Free Republic

Have you ever spent 15 or 20 minutes or more on the telephone trying to speak to a real live human while getting the runaround from the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system? If so, this blogsite and database is for you. It has ways to bypass the IVR and speak to a human for 356 companies and goverment organizations as of today. Everyone from American Express to Bank of America to Verizon is on the list. I give it two thumbs and a salute!

A Rockmart family is being sued for illegal music file sharing, despite the fact that they don’t even own a computer. Read more in source: http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_v2.cfm?show=localnews&pnpID=728&NewsID=713614&CategoryID=11575&on=1

Lawmaker Puzzled by Obscenity in Letter By SAM HANANEL, Associated Press Writer Wed Apr 19, 10:23 PM ET WASHINGTON - Nobody expects to get a letter from a member of Congress that ends with an expletive. But that's what happened when Rep. Jo Ann Emerson , R-Mo., recently corresponded with a resident of her southeast Missouri district. The letter ended with a profane, seven-letter insult beginning with the letter a — "i think you're an. ..." Emerson says she can't explain how the offensive language made it into the letter, which otherwise reads like a typical response to a citizen's...

RMS - a man who can polarize a room into warring factions just by walking by. (Joe Barr) If You're Livin' On The Edge... MOVE OVER!..There are people waiting to Jump! You gotta punch the clock, so why not punch your boss? Please don't call IIS unstable, it's simply uptime challenged. As for the philosophical stuff, think of it as broccolli: it's good for you... (Brian Germain) When people look like ants - pull. When ants look like people - pray. There's no place like 127.0.0.1 How many NASA managers does it take to screw in a light bulb? "That...

I am using FrontPage 2000. Here's what I would like to have happen: After the page loads, have an image on that page automatically dissolve to a second one (in the same position), then dissolve to a third, or fourth, then repeat back to the first. I know I can add DHTML effects in FrontPage, but the effects seem to work only when the page is loaded, or when mouse-over or mouse click occurs. In my case, however, I would like the transitions to occur automatically, without any action by user. In other words, I would like to have the...

The Stanford University Symbolic Systems Program and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today the Singularity Summit at Stanford, a one-day event free to the public, to be held Saturday, May 13, 2006 at Stanford Memorial Auditorium, Stanford, California. The event will bring together leading futurists and others to examine the implications of the "Singularity" -- a hypothesized creation of superintelligence as technology accelerates over the coming decades -- to address the profound implications of this radical and controversial scenario. "The Singularity will be a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its...

Afghan Shops Searched for Stolen Files By DANIEL COONEY, Associated Press Writer A shopkeeper outside the U.S.-led coalition headquarters in Afghanistan was selling computer memory drives Wednesday containing seemingly sensitive military data stolen from inside the base — including the Social Security numbers of four American generals. This shopkeeper was apparently not the only merchant in local bazaars trying to get some cash in exchange for hardware and software containing such files. The surfacing of the stolen computer devices has sparked an urgent American military probe for the source of the embarrassing security breach, which has led to disks with...

LONDON, November 13 (IranMania) - US intelligence officials have shown leaders of the International Atomic Energy Agency a stolen Iranian laptop computer containing nuclear designs as proof the country is secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program, The New York Times reported on its website. The newspaper said that during the demonstration, which took place in Vienna in mid-July, officials displayed selections from more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments, saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead. The Americans acknowledged that the documents do not prove that Iran has an atomic...

When I turn my computer on and the screen appears, all I get is the hourglass (The mouse pointer turns into an hourglass whenever I move it towards the START menu or taskbar) and I'm unable to access my START menu. I usually turn the power off several times before it works again. I just did a virus and spyware scan and they came back clean. Yes, I have Windows XP (Cue the "Get a Mac!" responses). Please advise.

It’s a sad state of affairs when you buy a new computer these days and it comes pre-loaded with a ton of garbage software that brings your new machine to a crawl. If anyone’s bought a Dell PC in the last few years, you probably know what I’m talking about. Just recently, I was helping a friend set up his brand new Inspiron 1300 and it took FOREVER for it to boot up. It’s a very dissatifiying experience to pull a brand new computer out of the box and be spammed with a bunch of trial software. After removing all...

