Free Republic

It’s possible you’ve already heard of the greatest harebrained political scheme of the year: Venture capitalist Tim Draper’s plan to break California into six states, which might actually face a statewide vote in 2016. It all depends on whether Draper managed to snag the necessary number of signatures — 807,615 according to SFGate — to get the plan on the ballot. He’s claimed to have 1.3 million signatures, which would mean the residents of California would get to vote on the biggest breakup proposal in state history.

Infections found in Australia and New Zealand. A new malware that runs on UNIX-like servers even with restricted privileges has already infected machines in Australia and is actively hunting for more targets, a new research paper has shown. Three researchers from Russian web provider Yandex - Andrej Kovalev, Konstantin Ostrashkevich and Evgeny Sidorov - said in the technical analysis of the malware, published on security and anti-virus specialist publication Virus Bulletin, that Mayhem functions like a traditional Windows bot. -snip- According to the researchers, Mayhem appears to be the continuation of the Fort Disco brute-force password cracking attack campaign that...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – First, Michelle Obama seized control of your child’s school lunch and made it “healthy.” Now, the First Lady wants to change the way you buy groceries. michelle obama shopping 337 x 244A new 80-page report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture explains that federal bureaucrats hope to use a variety of tools to modify the way Americans select food items at the supermarket. The stated goal is steer consumers toward fruits and vegetables – and away from sugar- and fat-laden items. The plan is in line with “Michelle Obama’s stated second term agenda to ‘impact the nature...

Apple today announced that Susan L. Wagner, founding partner and director of BlackRock, has been elected to Apple’s board of directors. Bill Campbell, the board’s longest-serving member, is retiring after 17 years of service. Wagner co-founded BlackRock in 1988 and helped it become one of the world’s most successful asset-management companies, holding a range of leadership positions including vice chairman until mid-2012. She continues to serve on the boards of BlackRock and DSP BlackRock (India), as well as Swiss Re, Wellesley College and Hackley School. “Sue is a pioneer in the financial industry and we are excited to welcome her...

Not content to blow both feet off with a shotgun, Microsoft is going for the kneecaps now by blackmailing it’s customers. If you are still dumb enough to use Windows, you are about have your wallet shaken down by Microsoft in a familiar yet still unwelcome way.We don’t feel the need to sugarcoat this much because the company’s behavior is so blatant and uncaring it is almost staggering. Worse yet the victims, that would be almost all Windows users, have only themselves to blame because the pattern has been well laid out for years now. Microsoft has been unapologetically blackmailing...

1853, 1906, 1929, 1969, 1999 Pass the question around your office. Call your money manager and ask him or her, too. Post it on your office notice board. Give up? Those were the peaks of the five massive, generational stock-market bubbles in U.S. history. Investors who bought into stocks around those peaks ended up earning terrible returns over the subsequent 30 years. Forget “stocks for the long run.” They ended up with “stocks for a long face.” The bigger the bubble, the worse returns. And, according to a new research report, we are back there again. U.S. stocks are now...

Obesity may be considered a disability if it affects how a person does their job and so could fall under EU rules banning discrimination in the workplace, the EU’s top court said Thursday (17 July) in an opinion set to be closely studied by employers. "Morbid obesity may come within the meaning of ‘disability’ if it is of such a degree as to hinder full participation in professional life on an equal footing with other employees,” said advocate general Niilo Jaaskinen. The case arrived at the European Court of Justice after Karsten Kaltoft, a child-minder Denmark, claimed he unfairly lost...

Employees at Dell Services offices in Plano will be affected by global layoffs that parent company Dell Inc. is undergoing, but the number of pink slips the Round Rock-based tech giant will pass out in North Texas is not yet clear. Dell workers were to be notified Wednesday of layoffs across the globe, including at Dell Services offices in Plano. A statement put out by Dell confirmed the layoffs but declined to give the number of workers that the computer firm will cut. Dell has about 2,500 employees in North Texas and about 16,500 statewide.

James Bond’s car of choice just got an upgrade worthy of a spy-style getaway. British luxury manufacturer Aston Martin just unveiled its most-powerful machine ever built — the 2015 V12 Vantage S Roadster, a follow-up to the line debuted in 2013 which earned the company’s highest performance marks ever — until now. The new Vantage sports a 565-horsepower 6-liter V-12 engine capable of powering the car to a eyelid-ripping 201 m.p.h. top speed, and takes it from zero to 60 m.p.h. in a mere 3.9 seconds.

