Free Republic

Wal-Mart refuses to carry smutty magazines. It will not sell compact discs with obscene lyrics. And when it catches customers shoplifting — even a pair of socks or a pack of cigarettes — it prosecutes them. Skip to next paragraph Paul Sakuma/Associated Press Customers outside a Wal-Mart store in Mountain View, Calif. But now, in a rare display of limited permissiveness, Wal-Mart is letting thieves off the hook — at least in cases involving $25 or less.

Usually CNN polls are just fodder to ignore, but this one needs serious freeper attention: Should the U.S. seek a new U.N. resolution before taking military action against Iraq? Right now it's 61% YES to 39% NO

In the wake of MS-DOJ, when is the government going to look into Oracle's headlock on the database industry? By David Coursey, ZDNet News June 20, 2000 4:50 PM PT On the heels of Oracle Corp.'s stellar fourth-quarter earnings report, I'm wondering: How much longer can the Oracle monopoly be left intact? If memory serves me, there used to be other database companies -- Informix and Sybase, I think they were called. And customers used to have to think about which company's database they would standardize upon. Just like customers used to have to decide which desktop operating system to ...

In Bill Gates' new book (Business @ The Speed of Thought), he lays out 11 rules that students do not learn in high school or college, but should. He argues that our feel-good, politically-correct teachings have created a generation of kids with no concept of reality who are set up for failure in the real world. You might be interested in his list: RULE 1 - Life is not fair; get used to it. RULE 2 - The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself. RULE 3 ...