Former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott revealed on Tuesday that the Biden administration is paying contractors not to build a wall on the southern U.S. border and that “for a while, it was almost $5 million a day between DOD and DHS.”

In an exclusive interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Scott said that after Joe Biden assumed the White House, he issued a presidential proclamation that paused U.S. border projects for 60 days. Now more than 250 days since the inauguration and thanks to the Biden administration, Scott says many of those projects are still on hold despite contractors still being paid and having the materials to work on border security.

According to Scott, all that remains of former President Donald Trump’s border wall efforts are “stacks and stacks” of panels, “hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cabling,” and “hundreds of cameras” that are just “sitting there.”

“There’s no action being taken,” Scott explained. And despite Border Patrol telling the Biden White House in briefings that the border would suffer “unmitigable disaster” if Trump’s policies end, the Democrat administration’s position is simply, “We’re not building more wall.”

“There’s no conversation. There’s no adult dialogue, if you will. It’s just a black-and-white decision. The administration said we’re not doing it, so we’re not doing it,” Scott continued. “And that money is just trickling away to those contractors for not doing work each day.” //

Before Biden ousted him from his law enforcement role on the border, Scott witnessed people caught from 150 different countries coming through Mexico to try to reach the United States.

Japan is set to fire up its nuclear power plants as it looks to expand its renewable energy offering amid a push to slash its emissions, its new industry minister has said today.

The efforts are a bid to cut 46 per cent of its carbon output from 2013 levels by 2030, while the country has also pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050.

“I would like to promote the maximum adoption of renewable energy, thorough energy conservation and the restart of nuclear power plants with the highest priority on safety,” newly appointed economy, trade and industry minister, Koichi Hagiuda, told his first news conference.

It comes amid a cabinet shuffle in Japan, as its government makes way for new prime minister Fumio Kishida.

Using clues from Sean Connery's six official James Bond films, a fan makes the case that 1996's The Rock is 007's last adventure. //

A fan on Reddit believes they have proven the fan theory that 1996's The Rock isn't just an action thriller -- it's a James Bond movie. //

Directed by Michael Bay, The Rock stars Connery as John Mason, a former SAS captain renowned as the only inmate who ever escaped from the federal prison on Alcatraz Island. Mason is recruited to join a band of Navy SEALs to slip onto the island and defeat a terrorist threatening to destroy San Francisco with missiles if he isn't paid a $100 million ransom for the civilians on the site.

Connery debuted as Bond in 1962's Dr. No, and a line of dialogue in The Rock states Mason was "incarcerated on Alcatraz in 1962… escaped in '63." Dr. No ended with Bond destroying the title villain's headquarters in Jamaica and drifting off with Honey Ryder rather than join CIA contact Felix Leiter, who brings the U.S. Marines to mop up operations. The theory posits that in the confusion, Bond was captured by a Navy patrol and, being undercover with no credentials, was sent to prison. In the next Bond film, From Russia With Love, there's a line of dialogue that Bond went missing for six months after that adventure -- the time Bond-as-Mason would have been behind bars.

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows' Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).

It will create one VHD for each disk on which selected volumes reside. It preserves the partitioning information of the disk, but only copies the data contents for volumes on the disk that are selected. This enables you to capture just system volumes and exclude data volumes, for example.

Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM. ///

Hyper-V does not have the 127GB limitation (?)

The Vinland Map, once believed to be the earliest cartographic depiction of the New World, has been proven to be a modern forgery, confirming long-held suspicions. A team of conservators and scientists at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, conducted an in-depth analysis of the purported 15th-century map, determining that it was drawn with 20th-century inks.

“The Vinland Map is a fake,” Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, said in a statement. “There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest.”

Yale acquired the parchment map for the library as a gift from Paul Mellon in mid-1960s and unveiled it to great fanfare in 1965, publishing a scholarly book on this view of the North American coastline southwest of Greenland, labeled as “Vinlanda Insula.” Making the front page of the New York Times, it was hailed as support for archaeological evidence that the Vikings had visited North America long before Christopher Columbus. //

For the first time, they used X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), a non-destructive technique, to scan the entire map, not just studying specific areas. The titanium was found to pervade the entire map, and the ink contained little to no iron, sulfur, or copper—the elements that make up the iron gall ink typically used by medieval scribes. //

All in all, the map’s anachronistic anatase was a close match to ink produced in Norway in 1923, making it unlikely that the compound had somehow occurred naturally. //

But even though the Vinland Map is fake, Yale plans to keep it.

