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I came across this today. A web site that helps you get through phone menus and get to a human. The "F"'s are their grades. http://www.gethuman.com/

Ten Things Your IT Department Won't Tell You By VAUHINI VARA July 30, 2007; Page R1 Admit it: For many of us, our work computer is a home away from home. It seems only fair, since our home computer is typically an office away from the office. So in between typing up reports and poring over spreadsheets, we use our office PCs to keep up with our lives. We do birthday shopping, check out funny clips on YouTube and catch up with friends by email or instant message. And often it's just easier to accomplish certain tasks using consumer technology...

A single bottle broke the calm, shattering in the late-afternoon sun. Then another...and another. :SNIP: Bob Tur, a pilot and photojournalist, hovered above the unfolding chaos in his helicopter, along with his copilot, his camerawoman wife, his lawyer, and a 9mm semiautomatic pistol... There was Larry Tarvin, who was pulled from his truck and kicked in the ribs, shoulder, and face. That's when the shots started. Tur's chopper began taking hits as the throng below pummeled another trucker, Reginald Denny, with a cement block, a tire iron, and a fire extinguisher.:SNIP: Over the years, he estimates, the Denny tape has...

NASA worker caught in act of sabotage on ISS bound computer Posted Jul 26th 2007 5:33PM by Joshua Topolsky Filed under: Transportation According to breaking news from NASA, a space program worker is alleged to have deliberately damaged a computer that was meant to fly aboard the Endeavor in less than two weeks, in an apparent act of sabotage. NASA says the unnamed individual, who works for one of the space agency's subcontractors, cut wires inside a computer that was headed to the International Space Station (ISS) on the shuttle. The alleged tampering occurred outside of NASA operations in Florida,...

WASHINGTON--Politicians charged on Tuesday that peer-to-peer networks can pose a "national security threat" because they enable federal employees to share sensitive or classified documents accidentally from their computers. At a hearing on the topic, Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said, without offering details, that he is considering new laws aimed at addressing the problem. He said he was troubled by the possibility that foreign governments, terrorists or organized crime could gain access to documents that reveal national secrets. Also at the hearing, Mark Gorton, the chairman of Lime Wire, which makes the peer-to-peer software LimeWire, was assailed for...

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German man who startled his neighbours when he hurled his computer out of the window in the middle of the night, was let off for disturbing the peace by police who sympathised with his technical frustrations. Police in the northern city of Hanover said they would not press charges after responding to calls made by residents in an apartment block who were woken by a loud crash in the early hours of Saturday. Officers found the street and pavement covered in electronic parts and discovered who the culprit was. Asked what had driven him to the...

A jury has found a 13-year-old Canadian girl guilty of murdering her parents and her younger brother in revenge for being grounded and having her computer privileges revoked. A jury in Medicine Hat, Alberta, found the teenager guilty on three counts of first-degree murder after only three hours of deliberation. The bodies of her father, 42, mother, 48, and brother, 8, were found in the family home in April 2006. They had been stabbed 41 times. During the trial, the girl told the jury that her boyfriend, Jeremy Steinke, who was 11 years her senior and had claimed to friends...

My wife is in Hong Kong, and took her Toshiba Satellite R15-S822 notebook computer. It has a power supply that's supposed to be auto-sensing. Therefore, she plugged it directly into an outlet, using only a physical plug adapter, not a converter. Yesterday and the day before, while using it, she felt as though she was being bitten by mosquitoes, that is she felt stinging sensations on the outside of the computer. Just now, however, she has found the computer to be "dead." Whether the battery is in or not, nothing happens when she turns on the switch. Even the "battery...

<p>Copyright 2007, NewsBank. All Rights Reserved.</p> <p>IBM said it developed a system that can reach the latest holy grail of supercomputing -- it has designed a supercomputer that can surpass a sustained performance of one quadrillion operations per second, also known as a petaflop.</p>

Homeland Security Department Acknowledges Own Computer Break-Ins, Virus Outbreaks The Homeland Security Department, the lead U.S. agency for fighting cyber threats, suffered more than 800 hacker break-ins, virus outbreaks and other computer security problems over two years, senior officials acknowledged to Congress. In one instance, hacker tools for stealing passwords and other files were found on two internal Homeland Security computer systems. The agency's headquarters sought forensic help from the department's own Security Operations Center and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team it operates with Carnegie Mellon University. In other cases, computer workstations in the Coast Guard and the Transportation...

