Free Republic

MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- Vladimir Putin's decision to stop a small boy as he walked through the Kremlin and kiss his stomach was prompted by a desire to "touch him like a kitten," the Russian president said on Thursday. The five-year-old boy, identified as Nikita Konkin by the press, was clearly stunned by the kiss and speculation over Putin's motivation has run wild in the week since it happened. Curious Internet users propelled the issue to the top of a list of questions put to Putin in an interactive Web cast. "People came up and I began talking to them,...

I see so many people asking to be put on the 'ping list', what does that mean? I also see that you can be 'pinged' if something you are interested in is posted. Are you notified someway? Thanks

Judge Wells Grants in Part IBM's Motion to Limit SCO's Claims! In *Large* Part Feast your eyes on this, my friends! Judge Brooke Wells' Order Granting in Part IBM's Motion to Limit SCO's Claims [PDF]. Finally, SCO's refusal to offer specificity has cost them, as it should. There is almost nothing left in the case as far as the challenged items are concerned. Items in dispute were numbers 3-112, 143-149, 165-182, 186-193, 232-271, and 279-293 on SCO's list of allegedly misused materials. That list was sealed, naturally, SCO being SCO, but those are the numbers the judge lists. Footnote 65...

Man jailed for five years for IRA membership 28/06/2006 - 13:50:34 A Dublin man who a top garda said had been a member of the IRA since he was 15 years old, has been jailed for five years at the Special Criminal Court. Vincent Kelly, who was arrested wearing an Oglaigh na hEireann t-shirt, was found guilty by the three-judge court earlier this month of being a member of the IRA on June 7 last year. Kelly, who is now 21, of Empress Place, Ballybough, Dublin was arrested when gardaí found a handgun hidden inside a van on the Malahide...

Dan Betzer and Louie - "Tell The Bible Classics Volume 3"

IRA were behind 48pc of Troubles murders A UNIVERSITY of Ulster academic yesterday blamed the IRA for the overwhelming majority of murders during the Troubles. Henry Patterson, Professor of History at Jordanstown, challenged the view that the Northern Ireland conflict was a simple "war of liberation" by republicans against colonial interests and said there were key differences between the Troubles in Northern Ireland and struggles in Africa and Latin America. He told the sixth International Conference of The Spanish Association for Irish Studies at the University of Valladolid in Spain that the Provisional IRA was responsible for 48 per cent...

The opening of Beta 2 testing at WinHEC for Windows Vista has once again raised serious questions about Microsoft's ability to keep its promises. We have witnessed up until now the inexhaustible reservoir of excuses coming from MS's officials, who have continuously fed us with plenty of reasons for Vista's delay: they're working on security, they're trying to make it more reliable for business, etc. Although it was initially destined to make its public debut way back in 2002, following years haven't shown us more than small bits of what was to become Microsoft's best product in more than 10...

Picasa is a photo organizing and editing tool from Google that does most of what most people need to do with their digital pictures. Now Picasa, previously a Windows-only program, has binaries available for most popular GNU/Linux distributions. The Linux version of Picasa is still a beta release, but it's ready to handle photo storage, organizing, and light photo editing on your Linux computer. Even if you don't want to use Picasa, Google's creation of the Linux version may help make your Linux computer more versatile. The Picasa Linux port is being made with Wine, and in the process more...

While the beta 2 of Windows Vista is available, the consumer version of the new OS could be pushed back past the stated January launch date, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said at a news conference in Tokyo.

The Curious Incident of Sun in the Night-Time ~ by Richard Stallman Our community has been abuzz with the rumor that Sun has made its implementation Java free software (or "open source"). Community leaders even publicly thanked Sun for its contribution. What is Sun's new contribution to the FLOSS community? Nothing. Absolutely nothing--and that's what makes the response to this non-incident so curious. Sun's Java implementation remains proprietary software, just as before. It doesn't come close to meeting the criteria for free software, or the similar but slightly looser criteria for open source. Its source code is available only under...

Sun Microsystems plans to offer support for the Ubuntu server Linux distribution on its T1 server line, the company said at the JavaOne industry conference in San Francisco. "We will be aggressively supporting the fork that Ubuntu has been doing," Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at the conference. "The ideals of that community are relatively familiar to us." The Ubuntu Linux distribution is based on Debian. The operating system currently provides only a desktop version that has a strong following among software developers. A first server system is scheduled for release on 1 June. The distribution is sponsored by...