Free Republic

Smart speakers offer amazing convenience—from playing your favorite tunes to re-ordering toilet paper—with only a simple voice command. But that convenience can come with a steep cost in privacy that many consumers aren't even aware they're paying. We've all had the uncanny experience of searching for something on the internet and then suddenly ads for that very thing are popping up everywhere we look online. It's no coincidence, said Umar Iqbal, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. "My collaborators and I uncovered that Amazon uses smart...

When the Jeb Bush for President campaign relaunched with a modified slogan, "Jeb Can Fix It," on Monday morning, the hashtag #JebCanFixIt started immediately trending on Twitter (TWTR) , garnering nearly 30,000 Tweets by the end of the day. Sounds great, right? Not if you're a Bush supporter. The hashtag was instantly hijacked by thousands of trolls with Tweets like this:

The FR main page/display bug seems to have returned... ... No sidebar... Minimum first pages displayed Time to GIT-R-DONE.... (again)

Anyone whose viewing is messed up, go to tools on your toolbar and TURN OFF COMPATIBILITY VIEW. That's it. That's all.

Why all of a sudden am I loading the Latest articles page? It used to be clicking on messages in the upper right corner solved the problem. Now, I finally found "Comments" down the right side a bit, but every time ya hit browse now coming out of a thread, I return to latest articles page! WWWWWHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTZZZZZZZZZ - UUUUP!!??!!!

I have a Maytag side by side refrigerator/freezer. MSD2454FR (Dunno what that number is, but was on tag inside.) For two days it's been making a "clicking" noise like a thermostat on a coffee maker. Tonight I just noticed the freezer is leaking. The ice in the icemaker is melting and the food is thawing. I cranked the temp control to highest point. Dunno if it's going to make a difference. My guess is that the "clicking" noise was the icemaker filling up with water to replace the melting ice. Any ideas? Thanx.

Everyone agrees that California has a chronic fiscal problem - five straight years of deficit budgets being graphic proof. The state, which had experienced serious budget problems in the early 1990s, thanks to a severe recession, was recovering nicely until 2000, when then-Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature blew most of a one-time tax windfall on billions of dollars in tax cuts and new spending. --snip-- The budget crisis eventually cost Democrat Davis his job and propelled Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger into the governorship on his promise to clean up the mess in Sacramento. But while Schwarzenegger has made some incremental...

China's Mrs Fixit reignites row with Japan By Richard Spencer in Beijing (Filed: 25/05/2005) Diplomatic hostilities between China and Japan exploded into life again yesterday after a Chinese politburo member known as Mrs Fixit snubbed her hosts by ending a visit to Tokyo a day early. No reason was given for Wu Yi's failure to meet Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese prime minister, thereby missing talks supposed to improve relations between the economic giants. But it became clear that the snub was deliberate when the Chinese media reopened a campaign of vilification against Mr Koizumi. The countries have been at loggerheads...

CLINTON: 'FIX IT, DON'T NIX IT' 2 hours, 53 minutes ago President Bush hit the road for his Social Security overhaul in New Jersey yesterday — while in New York, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton painted Bush as a threat to the retirement program. "I'm going to keep telling people we've got a problem until it sinks in, because we've got one," Bush said in Westfield. "The safety net has got a hole in it." At Pace University, Clinton ran a "fix it, don't nix it" rally where Schumer told of a time before Social Security when seniors...

July 8, 2002 It’s All Airports That Need a Security Review! Since September 11, 2001, it would be expected that American airports would be scrambling to improve their security. To some extent they have, however, it is only a select few that have implemented exceptional top to bottom security and, in some cases, gone further than the government suggested or required. One of the immediate directives from the federal government on 9-11 was that all short-term parking that was within 300 feet of a terminal must be shut down and cars moved further away. Tow trucks were removing vehicles because...