Free Republic

An intermediate appellate court in Waco has upheld the felony child pornography conviction and seven-year prison sentence of a former Baylor University professor. Waco's 10th Court of Appeals overruled Bruce Watson's appeal on Wednesday, determining that he didn't have permission to appeal after his guilty plea and rejecting his assertion that the statute under which he was convicted is unconstitutional. Watson, 44, a non-tenured French professor who had been with Baylor 12 years, was indicted in September 2000 on 10 counts of possession of child pornography. University officials discovered hundreds of images of nude children and children engaged in sex...

Meet the latest spaced out modern artist - a picture-drawing robot arm in Australia whose brain sits in a petri dish in the US.Working from their university labs in two different corners of the world, American and Australian researchers have created what they call a new class of creative beings: "the semi-living artist". Gripping three coloured markers positioned above a white canvas, a robotic arm churns out drawings akin to that of a three-year-old. Its guidance comes from around 50,000 rat neurons in a petri dish 19,000 kilometres away. The "brain" lives at Dr Steve Potter's lab at Georgia's Institute...

My Windows 98 system has a bad hard disk. However, I can get to a command line prompt on that system via a boot diskette I have created. I need to copy off a file that is larger than 1.44 mb. But of course neither COPY nor XCOPY support multiple destination diskettes. I have looked at the utility RAR but it seems pretty hard to understand. So, here is what I need: - a program that works in the command line environment that copies (compression would be great too) a file to multiple diskettes - a corresponding program that uncompresses...

I am getting the dreaded "operating system not found." I have backup, but still would like a recommendation for a data recovery service, if anyone has used one. Thanks.

Why Male Leaders Cannot Have a Female Secretary?Sichuan Province in southwest China has recently formulated a new regulation forbidding male leaders to employ female secretaries, which has sparked heated discussions in various newspapers. An article in Nanfang Metropolitan Daily says the new regulation has significant meaning and can be taken as a reference by other local governments. The author of the article believes there are a few disadvantages of male leaders and female secretaries working together. In today's China, quite a few corruption cases are blamed to have been connected with female secretaries who've won the favour of their...

Re-defining the desktop paradigm By Adamson Rust: Friday 18 July 2003, 08:02 THERE'S A FUN interview with the Apple hierarchy over at Digital Video Editing. After telling interviewee Charlie White all about Mac OSX and the G5, they're challenged about the statement that Apple has released the "first 64-bit desktop". Charlie makes the Apple marketeers splutter when he mentions that BOXX shipped a dual processor 64-bit desktop on June 4th. At first they try and tough it out, but then try and redefine the meaning of desktop. Nor do the Apple folk seem aware that the Opteron is a 64-bit...

<p>Microsoft Corp. acknowledged a critical vulnerability Wednesday in nearly all versions of its flagship Windows operating system software, the first such design flaw to affect its latest Windows Server 2003 software.</p> <p>Microsoft said the vulnerability could allow hackers to seize control of a victim's Windows computer over the Internet, stealing data, deleting files or eavesdropping on e-mails. The company urged customers to immediately apply a free software repairing patch available from Microsoft's Web site.</p>

SEOUL (Reuters) - A South Korean man angry with his daughter's Web surfing faced possible charges on Monday after he threw a computer monitor out of his 12th-floor apartment, hitting a four-year-old girl below on the head, police said. A police official said the man, 49-year-old Park Yong-ju, had got angry when he returned to his flat in Seoul on Saturday. His 20-year-old daughter was playing an online computer game and failed to greet him, as Korean custom requires. When she declined to let him join the game, he grabbed the monitor and flung it through the balcony window, the...

Microsoft is considering paying its shareholders a special dividend of more than $10bn to reduce its $46bn cash pile. Shareholders would receive the dividend in a one payment of "significantly more than $10bn" or spread over three or four quarters, according to a person close to the discussions. The dividend, which would be the largest corporate pay-out ever, is one of a number options Microsoft is looking at, the FT's sister paper, Les Echos, has learned. The other options include a buyback, acquisitions and higher ordinary dividends. A decision is expected by the end of the year. The software giant...

We've seen some bizarre PC case modifications in our time, but this one takes the cake. One Russ Caslis has build a PC into the Millennium Falcon. Yes, Han Solo's famous smuggling vessel - 'You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?' 'Should I have?' 'It's the ship the made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs...' - now comes equipped with 7GB of hard disk storage, USB ports, PS/2 ports, network adaptor, 800MHz Via C3 processor, 256MB of 133MHz SDRAM memory and the works. Alas there's no CD or floppy, but who needs diskettes when you're outrunning Imperial cruisers?...

