Free Republic

So I was standardized on Opera for several years, tried Brave, didn't really like it, and then someone on here recommended Vivaldi. I tried it and really like it, it's my main browser now. Problem is, it seems to lose the file-type association for web links and http files and so on. I clicked on a link in an email and it opened the box inviting me to tell it what program to use, and -- Vivaldi wasn't even one of the pre-registered options, only Opera. So I browsed to the location (which is oddly in %APPDATA%), and explicitly told...

Kimberly Guilfoyle confused Twitter users on Friday with a prediction about ex-President Donald Trump.“I will confidently say that (former) President Trump from his desk at Mar-a-Lago will accomplish more for America in the next four years than (President) Joe Biden and (Vice President) Kamala Harris could ever dream of,” former Fox News host Guilfoyle, who is the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and the GOP leadership are scrambling this week to corral 50 out of 52 Republican votes for an historically unpopular health-care bill. Why did so many House Republicans already vote for a bill that large majorities in every state detest? And why are their Senate colleagues considering walking the same plank, given the electoral risk? In our book, “Representing Red and Blue: How the Culture Wars Change the Way Citizens Speak and Politicians Listen,” we find that thumbing one’s nose at public opinion might spell trouble for elected Democrats. But Republicans typically have much...

For years I used a folder sync utility, I think shareware, but have changed computers a couple times, so no longer have it. I've looked at all the usual shareware sites (download.cnet.com, tucows, softpedia, etc.) and can't seem to find this one. Googled, etc. The things that I remember that might ring a bell for someone are the compares could be saved as "jobs" and there was a list of recent jobs, so you could redo the same compare/synch again later. Also, if you did a compare on a directory with subdirectories, the comparison display would highlight in different colors...

It looks like the days of trading half of your peanut butter and jelly sandwich for half of your best friend’s ham sandwich may soon be over if the federal government has anything to do with it. A Richmond, Virginia mother received the following note, telling her not to pack a lunch for her pre-school age child. Dear Parents, I have received word from Federal Programs Preschool pertaining to lunches from home. Parents are to be informed that students can only bring lunches from home if there is a medical condition requiring a specific diet, along with a physicians note...

People who own Dell Latitude 6430u laptops are complaining that their pricey new computers are emitting a smell similar to cat urine. Some of them said on the company's online customer forums that the odor seems to be coming from the keyboard or palm rest. The Round Rock, Texas, company originally advised buyers through its forums to try cleaning their keyboards with a soft cloth or compressed air, but the smell persisted. "The machine is great, but it smells as if it was assembled near a tomcat's litter box," wrote a customer using the handle "three west" on a Dell...

The name of the holiday celebrated each year on July 4th will in the future be "Dependence Day". As time has passed, we have become wiser, and apologize for our previous hubris and dedication to such foolish ideals as freedom, liberty, and the idea of a republic. We're very sorry. [/lib mode]

Think you own your wireless handset, inside and out? Think you can do whatever you wish with your own property? Think again. Beginning Saturday, it will become illegal to unlock a phone without the express permission of the carrier who locked it. While the relevant portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act legalizes jailbreaking for three years, it also makes it illegal to unlock new, locked wireless handsets (without the permission of the previous carrier). Exemptions include “legacy phones” ("used (or perhaps unused) phones previously purchased or otherwise acquired by a consumer"). So this ruling won’t kill the secondary market...

The huge humpback whale whose friendliness precipitated a surreal seven-year — so far — federal hunt for criminality surely did not feel put upon. Nevertheless, our unhinged government, with an obsession like that of Melville’s Ahab, has crippled Nancy Black’s scientific career, cost her more than $100,000 in legal fees — so far — and might sentence her to 20 years in prison. This Kafkaesque burlesque of law enforcement began when someone whistled.Black, 50, a marine biologist who also captains a whale-watching ship, was with some watchers in Monterey Bay in 2005 when a member of her crew whistled at...

TOKYO (AP) -- A panel investigating Japan's nuclear disaster said Saturday that the ex-prime minister and his aides caused confusion at the height of last year's crisis by heavily interfering in the damaged and leaking plant's operation. Shuya Nomura, a member of the parliamentary panel, said that Naoto Kan's aides made numerous calls to the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, often asking basic questions and distracting workers, thus causing more confusion. They did not follow the official line of communication -- through the regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency -- under the country's nuclear disaster management law, he said.

