Free Republic

In the near future, you won't even need to know how to fire a rifle to be a crack shot. At the Consumer Electronic Show, the Austin, Texas-based start-up TrackingPoint showed off its all-new 500 Series AR Smart Rifle, a gun that makes it almost impossible for any user to miss. (Read more: Now there's a gun that let's you shoot.) TrackingPoint is the inventor of Precision Guided Firearms, a guided shooting system that the company says creates the most accurate guns in the world. The new rifle is the company's first semi-automatic series. This technology turns even a neophyte...

Confession. Credit: catholicrelics.co.uk.. Phoenix, Ariz., Dec 20, 2013 / 02:32 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Phoenix, Ariz., priest has invented a computer system intended to help Catholics who are deaf, hearing-impaired or speech-impaired to make their confessions. Father Romuald P. Zantua, the system’s inventor, told CBCP News that his invention will help increase the practice of confessions, especially for deaf people who have limited access to priests who know sign language. The website for the system, called St. Damien’s Confession Box, says it is primarily aimed at the deaf and those with speech impediments who may not be able to communicate...

While employees may get the brunt of the blame for security breaches, company leaders are doing their fair share of damage as well, a new study finds. Research from ThreatTrack Security revealed that 40 percent of security professionals found that a device used by a member of their company's senior leadership team had been infected by malware because of a visit to a pornographic website, and nearly 60 percent of the security professionals surveyed have cleaned malware from a device after an executive clicked on a malicious link or was duped by a phishing email. In addition, 45 percent of...

Excerpt: Yes, you can get a ticket for driving while wearing the new eyewear-like Google Glass wearable computer, which is now being tested nationwide for possible entry into the consumer market. Cecilia Abadie, 44, who lives in Temecula and works at a golf store in San Diego, got just such a ticket Tuesday night after being stopped for speeding by a California Highway Patrol officer. Quickly, Abadie posted a note on the Internet: "A cop just stopped me and gave me a ticket for wearing Google Glass while driving! ... Is Google Glass illegal while driving or is this cop...

For some reason FR & Google are okay, but any other website, including small private sites, connect and then quickly disappear and I get a message that the tab has been recovered and immediately get the following message: We were unable to return you to yahoo.com.(or whatever) Internet Explorer has stopped trying to restore this website. It appears that the website continues to have a problem. I ran into some of this yesterday, but it's definitely worse today.

A Long Island man was arrested Friday after investigators say he attempted to travel to Yemen to join al Qaeda and conspired with the terror group from the United States, according to an indictment from the U.S. Department of Justice. Marcos Alonso Zea, 25, also known as “Ali Zea,” was arrested at his home in Brentwood, New York, on charges of conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country, attempting to provide material support to terrorists and obstruction and attempted obstruction of justice, the indictment says. …

I just noticed this about 2 weeks ago. It took all night to update, then worked fine. Today's install seems to be updating even slower. Thinking it may be an issue with my ISP, I got a friend (many miles away) to do an install with his XP, and he's experiencing the same issue.My install cd came with SP2. I slipstreamed SP3 onto it many years ago, and it has worked flawlessly ever since. I can manually install a downloaded media player 11 which makes me validate and that passes, so that's not the problem.

I am an unrepentent Luddite, operating Mac0S9 in a Windows world. On Friday night I suffered the mother of all computer crashes....sent an email and just as it transmitted the background browser/email program crashed and the word processing program froze. Usually a forced reset cures all, but not this time. Nor did a "hard reset" by spiking the power. Each time reboot attempt resulted in a flashing icon indicating an unreadable hard drive. Hours and many dollar later the failing hard drive which had caused the freezes and crashes was replaced, and, most importantly, almost all the data was recovered...

It's elementary. Public education bureaucrats do the darnedest, stupidest things. Clever kids are ready, willing and able to capitalize on that costly stupidity in a heartbeat. Within days of rolling out a $30 million Common Core iPad program in Los Angeles, for example, students had already hacked the supposedly secure devices. The Los Angeles Times reports that the disastrous initiative has been suspended after students from at least three different high schools breached the devices' security protections. It was a piece of iCake. The young saboteurs gleefully advertised their method to their friends, fellow Twitter and Facebook users, and the...

Help! Somehow the task bar jumped to the top of the computer screen. Yes, I'm logged in. Yes, I know how to move the task bar around - right click, unlock task bar and move it. Problem is when I move it back to the bottom, it leaves an empty space where it was at the top and is ghosty when it's back at the bottom (the background shows through it). So, I clicked it back to the top and back down again and now the second problem... the internet screen is getting smaller and smaller. Each time I move...

Have used Windows Movie Maker but want to try something else. It's simply an audio track that I recorded (50Mb wav) and I have one still image. Would like to be able to enter some info about the song and location. Thanks

Microsoft Windows 10 might become a cloud based operating system (OS) according to a leaked road-map. The road-map shows that Microsoft will no longer release service packs but instead will release major updates every year which also increases the version number of the OS. The next major improvement should be Windows 9, this should bring back the Aero interface in a new form. This should also be a version in which Microsoft will merge its ARM CPU based Windows RT platform with Windows Phone. This version of Windows could also be the last version of Windows as we know it....

FRiends, will someone please help me with a loose key on an Acer laptop? It isn't off, just loose.

I want to convert an old Powerpoint presentation into a mpg, avi, flv, anything that I can rig to post to YouTube. I have a XP machine running Office 2003. Can anyone recommend a piece of software which will do this?

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"I reported that Windows 8 was dangerous. Some wrote to argue I was wrong. I wrote why NASA announced it was dumping Windows 8 and that even Skype should not be used. Microsoft has been criticized for the Prism affair." "Now appears that Windows 8 is especially dangerous. The German government warns against Microsoft program because it has the ability to control the hardware and software of the computer. The NSA can enter you computer remotely. Has Microsoft created economic suicide?"

Looks like Wells Fargo Bank is experiencing computer glitches. I contacted them on a transaction which I did not make and they insisted I close all my accounts. However, after talking with numerous WFB reps I found out that no web login activity for my account was logged for date in question for the transaction of interest - which was verified by WFB rep to be an on-line transaction. So how can an on-line transaction be processed/requested when their logs indicate no login to request any such transaction. And I made no such request in any form. Either WFB has...

Just a heads up, if you're stuck with Windows 8 there is a free program called "CLASSIC SHELL" which gives you a start button. You can even choose to simulate XP.I'm stuck with this rig, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna put up with it!

SNIPPET: "The U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa announced Thursday that a grand jury has indicted Shelton Thomas Bell, 19, of Jacksonville, on charges of conspiring and attempting to provide material support to terrorists. He faces up to 15 years in prison for each of the two charges. According to the indictment, Bell had planned to travel to the Arabian Peninsula and join Ansar Al-Sharia, which is an alias for al-Qaida there. The group has taken responsibility for multiple attacks on Yemeni forces, including a suicide bombing during a parade in May 2012, which killed more than 100 Yemeni soldiers. The...

The Commerce Department destroyed more than $170,000 worth of working computers, televisions and cameras, all in response to a cyber threat that “did not exist.” ... Commerce Department, feared its IT network was infected with a widespread virus, and ultimately spent more than $2.7 million to fix a problem that was nothing more than “common malware.”