Free Republic

<excerpt>In the middle of last week I tipped over from a state of mild fearfulness about the global economy to one of wild panic over what is to become of us. On Wednesday, I became host to all sorts of crazy worries – big, unmanageable ones as well as little, stupid ones. I worried about there being anarchy on the streets of London – while at the same time fretting over whether I should have painted the boxroom cream rather than white. This is the sort of mixed-up mental state I am familiar with from bouts of wakefulness at three...

An apparent system error left millions of visitors to the site puzzled when links to all search results were flagged with the warning 'This site may harm your computer'. It is thought the site had erroneously identified all other websites - and some of its own pages - as containing malicious software or 'malware'. The glitch, which prevented internet users from directly clicking through to search results, was fixed within 30 minutes although users of Google's email service Gmail have since reported finding genuine messages sent mistakenly to spam folders. The errors prompted panic among web surfers who at first...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- While a number of technology giants have been making public disclosures about job cuts in recent weeks, IBM Corp. has been quietly eliminating positions in a number of divisions including its storied research unit, according to an organization seeking recognition as a union with the company. nearly 200 jobs have been cut from the research group, 1,200 from the systems technology group, over 300 from finance nearly 100 from human resources. an IBM spokesman, said the company is not commenting on the number of job cuts underway or on which business units are affected. Alliance@IBM believes...

President Barack Obama's aides, who ran the most tech-savvy US election campaign in history, were forced into a red-faced admission Monday -- the White House email system has crashed. "Our email system is not working so well," press spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters at the start of his daily briefing. "We'll endeavor to get you information from earlier in the day, hopefully in a little bit more of a timely manner, if we can get the email to work." At one stage, Obama aides were forced to turn back the clock and hand out copies of memoranda signed by the...

If you don't like going to Drudge and dealing with popups or getting tracked by third party cookies, I would suggest that you visit the following site: Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts FileThis site maintains an updated "HOSTS" file that has a pretty comprehensive list of known ad and spyware sites and will cause your browser to not go to those sites if the page you are loading wants to get a banner ad, popup ad, webbug, or third party tracking cookie. The list of blocked sites is updated about once a month. How does it work? When you...

The firmware update released by Seagate yesterday is apparently bricking 500GB hard drives. There are hundreds of people complaining in the Seagate forums that, after “successfully” updating their drives, they no longer work. If you own a Seagate drive, you might want to hold off on any firmware updates until this whole thing is ironed out. We’ll keep you posted.

Mobile broadband users in Stockholm will soon be able to surf the internet on a new high speed 4G network, following the signing of a deal between Ericsson and TeliaSonera. The order from Finnish-Swedish telecom provider TeliaSonera marks the first commercial deployment of Ericsson’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) network technology and will provide mobile internet users with data speeds up to ten times faster than those offered on current networks. "LTE brings the highest possible performance and network capacity, which is needed to meet the needs of the fast growing group of mobile broadband users around the world,” said Ericsson’s...

Current steam catapults use about 615 kg/ 1,350 pounds of steam for each aircraft launch, which is usually delivered by piping it from the nuclear reactor. Now add the required hydraulics and oils, the water required to brake the catapult, and associated pumps, motors, and control systems. The result is a large, heavy, maintenance-intensive system that operates without feedback control; and its sudden shocks affect airframe lifespans for carrier-based aircraft.

President-elect Barack Obama, as part of the effort to revive the economy, has proposed a massive effort to modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic. Here's the audacious plan: Computerize all health records within five years. The quality of health care for all Americans gets a big boost, and costs decline. Sounds good. But it won't be easy. In fact, many hurdles stand in the way. Only about 8% of the nation's 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation....

The Japanese electronics giant says that by 2011, 90% of all the products it makes will be able to connect online Just a few years ago most people were content watching their videos on a TV in the living room. But even though we now watch television over our computers, on high definition flatscreens or even on our iPods, we have still only seen the tip of the iceberg. That's according to Japanese electronics giant Sony, which today unveiled a pair of futuristic glasses that project 3D video onto the lens while still allowing you to see the world around...