Although there are many signs the economy is improving, average weekly wages in the United States remained stagnant throughout 2013. This was a notable change from a year earlier, when weekly wages rose 4.7% over the same period. Despite flattening nationally, wages posted strong growth in some metro areas. In six of the 10 metro areas, wages grew at least 6%. In Idaho Falls, wages grew by 18.4% between the fourth quarters of 2012 and 2013. Based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), these are the metro areas where wages are soaring.Click here to see the 10...

SEATTLE — Microsoft said Thursday that it planned to eliminate up to 18,000 jobs over the next year in a shake-up intended to help the company move more quickly in the market. The cuts are the largest in the company’s 39-year history, representing about 14 percent of its work force. Microsoft will make the deepest cuts from the businesses it acquired from the Finnish phone maker Nokia. About 12,500 of the jobs being eliminated will come from the Nokia groups, resulting from the closing of a factory in Hungary and other changes. That is about half the number of employees...

How’s that feminism workin’ out for ya? According to a survey reported in a Psychology Today article, the unhappiest workers are:Female 42 years oldUnmarriedHave a household income under $100,000Work in a professional position (i.e., as a doctor or a lawyer). Sounds exactly like the feminist ideal: a woman who needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. On her own, independent, unburdened, I am woman, hear me roar. Except that she’s not very happy. The author, Sherrie Bourg Carter, Psy.D., notes that while it is possible the survey is inaccurate (the sample size is only 670 North American white...

Bears may be making the most noise on Wall Street, but bulls expect to see stocks stay on a record-setting course this summer, fueled in part by a surge in merger activity. Despite calls for a big correction, the S&P 500 and Dow have persisted in making gains, with major indices up more than a percent this month so far. The Dow closed at 17,138, a new high, Wednesday. The S&P 500 trended higher to 1,981, four points below its all-time high. [SNIP] Stocks could continue to benefit from low rates and easy Fed policy into next year, and the...

This week, two of the most pugnacious actors on the Florida political stage clashed over whether President Barack Obama should be impeached.

Tech behemoths Apple and IBM announced a partnership Tuesday that could make Apple—traditionally a consumer brand—a major player in the business market. IBM said it would create a class of more than 100 business applications exclusively for iPhones and iPads to run on Apple's iOS platform. In return, IBM will sell Apple's products with 100 industry-specific apps to its clients worldwide. Some of the services IBM will provide via iOS include device management, security, analytics and mobile integration, they said in a release. In return, Apple's vaunted AppleCare service would provide support for these applications. The partnership is about "transforming...

Part of our continuing series on answering the most common (and trickiest) behavioral interview questions. Tell Me About a Failure What’s the toughest behavioral interview question of them all? For many, it’s this one: Tell me about a time you failed. I’ve noticed that more and more recruiters and hiring managers are including this question in their standard behavioral interviews. Some recruiters will even tell you that this is the most important interview question to ask a candidate. Obviously, you can’t afford to FAIL to answer this question well. However, my experience is that most candidates are terrible at answering...

Sarah Palin is right about impeaching President Barack Obama. No, not that the president should be impeached. But Palin is correct in arguing that, for those who assert that Obama has grievously abused his executive authority, impeachment is the proper course of action. (please see link for full article)

What's a Monty Python reunion without a dead parrot? And why settle for a simple prop you can bang on the counter when you could have a monstrous, 50-foot-tall dead parrot? To promote the live broadcast of the comedy troupe's July 20 performance, UKTV's Gold channel and sculptor Iain Prendergast created a massive fiberglass dead parrot, which was suspended from a crane and laid talons-up in London's Potters Field this week.

RUSH: Last night on CNN, Joe Johns, the correspondent, had a report about me and my criticism of Eric Holder. Now, that's not what I'm surprised about. What I'm surprised about is it took so long -- his report basically says establishment Republicans are worried about Sarah Palin and me, because we're too partisan, and they are worried that we are scaring off potential Republican voters and potential Republican donors. Here is Joe Johns' report. (please see full article)

The U.S. House of Representatives has voted to permanently extend a ban on Internet access taxes that Congress has temporarily extended three times over the past 16 years. The House, in a voice vote Tuesday, passed the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act, over the objections of some Democrats. In addition to permanently banning states and local governments from taxing Internet access, the bill would ban any other form of Internet-only taxes, although its aimed primarily at taxes on Internet access service. The bill does not address Internet sales taxes, a separate issue that Congress has debated for several years. The...