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My brother-in-law has been diagnosed with PBP (progressive bulbar palsy). He is now having difficulty talking, but his eye-hand coordination is fine. I was wondering what hand-held device freepers would recommend for him to use to communicate. Looking for something with good screen, stylus, and prefer text to speech if possible. Thanks.

NET senior editor James Kim and his family are missing. The 36-year-old Kim, his wife Kati, and daughters Penelope (4 years) and Sabine (7 months) left their home in San Francisco last week on a road trip to the Pacific Northwest. They were last seen on Saturday, November 25, in Seattle, according to the San Francisco Police Department, which has opened a missing persons' investigation. They were driving a 2005 silver Saab station wagon with California personalized plates of "DOESF." Those with information about the Kim family's whereabouts are asked to contact the SFPD immediately--at 415-558-5508 during normal business hours...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- IBM has filed two patent infringement lawsuits against Amazon.com for unspecified damages, the company announced Monday. The lawsuits are over five patents that IBM alleges that Amazon has infringed upon, which it says the online retailer uses in its customer recommendations and purchase system, web site navigation and the way its stores data on its network, according to an IBM spokesman. IBM says it has notified Amazon.com several times of the alleged infringement since September 2002, but the companies have not been able to resolve the issue. The suits were filed in two District Courts for...

BAILEY, Colo. -- Jefferson County authorities confirm an "active shooter" inside Platte Canyon High School, and students from that school and the adjoining Fitzsimmons Middle School are being evacuated.

Last week I attended a dinner hosted by Mark Anderson, CEO of the Strategic News Service. Mark looks at the future of computing and communications in his newsletter and annual conference. During his remarks at dinner, Mark talked about 21st century pyramids, referring to the super datacenters Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are building in energy-friendly territories. "The guys are building the pyramids, but they don't know what for. Is it for searching? No. An Internet Assistant delivered on a custom basis that tells us how to run our business and lives–how to get an edge is the ultimate...

OPEN VOTING FOUNDATION 9560 Windrose Lane Granite Bay, CA 95746 Phone (916) 295-0415 alan@openvoting.org PRESS RELEASE -- JULY 31, 2006 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Subject: WORST EVER SECURITY FLAW FOUND IN DIEBOLD TS VOTING MACHINE Contact: Alan Dechert Reference: PICTURES (Click on thumbnail. Click again on lower half of picture for high resolution) SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA -- “This may be the worst security flaw we have seen in touch screen voting machines,” says Open Voting Foundation president, Alan Dechert. Upon examining the inner workings of one of the most popular paperless touch screen voting machines used in public elections in the United...

Immigration reform could kill the housing boom Up to 40% of home building is done by undocumented aliens. But no one's talking about what a crackdown could do to real estate prices.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications. In December of 2005, the press revealed that the government had instituted a comprehensive and warrantless electronic surveillance program that ignored the careful safeguards set forth by Congress. This surveillance program, purportedly authorized by the President at least as early as 2001 and primarily undertaken by the NSA, intercepts and analyzes...

You may already be a victim of cellular "records rip-off" and not even know it. Anyone -- a stalker, a jealous lover, a curious employer -- with merely your cell-phone number can visit one of several Web sites, pay around $100, and in a few hours find out whom you've been calling and who's been calling you. Indeed, the Web site Americablog revealed last week that it successfully obtained the records of Gen. Wesley Clark, the former presidential candidate. "All we needed was General Clark's cell phone number and our credit card, and 24 hours later we had one hundred...

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by a programmer who sued his former employer for changing his programs' source code. William Krause of New York first charged in 1996 that Titleserv, a title insurance firm, had committed copyright infringement when it altered eight programs he had written for the company over a decade of work. Krause left the programs, which were designed to manage client information, on Titleserv's servers when he quit working for the company. He placed locks on the code and stipulated that Titleserv could run--but not alter--the programs, prompting a lawsuit from the company,...