OverviewThe first beta release of IE8, which was demonstrated at the MIX08 conference, contained many new features, including WebSlices and Activities. In the second beta release, Activities were renamed to Accelerators. Added featuresSome of the features and changes for the Beta 2 compared to Beta 1InPrivateDelete Browsing HistorySearch SuggestionsUser Preference ProtectionCaret BrowsingAccelerators (previously known as Activities)Web Slices (previously known as WebSlices)Suggested SitesTab Color GroupingAutomatic Crash RecoverySmartScreen Filter (Known as Safety Filter in Beta 1)Tab isolation (tabs spread over separate operating system processes) Removed featuresInline AutoCompleteThe option to delete files and settings stored by addons or ActiveX controls.CSS Expressions are no...

SEATTLE (AP) -- Amazon.com Inc. said Friday that the 2008 holiday season was the online retailer's "best ever," with more than 6.3 million items ordered and 5.6 million units shipped during its peak day on Dec. 15. Amazon's upbeat take on the holiday season bucked the drumbeat of generally dismal news from retailers. Holiday sales typically account for 30 percent to 50 percent of a retailer's annual total, but rising unemployment, home foreclosures, the stock market decline and other economic worries led many shoppers to slash their shopping budgets this year.

China makes first 2,210-kw coal mining machine www.chinaview.cn 2008-12-14 00:06:27 Print The first China-made 2,210 kilowatt coal mining machine passed check and appraisal on Saturday in the northwestern Shaanxi Province, reducing the reliance on exports. (Xinhua Photo) Photo Gallery>>> XI'AN, Dec. 13 (Xinhua) -- The first China-made 2,210 kilowatt coal mining machine passed check and appraisal on Saturday in the northwestern Shaanxi Province, reducing the reliance on exports. Trial operation showed the remote control machine, produced by Xi'an Coal Mining Machine Co. Ltd, can mine eight million tons of coal annually, according to the Shaanxi Provincial Science and Technology Department....

December 12, 2008, 0:30 p.m. Game ChangerTotally video. By Robert VerBruggen Video games are undeniably popular: Over Thanksgiving week alone, Nintendo sold more than 800,000 Wii consoles. This trend could have serious ramifications for society; experts have speculated about consequences ranging from an uptick in childhood obesity to better-developed visuospatial skills. But video games’ effects on our way of life could exceed even these expectations. In Changing the Game, David Edery and Ethan Mollick focus on the world of business, explaining how companies are increasingly turning to games to solve various problems. The book both advises companies on how...

ARLINGTON, Va. - Private information at bargain prices. It was a high-tech flub at the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Arlington when a MyFoxDC investigative reporter bought a Blackberry device containing confidential campaign information.

The final judgment [PDF] from Utah is here at last. It recites what the August 10, 2007 and July 16, 2008 orders said, but it also resolves the recent dispute over SCO's desire to voluntarily waive some claims and then bring them back to the table after an appeal, should it prove successful. Here's SCO's motion to voluntarily dismiss, and Novell's response, so you can verify that this judgment indeed represents another loss for SCO. You'll see that it was Novell that suggested the wording regarding SCO's voluntarily dismissed claims that we see in the judgment, that they be dismissed...

A British couple have divorced after the husband was caught having a "virtual affair" with a female character in an online role-playing game. David Pollard and Amy Taylor met in an online chat room in 2003 and married after discovering a shared love of the Internet game "Second Life." In the game, players create characters known as avatars, which then interact with others in a virtual world. To his wife's horror, Pollard's interaction included virtual infidelity with a female character playing the role of a prostitute.

SAN FRANCISCO: Attackers bent on shutting down large Web sites — even the operators that run the backbone of the Internet — are arming themselves with what are effectively vast digital fire hoses capable of overwhelming the world's largest networks, according to a new report on online security. [ ... ] The report, which will be released Tuesday, shows that the largest attacks have grown steadily in size to over 40 gigabits, from less than half a megabit, over the last seven years. The largest network connections generally available today carry 10 gigabits of data, meaning that they can be...

A federal grand jury has indicted a former Intel employee whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has accused of stealing trade secrets from the company. Biswamohan Pani, 33, allegedly was found with more than 100 pages of Intel documents, with 13 "top secret" file also discovered inside his residence. Intel put more than $1 billion of research and development money into the documents Pani stole, which includes future CPU designs. "The indictment was not a surprise," said Bradford Bailey, Pani's attorney. "We knew it was coming. We will enter a plea of not guilty when an arraignment date is...

"Federal agents seeking to generate MD5 hashes from files on a suspect’s hard drive must now obtain a warrant before doing so, says a Pennsylvania U.S. District Court, as such an act constitutes a government search protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. The case in question, United States v.Robert Crist, involves accusations of child pornography"