Free Republic

Four-year-old Gavyn Boscio loves to cook and asked for an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas. But when his big sister went to buy one, she discovered to her disappointment that it comes only in girly pink and purple, with girls—and only girls—on the box and in the commercials. So the eighth-grader from Garfield, N.J., started an online petition asking Pawtucket, R.I.-based Hasbro to make the toy ovens in gender-neutral colors and feature boys on the package. By Friday, 13-year-old McKenna Pope’s petition had garnered more than 30,000 signatures in a little more than a week. And celebrity chef Bobby Flay, who...

Apple's Intel-based Mac development kits have started trickling into developer's hands, Think Secret has learned. The Apple Development Platform ADP2,1, as the systems are officially designated, features 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processors with 2MB of L2 cache operating on an 800MHz bus with 1GB of RAM. The Intel systems run Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger identically on the surface as ordinary Macs, with the exception of a modified Processor System Preference (from Apple's CHUD tools) that allows the user to toggle Hyper-Threading on or off. Apple System Profiler includes a new line under Hardware listing CPU Features; for the 3.6GHz Pentium...

Food inspection agency recalls cookie mixCandian PressOTTAWA — Individuals with allergies to peanut or milk proteins were warned Thursday night not to consume the White Cookie Mix in the Easy Bake brand Bake'n Design Springtime Cookie Set. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Hasbro Canada advised that the White Cookie Mix, included in the set, may contain peanut or milk proteins that are not declared on the label. The affected product, Easy Bake brand Bake'n Design Springtime Cookie Set, product of United States of America, is sold in a 74-gram package bearing the UPC 0 76930 60821 0. All codes...