A man whose wife died when a Nigerian commercial airliner crashed into a crowded neighborhood in that country's largest city filed a lawsuit in the United States on Thursday that blames the accident, at least in part, on U.S. companies that designed, manufactured and sold the ill-fated plane. An American attorney filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Chicago on behalf of David Chukwunonso Allison, whose wife, Joy Chiedozie Allison, was on the Dana Air MD-83 that went down in the African nation Sunday afternoon. The crash killed 153 people who were on the plane and an undetermined number...

Yes, the Health-Care Mandate Is About LibertyLink only. Bloomberg probably got tired of having their pants pulled down over their shoddy shell-game logic by alert FReepers.

President Obama preemptively slammed the Supreme Court as a bunch of "unelected group of people" who will have turned to "judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint" if they decide to strike down his signature legislative achievement, the healthcare reform act. Obama was speaking at a trilateral event with the Prime Minister of Canada and President of Mexico. Obama touted the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, as "a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically-elected Congress."

Microscopic-scale medical robots represent a promising new type of therapeutic technology. As envisioned, the microbots, which are less than one millimeter in size, might someday be able to travel throughout the human bloodstream to deliver drugs to specific targets or seek out and destroy tumors, blood clots, and infections that can't be easily accessed in other ways. One challenge in the deployment of microbots, however, is developing a system to accurately "drive" them and maneuver them through the complex and convoluted circulatory system, to a chosen destination. Researchers from Korea's Hanyang University in Seoul and Chonnam National University in Gwangju...

The omnibus spending bill passed Thursday includes a provision that temporarily lifts the incandescent light bulb ban. Republicans managed to insert language into the 1,200 page bill that prevents funds from being used to implement the first phase of the ban, which was scheduled to commence on January 1st. The incandescent light bulb will be given a stay of execution through at least September 30, 2012. For those who didn’t know…in 2007, President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act into law. Subtitle B of Title III mandated an approximate 30% increase in energy efficiency for lightbulbs. Beginning in...

Malone, NY -- A New York man who had abused his ex-girlfriend and then plotted to kill her and make it look like she had been mauled by a bear was sentenced to prison for trying to hire someone to kill her in a staged car crash. Clyde Gardner gave up on his first idea: Kill a bear, skin it and wear the pelt while using its claws to kill the woman as she took out her garbage. The plan included him wearing the bear's paws on his feet so no human footprints would be left behind. When he abandoned...

EVERETT, Wash. (AP) -- After nearly two years of flight tests and analysis, the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday cleared the way for the new Boeing 787 to take its first commercial flight. Boeing plans to deliver the first 787 to Japan's All Nippon Airways next month -- more than three years later than initially planned. The airline plans to fly it for the first time as a charter on Oct. 26 and begin regular service Nov. 1. Both the FAA and European regulators certified the plane for flight. Boeing completed flight tests on the 787 this month. The Chicago...

Engineers at the University of Southampton have designed and flown the world’s first ‘printed’ aircraft, which could revolutionise the economics of aircraft design. The SULSA (Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft) plane is an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) whose entire structure has been printed, including wings, integral control surfaces and access hatches. It was printed on an EOS EOSINT P730 nylon laser sintering machine, which fabricates plastic or metal objects, building up the item layer by layer. No fasteners were used and all equipment was attached using ‘snap fit’ techniques so that the entire aircraft can be put together without tools...

LE BOURGET, France (AP) — A confused cockpit crew without proper training to head off high-altitude disaster flew toward it, instead, with wrong-headed maneuvers, no task-sharing and perhaps unaware their flight was about to end in the Atlantic Ocean. Screeching stall alarms and incoherent speed readings from faulty sensors, bad weather in a darkened sky and growing stress make up the chaotic cockpit scenario in the final moments of the Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009. All 228 people aboard the plane were killed. Friday's third report by France's accident investigation agency, or...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The economy slowed in the first six months of 2011 to its weakest pace since the recession ended. High gas prices and scant income gains forced Americans to sharply pull back on spending. The Commerce Department says the economy expanded only 1.3 percent in the April-June period. And it downwardly revised the January-March figures to show growth of just 0.4 percent, the weakest since the recession ended two years ago.