Free Republic

A boat party in an exclusive area of Long Island Sunday night was interrupted - when a severed human hand mysteriously dropped out of the sky onto the deck of a boat, police said yesterday.

CHARLOTTE COUNTY - A fifth-grade teacher lost her job this month when school administrators and parents were anonymously sent images of her engaged in sex acts and apparently smoking marijuana. In June, the Charlotte County School district office received two envelopes containing four still photographs and a thumb drive containing five videos of Natalie Santagata, a teacher at Kingsway Elementary School in Port Charlotte since 2002.

Palm Inc. swung to a loss in the fiscal second quarter, failing to meet Wall Street expectations amid withering competition from consumer electronics rivals. The maker of the Treo smart-phone said Tuesday it lost $9.63 million, or 9 cents per share, on revenue of $349.63 million in the three months ended Nov. 30. In the year-ago period, Palm earned $12.77 million, or 12 cents per share, on revenue of $392.91 million. Excluding one-time items such as stock-based compensation expenses and nearly $1 million in restructuring charges, the Sunnyvale-based company said it would have lost $7.84 million, or 7 cents per...

CHICAGO, Aug. 19 (UPI) -- Phil Hammond carries a PalmOne Treo personal digital assistant with him almost all the time. "It's like carrying my office in my pocket -- I can get my e-mail, my contact list, my notes, even my combination to my locker at the Y," Hammond, marketing director for the Boston-based interior design firm of Margulies & Associates, told UPI's Wireless World. By Gene Koprowski

A TEACHER pleasured himself in front of pupils during exams, a court heard yesterday. Shay Kernaghan, 27, put chairs either side of his desk to hide what he was doing, but one sixth-former said: “It was obvious. He went pink and started shaking his hand.” Business studies teacher Kernaghan, who has since left the London school for Muslims, denies eight charges. Case continues at Southwark Crown Court.

I'm planning on buying a high-end PDA for remote WWW access, e-mail, and general fooling around. (IOW, I want to be able to freep anywhere. :-) ) I've narrowed my search down to the Palm Tungsten C or the HP iPAQ 3715, but I'm unsure which one to get. FWIW, all my previous PDAs have used the Palm OS, so I'm really not familiar with the capabilities and limitations of the Pocket PC OS. Any freeper input, including suggestions of other models, would be appreciated. Built-in WiFi is a must; a camera would be nice.

The next big thing that wasn't---or was it? IS IT time to declare the demise of the handheld computer, also known as the personal digital assistant (PDA)? A lot of people suddenly think so, for despite high hopes that the devices---made by such firms as Palm, Sony, HP and Dell---would someday become ubiquitous, annual sales have stayed flat at around 11m units worldwide. This compares poorly with PCs, around 130m of which are sold every year, and mobile phones, with sales of around 460m units. ---The PDA market will never be a mass market,--- says Cindy Wolf, an analyst at...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Handheld computer shipments slumped in 2002, as an expected boom in demand from corporations failed to materialize, according to an industry study released on Monday. Worldwide shipments of personal digital assistants, or PDAs, the pocket-sized digital companions that can store thousands of appointments, contacts and notes, fell 9.1 percent to 12.1 million units in 2002, according to Dataquest Inc., a unit of research firm Gartner Inc. "The more lucrative enterprise market has been stagnant because of poor economic conditions and a perception that PDAs are not yet capable of delivering sufficient return on investment," said Todd...

Gore being interviewed (on tape) by Leslie Stahl, announces he will not run for the 2004 democratic presidential nomination.Those of you on the West coast, be sure to see the beginning when Bill Clinton is featured in a teaser for anothe story--the sore on his mouth is frightening!

<p>DENVER — The White House yesterday ridiculed Al Gore for flip-flopping on Iraq and dismissed the former vice president's charge that President Bush is trampling civil liberties.</p> <p>"You know, it's hard to pay attention to what Al Gore says because it's so hard to know what Al Gore really believes, given how many times he's changed his position on Iraq," said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.</p>

W A S H I N G T O N, Sept. 26 — Democrat Al Gore, criticizing President Bush as he tests the waters for another possible presidential bid, accused the administration Thursday of an "attack on civil liberties" and ignoring signs that Osama bin Laden had been planning a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. It was the former vice president's second scathing attack on Bush in a week.Speaking at a Democratic fund-raising breakfast in Wilmington, Del., Gore took issue with the administration's handling of intelligence information prior to the Sept. 11 attacks and for its treatment of some terrorism...

<p>How would America have reacted to Sept. 11 had Al Gore been president?</p> <p>Or, more to the point, how would Al Gore have reacted to Sept. 11?</p> <p>Judging by his speech the other day to the Commonwealth Club of California, the answer is: Weakly.</p> <p>Tentatively.</p> <p>Maybe not at all.</p>

Posted as a courtesy to FR insomniacs. I'm having dinner and will NOT be able to watch.

Al Gore. State election officials ultimately declared George W. Bush the winner by a margin of 537 votes, but during and after the election dispute, questions remained about the uncounted ballots of 175,010 voters, ballots that had been rejected by error-prone tabulating machines employed in many Florida counties. Confusion and conflict, much of it generated by partisan intrigue, prevented these ballots from being counted during the election controversy. However, in 2001 every uncounted ballot was carefully examined in a scientific study by the University of Chicago, which concluded that when all the votes were counted, more votes had been cast...