I received an email yesterday pointing me to a bill, introduced on March 27, that would require all Executive branch agencies in the state of Minnesota to "use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this." The text of the bill is focused specifically on "open data formats," and would amend the existing statute that establishes the authority of the Office of Enterprise Technology (OET), and the duties of the states Chief Information Officer. While the amendment does not refer to open source software, the definition of "open...

Naked PCs: Free software supporters are angry that Microsoft is putting pressure on PC vendors not to sell machines without an operating system installed Microsoft has urged UK PC vendors not to give customers the opportunity to buy a PC without a pre-installed operating system.... The FSF Europe is alarmed by the prospect that customers who request a base systems would risk a visit from Microsoft's investigators. "It looks like a private sniffing service which is supposed to spy on these who do not want to pay the Microsoft tax anymore. It is an incredible piece of impudence which any...

A DEVICE that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed. One of the problems facing people with autism is an inability to pick up on social cues. Failure to notice that they are boring or confusing their listeners can be particularly damaging, says Rana El Kaliouby of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's sad because people then avoid having conversations with them." The...

Options for a coming singularity include self-destruction of civilization, a positive singularity, a negative singularity (machines take over), and retreat into tradition. Our urgent goal: find (and avoid) failure modes, using anticipation (thought experiments) and resiliency -- establishing robust systems that can deal with almost any problem as it arises. In order to give you pleasant dreams tonight, let me offer a few possibilities about the days that lie ahead—changes that may occur within the next twenty or so years, roughly a single human generation. Possibilities that are taken seriously by some of today's best minds. Potential transformations of human...

U.S. State Department purchase of more than 15,000 computers produced by Lenovo Group, a company controlled by the Chinese government, is starting to draw criticism in the latest sign of American unease about the role of foreign companies in the American economy..

Utah has offered its largest economic incentive ever - an estimated $15 million - to high-tech giants Micron Technology Inc. and Intel Corp., which plan under a joint venture to add 1,850 new jobs in Lehi over the next 18 months to two years.    Members of the Governor's Office of Economic Development Board on Friday unanimously approved the incentive from the state's tax rebate program, which typically is reserved for companies that have not yet decided where they will expand. The board awarded the incentive even though the two companies' IM Flash Technologies partnership said months ago it would expand...

In May 2005, a trojan called PGPcoder was discovered in the wild by Websense Security Labs. The trojan's purpose was to encrypt a user's files, then demand a ransom for their decryption. Although this scheme seemed novel, it is actually predated by over 15 years, by a similar scam in 1989. LURHQ's Threat Intelligence Group has now discovered a third such scheme involving ransomware which we are calling Cryzip. Unlike PGPcoder, which used a custom encryption scheme (which was subsequently reverse-engineered by LURHQ), Cryzip uses a commercial zip library in order to store files inside a password-protected zip. Although the...

WASHINGTON - A new variety of unusually powerful Internet attacks can overwhelm popular Web sites and disrupt e-mails by exploiting the computers that help manage global Internet traffic, according to security researchers. First detected late last year, the new attacks direct such massive amounts of spurious data against victim computers that even flagship technology companies could not cope. In one of the early cases examined, the unknown assailant apparently seized control of an Internet name server in South Africa and deliberately corrupted its contents. Name servers are specialized computers that help direct Internet traffic to its destinations. The attacker then...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Wednesday mocked a $100 laptop computer for developing countries being developed with the backing of rival Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The $100 laptop project seeks to provide inexpensive computers to people in developing countries. The computers lack many features found on a typical personal computer, such as a hard disk and software."The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk ... and with a tiny little...

New virus seeks 'ransom' for computer files Wed Mar 15, 12:56 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - In the equivalent of a holdup in cyberspace, a new computer bug locks up a user's file with encryption and demands a 300-dollar "ransom," security experts say. The so-called "ransomware" Trojan was discovered Saturday by the security firm LURHQ, which said it was based on a similar scheme perpetrated 15 years ago. Users whose computers are infected receive an e-mail stating that their files have been encrypted and will not be unlocked unless they transfer 300 dollars to a special account. In poorly written...