Empty jargon is put to the sword by new program Political speeches and corporate reports may never be the same again. A computer program that sifts the bull from business jargon and exposes politicians' empty rhetoric has been developed by management consultants. Called Bullfighter, the jargon buster was developed by Deloitte Consulting after it noticed that Enron's documents became more indecipherable as it slid further towards bankruptcy. Brian Fugere, a partner at Deloitte Consulting, said the firm came up with Bullfighter because "we've had it with repurposable, value-added knowledge capital and robust, leveragable mindshare". In testing Bullfighter, Mr Fugere said,...

Inca may have used knot computer code to bind empire By Steve Connor, Science Editor 23 June 2003 They ran the biggest empire of their age, with a vast network of roads, granaries, warehouses and a complex system of government. Yet the Inca, founded in about AD1200 by Manco Capac, were unique for such a significant civilisation: they had no written language. This has been the conventional view of the Inca, whose dominions at their height covered almost all of the Andean region, from Colombia to Chile, until they were defeated in the Spanish conquest of 1532. But a leading...

The mysterious trojan horse that's been making security experts scratch their heads now has a name as more details of the oddball malware were made available. The trojan horse that has been causing confusion and concern among security researchers for over a month now has been dubbed 'Stumbler' by experts at Internet Security Systems (ISS). As reported earlier, Stumbler embeds itself in Unix systems and seems to be part of a concerted effort to map Internet-connected networks using port scanning techniques. A copy of the trojan was finally captured Wednesday, and investigation of its code began Thursday. After additional analysis,...

This computer is making a grinding noise; it sounds like it might be the fan. I have the cover off and it really sounds like the fan in the back is about to go out. Will it hurt the computer if I leave it on as long as it's turning? The computer is an HP Pavillion 6535, about 3 or 4 years old... Can it be fixed at home if I go buy a new fan, or is this a do-it-yourself project that blondes should avoid? I added some RAM to it a few months ago with no problem. And...

<p>The .zip compression format has known remarkable stability and compatibility for many years, but that may soon change. PKWare and WinZip, makers of competing compression and encryption products, are fighting over the .zip standard--which means that .zip archive files created by one program may not be accessible by the other.</p>

<p>NEW YORK — A new computer virus that offers hackers full control of infected PCs, giving them access to critical information such as passwords and credit-card numbers, was spreading on the Internet Thursday.</p> <p>The virus, dubbed "BugBear.B" by virus experts, follows two other quickly spreading e-mail viruses seen in recent weeks — "Sobig.B" and "Sobig.C" — but far exceeds them in its ability to do harm and in the aggressiveness of its spread.</p>

Ex-Stokes manager had computer full of porn Finding led officials to fire him, not accept resignation By Sherry Wilson Youngquist JOURNAL REPORTER DANBURY The former county manager for Stokes County, Craig Greer, had downloaded so much Internet pornography that his computer hard drive at the government center was running out of space, county officials say. The cache of more than 27,000 photos - with such titles as 'Bye bye bikinis,' 'Housewife,' and 'Midget peep show' - was discovered by information-technology workers after Greer resigned April 28. County commissioners said yesterday that the discovery was behind their decision last week to...

<p>IBM is expected to unveil today its next-generation mainframe computer, a more powerful version of the system that once generated at least 80 percent of its profits.</p> <p>Even though IBM has become more of a services company in recent years, the mainframe is still a key product for the world's largest computer maker. Despite IBM's code-name for the product -- T-Rex, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the constant dismissal by competitors that the mainframe is a dinosaur -- the mainframe is far from death's door.</p>

<p>May 12, 2003 -- A Brooklyn woman stabbed her hubby to death early yesterday after he complained about her figure and how long she spent using the computer, cops said.</p> <p>Judy Thomas, 27, was in the bedroom of the pair's basement apartment on Hemlock Street in Cypress Hills around 1 a.m. when her husband, Jackson Thomas, berated her about the amount of time she spent on the computer, investigators said.</p>

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Security guards smashed their way into an official limousine with sledgehammers on Monday to rescue Thailand's finance minister after his car's computer failed. Suchart Jaovisidha and his driver were trapped inside the BMW for more than 10 minutes before guards broke a window. All doors and windows had locked automatically when the computer crashed, and the air-conditioning stopped, officials said. 'We could hardly breathe for over 10 minutes,' Suchart told reporters. 'It took my guard a long time to realize that we really wanted the window smashed so that we could crawl out. It was a harrowing...