Voicemail calls, and no calls, can be costly - The Red Tape Chronicles - MSNBC.com

Nicki Harris couldn't understand how she'd exceeded the monthly minutes on her Sprint calling plan. She is careful with her prime-time calling and pays for a plan that gives her free Sprint-to-Sprint calls, so calls to her husband and mother don't eat into her monthly allotment. Yet her bill showed she had shot clear through her 800-minute-per-month ceiling.

A close look at her monthly bill revealed a surprising culprit: Numerous calls to retrieve voice mail had chewed up many minutes.

"I noticed overage charges for calls to my voicemail," said Harris, 28. "I thought this was a mistake, so I e-mailed customer service and they responded that they do not consider calls to voicemail to be a call to a Sprint phone number. ... It's hard to believe."

But it's not a mistake. Free Sprint-to-Sprint calls don't include calls to voicemail, the company told me. And it turns out Sprint isn't alone. AT&T/Cingular and Verizon also charge regular per-minute assessments on voicemail calls.

Add voicemail to the long list of sneaky, hard-to-figure charges to look for in your telecom bills.

Of the four largest carriers, only T-Mobile considers voicemail calls as in-network calls.

more... http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/08/no-such.html#posts

Cheney in 1994 on Iraq

Damages Pilot Preview Video

Oh my goodness! This could possibly be the best show ever. The first two episodes just blew my mind. Everyone, check it out.

This might be the man who can save us from this Demopublican train wreck were on...

Just click on the link below for more information.http://www.ronpaul2008.com/

Brief Overview of Congressman Paul’s Record:

He has never voted to raise taxes.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
He has never taken a government-paid junket.
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
He voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the Internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.
He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.
Congressman Paul introduces numerous pieces of substantive legislation each year, probably more than any single member of Congress

Well, I got my project finished this weekend. It's a Celeron 2.8 mhz on a MicroStar Mainboard with 512meg. ram. Broadband ready. 17" flat screen HP Monitor. 30 gig Maxtor hdd and Nvidia graphics. Toshiba cdrw/dvd drive. Ubuntu 7.04 Linux installed. Logitech optical mouse. Sound Blaster 3 way speaker system w. sub. All is new except for the hard drive and the video card. This little puppy flies. No spyware, no viruses. $300.00 takes it home SOLD!

Guy hit in head with .50 caliber ricochet

This has got to be the luckiest guy in the world!

Denise Long holds her grandson, Booker West, 1, as he pets Zoey, held by Monty Long in the backyard of their home near Masonville, Colo. in July 2007. Zoey is a Chihuahua, but when a rattlesnake lunged at her owners' 1-year-old grandson, she was a real bulldog. "She got in between Booker and the snake, and that's when I heard her yipe," said Monty Long, the boy's grandfather said Thursday, July 19, 2007. (AP Photo/Loveland Daily Reporter-Herald, Christopher Stark)

Nigerian kids browse porn on donated laptops

ABUJA, Nigeria - Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organization have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported Thursday.
NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images stored on several of the children’s laptops.
“Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials,” NAN said.

A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters.
Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

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OLPC was founded by Nicholas Negroponte with a core of Media Lab veterans, but quickly expanded to include a wide range of exceptionally talented and dedicated people from academia, industry, the arts, business, and the open-source community. Each individual involved brings a unique skill set, and a deep personal passion, to the project.


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