Think that all of the great Web sites have already been invented? Think again. The Internet is evolving in new and inventive ways thanks to mashups that pull data from all over the Web and to AJAX-based interfaces that give sites the same degree of interactivity and responsiveness that desktop apps possess. To keep you ahead of the curve, we've rounded up 25 innovative Web sites and services that are well worth watching. Some of them help you design your own personalized Web site mashups; others enable you to create video mixes, build wikis, share personal obsessions, and more. But...

The keyboard on my VAIo lap=top= has gone nuts. When I typ=e a p=, I get the p= p=lus the equal sign , and the cursor jump=s to the first line of typ=e. The direction keys don-' t work, nor does the backsp=ace. The enter key causes the little box with undo to drop= down. I already p=layed around with the numlock key and fixed the worse of it, which was the letter keys tpy=ing numbers. But it is still messed up=. Any suggestions?

How does Skype compare with other PC-to-telephone VoIP options, such as Net2phone? What has your experience been? I see wireless Skype phones that work when someone is in a hot spot. However, suppose I don't have wireless, but DO have a regular internet connection and a computer. Do any of those phones have USB adapters so that I can still make non-wireless calls? Thanks.

I have discovered a Win32:Agent trojan resident in a file on my C: drive. It is located in my Thunderbird email files section. Try as I may, I cannot seem to delete this. It appears to be growing in size. I have read a lot about this one and they refer to it as a "sleeper" trojan. How can I remove this trojan? I run Firefox, Thunderbird as email client, XP Pro, Avast & AVG 7.5 Internet Security System, Zone Alarm Pro, along with Spy Bot S&D and Spyware Blaster.Can anyone help with this?Thanks

The computer attacks, apparently originating in Russia, first hit the Web site of Estonia’s prime minister on April 27, the day the country was mired in protest and violence. The president’s site went down, too, and soon so did those of several departments in a wired country that touts its paperless government and likes to call itself E-stonia. Then the attacks, coming in waves, began to strike newspapers and television stations, then schools and finally banks, raising fears that what was initially a nuisance could have economic consequences. The attacks have peaked and tapered off since then, but they have...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A cheap glue that gets stronger at high temperatures might be useful around the house, but make it 100,000 times thinner than a human hair and you have nanoglue, a sticky substance that could help make extremely tiny computer chips, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. Developed by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, nanoglue is made from ultrathin materials that are already commercially available. "It is really mind-boggling to think about a single layer of molecules improving the adhesion of something," said materials science researcher Ganapathiraman Ramanath, whose work appears in the journal Nature....

Within Windows Explorer, we have a folder of jpg images. Right now, we have them displayed as thumbnails. However, something funny is happening. File A thumbnail shows (e.g.) a picture of a tree. However, when we double click on it, and bring up Picture/Fax viewer, we see an image of a person. When we drag that file into PowerPoint, we again see the image of a person. File B thumbnail shows (e.g.) a picture of a person. When we double click on it, or drag it into PowerPoint, we see a different image. What's going on? Seems like the thumbnail...

I need help on installing a Windows XP upgrade to a Windows ME machine. The computer is a Micron Systems IBM-compatible machine with 640.0 mb RAM and a 667 MHz CPU clock. I'm getting the following error after the Windows XP setup restarts the computer: A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps: Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly-installed hard drives or hard drive controllers....

The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer.In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains. Now the team is tuning the simulation to make it run faster and to make it more like a real mouse brain. Life signsBrain tissue presents a huge problem for simulation because of its complexity and the sheer number of potential interactions between the elements involved. The three researchers, James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S Modha, laid...

How can a person from the US, traveling to China (Beijing), send messages inexpensively back to US and vice versa, besides email? Cell phone rates will be $1.50/minute, so I'd like to minimize that if I can. Specifically, - Will AIM or AIM express work from China, or will we have to use ICQ? Is there a way to send AIM messages to a cell phone as a text message rather than to another AIM client? - Does the T-Mobile web-to-cell phone text messaging feature https://wmg.tmomail.net/customer_site/jsp/messaging_lo.jsp work from outside the US? Has anyone used it from China to send a...