booster Core, the strap-on solid rocket motors and upper stage engine steering checks were run through a pre-launch test pattern. 2310 GMT (7:10 p.m. EDT) The odds of...

The first of three development flights for the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb has been successfully completed in Nevada. The test -- conducted by the U.S. Air Force and the National Nuclear Security Administration -- was to verify the capabilities of the weapon system and instrumentation system designs and the hardware before undergoing a baseline design review in 2016. "This test marks a major milestone for the B61-12 Life Extension Program, demonstrating end-to-end system performance under representative delivery conditions," said NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Dr. Don Cook. "Achieving the first complete B61-12 flight test provides clear evidence of the...

Dr Christopher Lehnert talked about the potential robots held for the agriculture industry at CQ University yesterday. A STEREOTYPICAL farmer might wear overalls and gumboots in 2015. But in not long at all, he could be a state-of-the-art robot. Agricultural robotics research fellow Dr Christopher Lehnert spoke at CQUniversity yesterday about robots being developed to pick fruit and detect weeds. One problem they could solve was harvesting labour shortages. "It's a causal workforce problem. (For farmers) their really high risk is getting a workforce to pick the fruit," Mr Lehnert said. "There's not a worry about job losses. We're just...

SAN FRANCISCO — An elite group of security technologists has concluded that the American and British governments cannot demand special access to encrypted communications without putting the world’s most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger. A new paper from the group, made up of 14 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers and computer scientists, is a formidable salvo in a skirmish between intelligence and law enforcement leaders, and technologists and privacy advocates. After Edward J. Snowden’s revelations — with security breaches and awareness of nation-state surveillance at a record high and data moving online at breakneck speeds — encryption has...

Are electric cars damaging YOUR region? Maps reveal how EVs can be WORSE for the environment than gas-guzzling vehicles In some areas, mostly in the east of the US, the impact of charging up EVs does more harm to the environment In monetary terms, electric cars are about half-a-cent worse per mile for the environment than gas-powered cars With gas cars, the worst damage to the environment, shown in red, took place in highly-populated urban areas They have been hailed as the environmentally-friendly solution to getting around towns and cities. But new research has found electric cars have an overall...

British scientists came to Iceland with a machine that reportedly keeps the weather temporarily sunny and dry, and it was used for the Secret Solstice festival. Vísir reports that this is actually the second year the scientists have come here with the express purpose of ensuring good weather at the festival. While it is unknown how the machine works, it allegedly changes the air pressure in an area for a limited time, thereby reducing the chances that clouds will gather. Jakob Frímann Magnússon, one of the organisers of Secret Solstice, would not comment in detail about what the device is...

Samsung wants to put huge video displays on the back of trucks. No, this isn't some bizarre entertainment-based initiative designed to make the lives of trailing drivers less stressful by screening a selection of TV shows to help pass the time, though thinking about it, that might not be such a bad idea. Instead, Samsung's idea focuses on improving road safety, particularly along two-lane roads where impatient drivers can make poor choices when overtaking slow trucks in front. The technology involves fitting a wireless camera to the front of the truck that provides live-view imagery to a giant four-screen display...

Ross Ulbricht was jailed for life after he was accused of being Dread Pirate Roberts who ran online black market site But his horrified mother Lyn claims there has been a miscarriage of justice and is fighting for his freedom In a revealing interview she described her 'gentle' son as an idylistic graduate with little money But she says he was branded as a cyber-criminals by a legal system that rode roughshod over natural justice

This is the second of three columns relating to the recent story of Disney replacing 250 IT workers with foreign workers holding H-1B visas. Over the years I have written many columns about outsourcing (here) and the H-1B visa program in particular (here). Not wanting to just cover again that old material, this column looks at an important misconception that underlies the whole H-1B problem, then gives the unique view of a longtime reader of this column who has H-1B program experience.First the misconception as laid out in a blog post shared with me by a reader. This blogger maintains...

Bloomberg Businessweek has devoted an entire issue to a single article: Paul Ford's "What is Code?" I read the whole thing online this afternoon, and it's remarkable. I could see it being taught in journalism classes years from now, like Gay Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" or John Hersey's "Hiroshima." It takes something both very important and hard to understand, and makes it understandable to an audience of smart but nonexpert readers. It does this incredibly well. It mostly feels like fun, not work.

A hacker attack on the Bundestag (German parliament) earlier in 2015 means that an entirely new network will have to be built after experts failed to fix the breach. The Federal Office of Information Technology Security (BSI) decided that it could no longer defend against the attack and had to give up, broadcasters NDR and WDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Thursday. Der Spiegel reported on Wednesday evening that data was still flowing out of the parliament to unknown recipients, and that rebuilding the network using completely new hardware would take months and cost millions. …

“Part of the problem is that we’ve got very old systems,” President Obama said on Monday, in a response to a question about the recent hack attack on U.S. government computers. He said making U.S. cyberspace more secure is “going to be a big project,” requiring “new systems and new infrastructure.” The intrusion involving the Office of Personnel Management apparently compromised the personal, identifying information of four million current and former federal employees. […] Speaking at the conclusion of the G-7 summit in Germany on Monday, President Obama refused to say that China is responsible for the massive intrusion into...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) —So much for the argument "Apple computers are safer and bug-free." It's not true. We're accustomed to annoying glitches in PCs. But the past few years have shown that Macs, iPads and iPhones have them too. So far in 2015, five major flaws have affected Apple products. Just this week, we encountered a nasty bug that lets hackers bury computer viruses so deep inside Macs, you'll never find it. A week earlier, a flaw appeared that lets a text message crash an iPhone. These are significant issues, and neither has been fixed yet. Faulty code is found...

The head of the Federal Communications Commission is proposing that the government agency expand a phone subsidy program for the poor to include Internet access. The FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, has emphasized that Internet access is a critical component of modern life, key education, communication and finding a keeping a job. With the net neutrality rules released earlier this year, the agency redefined broadband as a public utility, like the telephone, giving it stricter oversight on how online content gets to consumers. That triggered lawsuits from Internet service providers. The proposal Thursday to expand the Lifeline phone program to Internet...

President Reuven Rivlin was born on September 9, 1939, in Jerusalem. However, according to the Google search engine, the tenth president of the State of Israel was born in “Palestine.” The Mayor of Ra’anana, Ze’ev Bielski, made the shocking discovery. “While working on a speech for the arrival of President to Ra’anana, and I typed his name into Google in English, and then we were amazed to see that says he was born in Jerusalem—in the Palestinian state,” Bielski stated to Yediot Aharonot on Friday. […] This is not the first time that Google has leaned toward labeling parts of...