We don’t know much about Harriet Miers; her qualifications list is short. But one item that is invariably included is her representation of Microsoft. So what exactly did she do for the software behemoth? She protected them from class action lawsuits over their faulty products. The Senate Judiciary Committee missed the boat on Roberts, failing to dig into his views on corporate liability. It remains to be seen if they repeat their mistakes with Miers, but her Microsoft work should clearly figure heavily in any examination of her record.

6:39 P.M. - HOUSTON (AP): Louisiana had a "well thought-out exit plan," in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina and many more lives would have been lost without it, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Sunday. "There was not a single individual taking a slow step in our state," Blanco said at the Reliant Center, where more than 2,000 evacuees are still living after fleeing the devastation in New Orleans. "I personally, and everybody I knew, begged people to leave before the storm came in. We had a very systematic, well thought-out exit plan. Hundreds of thousands left," she said....

August 27, 2005 The President The White House Washington, D. C. Through: Regional Director FEMA Region VI 800 North Loop 288 Denton, Texas 76209 Dear Mr. President: Under the provisions of Section 501 (a) of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 5121-5206 (Stafford Act), and implemented by 44 CFR § 206.35, I request that you declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period beginning August 26, 2005, and continuing. The affected areas are all the southeastern parishes including the New Orleans Metropolitan area and the...

WASHINGTON -- Rep. John Sweeney, R-N.Y., urged President Bush to appoint former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani or two former military officials to run the ground response in the Gulf Coast, saying local authorities are not up to the task. Sweeney suggested Giuliani or retired generals Colin Powell and Tommy Franks could take charge of the much-criticized hurricane relief efforts. "We owe it to the American people to have America's best leaders with experience on the ground running this," said Sweeney. "It's been painfully obvious over the last four or five days that the circumstances and challenges coming at...

The Bush administration intends to seek more than $10 billion to cover immediate relief needs in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, congressional officials said Thursday, and lawmakers made plans to approve the request by the weekend. Several officials said $10 billion would cover immediate costs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the government's front-line responder in cases of natural disasters. Several hundred million dollars would also be provided to fund the Pentagon's disaster relief efforts, congressional aides said.

Modernizes the sales and use tax. As reported by the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee on June 20, 2005, with amendments. An Act modernizing the sales and use tax, amending and supplementing P.L.1966, c.30 and amending P.L.1980, c.105.

To: Congresswoman Mary Bono, Congressman Joe Barton, Congressman Cliff Stearns Subject: H.R.29, SPY ACT (Introduced in House) As a professional in the industry, I find section 5.B.1 to be insufficient. According to the current draft, exemption is provided as long as the provider is installing monitoring software for the detection of fraudulent activities. There is no definition for the phrase "fraudulent activities," nor for the "detection" of "fraudulent activities". As such, any software provider (even outside of US Law Enforcement) can install monitoring software to collect information under the premise that it was for detecting fraudulent activities, and they would...

SAN FRANCISCO — Believe it or not, a Windows Web server is more secure than a similarly set-up Linux server, according to a study presented yesterday by two Florida researchers. The researchers, appearing at the RSA Conference of computer-security professionals, discussed the findings in an event, "Security Showdown: Windows vs. Linux." One of them, a Linux fan, runs an open-source server at home; the other is a Microsoft enthusiast. They wanted to cut through the near-religious arguments about which system is better from a security standpoint. "I actually was wrong. The results are very surprising, and there are going to...

Two Durango teens thought they'd surprise neighbors with nighttime deliveries of home-baked treats. But one woman was so terrified, she sued and has won.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of US Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards has been diagnosed with breast cancer. Mrs Edwards, 55, learned of the diagnosis on Wednesday, the day her husband and Senator John Kerry conceded defeat to President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. "I can confirm the report, which is correct," said Karen Finney, a spokeswoman for the campaign. Mrs Edwards campaigned alongside her husband and on Wednesday attended a ceremony in Boston, where the men on the Democratic ticket conceded the Republican victory. - AFP