“The map has become an historical object in and of itself. It’s a great example of a forgery that had an international impact,” Clemens said. But, he added, he hopes that experts can focus further research on authentic works. “Objects like the Vinland Map soak up a lot of intellectual airspace. We don’t want this to continue to be a controversy. There are so many fun and fascinating things that we ought to be examining that can actually tell us something about exploration and travel in the medieval world.”

The US Navy sold two old aircraft carriers for a cent each to a ship-breaking firm.
The USS Kitty Hawk and USS John F. Kennedy had been decommissioned for years.
They are due to be broken up by a firm in Texas, which can make money from the scrap metal.

Disk2VHD is a practical free tool by Sysinternals, since 2006 a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation. Sysinternals is well known of their wide range of free tools to manage, troubleshoot and diagnose Windows systems and applications. As the name already tells Disk2VHD is a tool to create a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file of an existing Windows system. This VHDfile can then be used to create a virtual machine in Windows Virtual PC (Windows 7) and Hyper-V (Windows 8 and later).

In this tutorial we will download and install Disk2VHD on an existing Windows 10 computer, use it to create a VHD of the current Windows 10 installation on that computer and use the resulting VHD to create a virtual machine on Windows 10 Hyper-V. The virtual machine will be an exact copy of the original Windows installation apart of some hardware and drivers, Hyper-V replacing some hardware with its own virtual devices.

The virtual machine will be fully functional and contain all software, user profiles and settings which were installed and present on the real physical computer and Windows when the VHD creation process was started.

One of the most lamentable things in our society today is the lack of communication. It’s the source from which many of our problems stem and benefit no one but those in positions of power. Lack of communication only breeds ignorance and those on the left have made it clear that communication isn’t just frowned upon, it’s punishable. Even Kasparian, one of the most leftist figures in the culture, isn’t safe from this kind of isolationist mentality being enforced.

She probably knew that going in and did it anyway, and for that, I salute her. Moreover, it took some bravery to go up against Shapiro, one of the leading minds in conservatism today and a man famous for his debating skills.

I hope more debates like this happen, and not just between Shapiro and Kasparian. I hope more people step forward and allow respectful debate to happen. I’d like to see more of what the left has to say in situations where they have to answer hard questions and confront real facts. No softballs to save them, just naked debate. It’s a big part of our national identity that we’ve been missing for some time and seeing it again made me feel like something lost had returned.

Ana Kasparian, I salute you.

The operator of the Wayback Machine allows Wikipedia's users to check citations from books as well as the web. //

Wikipedia is the arbiter of truth on the internet. It's what settles arguments at bars. It supplies answers for the information snippets you see on your Google or Bing search results. It's the first stop for nearly everyone doing online research.

The reason people rely on Wikipedia, despite its imperfections, is that every claim is supposed to have citations. Any sentence that isn't backed up with a credible source risks being slapped with the dreaded "citation needed" label. Anyone can check out those citations to learn more about a subject, or verify that those sources actually say what a particular Wikipedia entry claims they do—that is, if you can find those sources.

It's easy enough when the sources are online. But many Wikipedia articles rely on good old-fashioned books. The entry on Martin Luther King Jr., for example, cites 66 different books. Until recently, if you wanted to verify that those books say what the article says they say, or if you just wanted to read the cited material, you'd need to track down a copy of the book.

Now, thanks to a new initiative by the Internet Archive, you can click the name of the book and see a two-page preview of the cited work, so long as the citation specifies a page number. You can also borrow a digital copy of the book, so long as no else has checked it out, for two weeks—much the same way you'd borrow a book from your local library. (Some groups of authors and publishers have challenged the archive's practice of allowing users to borrow unauthorized scanned books. The Internet Archive says it seeks to widen access to books in “balanced and respectful ways.”)

So far the Internet Archive has turned 130,000 references in Wikipedia entries in various languages into direct links to 50,000 books that the organization has scanned and made available to the public. The organization eventually hopes to allow users to view and borrow every book cited by Wikipedia, with the ultimate goal being to digitize every book ever published.

“Our goal is to be a library that’s useful and reachable by more people,” says Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine service. //

Of course, the Internet Archive hasn’t scanned all the books cited by Wikipedia yet. It’s working hard to digitize collections from libraries around the world, along with donations from companies like Better World Books. Graham says the organization scans more than 1,000 books per day. But it has plenty more work to do.