Archive for the 'Featured' Category
There is no doubt that we all love free stuff Free is good right, well most of the time free is great! but sometimes its either to difficult to get or someone is trying to scam you out of pocket.
The realistion is that if you want free stuff you have to put in a little work to get it, which basically means you give to get given there is no real free lunch as such.
There are lots of free things available on the Net, but the trick is knowing which ones are worth while and how to get them. My job is to make it easy and fun for you to get freebies.
Like anything else, you need to know a little about what you are doing to be successful in obtaining freebies. You need to know where to look, how to make your request, and what kinds of things to avoid so you don’t get scammed.
The Internet is a wonderful place, filled will all kinds of great information and lots of stuff you can get for free. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of of bad things about the Internet. Where ever there are a lot of people you will find the evil few who try to take advantage of the masses. The same hold true for the Internet. You will want to learn to steer clear of the scams on your way to finding the good stuff.
Free Stuff Scams
The lure of free stuff is a powerful marketing tool and is used to good effect by many savvy marketers. Unfortunately, not every free stuff offer is what it appears to be. There are lots of great free stuff offers out there, but you need to use some healthy skepticism and resist the temptation to fall for free stuff scams.
Evaluating free stuff offers is pretty easy if you use a little common sense mixed with some knowledge and a bit of experience. Below are some tips to help you avoid the free stuff boondoggles:
- Too good to be true – Offers that appear too good to be true are. Examine the motivation for the free offer. A free trial size shampoo makes sense because they are trying to sell shampoo. A free vacation is unlikely, unless there are large hidden charges or other commitments attached.
- Ignore unsolicited offers – Just take it as a given that spammers have nothing of value to offer. Variations of the advance fee scam like the email from Nigeria saying they want to use your bank account to get money out of the country are on the rise. Just delete these without giving them a second thought.
- Don’t pay for prizes – If you get email or postal mail proclaiming you the winner of a great prize and all you have to do is pay a fee or provide sensitive information to claim it, don’t. It’s a scam and the only winners are the scammers.
- Free with shipping and handling – These offers are generally OK as long as the shipping and handling fees are reasonable and you get something of value. $4.95 for a CD-ROM you are interested in is fine, but $4.95 for a cell phone antenna booster (which does not work no matter what they tell you) is a waste of money.
- Beware email collection scams – Most of the sites that consist of nothing but a form offering free stuff are there to collect email addresses for spammers. These sometimes have long lists of offers or “newsletters” you can subscribe to. If you are tempted to sign up for these, be sure to use a disposable email address.
Just put these tips together with your own common sense and you can enjoy the legitimate offers and avoid the free stuff scams.
How To Avoid Junk Email and Still Enjoy Freebies
Here’s How:
- Only provide your email address to sites that have an appropriate privacy policy.
- Use a free (and disposable) email address when you suspect you may get on email lists that don’t interest you.
- Most online forms provide a checkbox to select whether you want to receive email from them. Check or uncheck as appropriate
- Many online forms have a checkbox which asks permission to share your information with third parties. Check or uncheck as appropriate.
- Avoid entering your email address in online guest books or other places where it will be displayed on the Web. Spammers use programs called bots to harvest these.
- Never reply to unsolicited email even to request removal. It just verifies that your address is valid.
- Use a bulk email blocking service like the one described in the related features below.
Tips:
- Some junk email is inevitable. Learn to recognize it by the subject or other headers and delete it without bothering to open it.
So you want to get some free samples and other free stuff?
Obtaining free samples and other free stuff can be a hit or miss proposition. You can, however, improve your odds of getting a free offer if you make sure it is from one of the big brand name companies. Sometimes the smaller companies will make an offer that sounds very attractive, but they usually become overwhelmed very quickly and seldom are able to follow through on the free stuff offer.
Brand Name Freebies
Companies like Procter & Gamble or Walmart are a great source of free samples and offers. These companies and many others gladly give away samples in hopes that you like their products and make future purchases. It’s a win – win situation all around. You get to try new products without buying them and the companies gain new customers and sell more products.
Free Software
Free software is probably the most plentiful type of freebie you will find on the Internet. Everything from games to heavy duty business applications can be had for free. The biggest problem is determining what free software is useful and avoiding software containing adware and spyware.
Brand Name Freebies
Charmin Free Offers:
Charmin is making it easy for you to find their free offers by collecting them on one page. The Charmin offers tend to run for a long time, but any offer may end at any time.
Costco Free Offers:
Costco’s free sample offers are not listed on a single page, but can be turned up with a simple search of their site. At this writing they have two free sample offers. They may have more or less at any particular time.
Dove Free Offers:
Dove now has a special offers page where they list all of the current offers including a number of free sample offers.
Kraft Foods Free Offers:
Kraft Foods puts a lot of effort into keeping their brands foremost in the minds of consumers. One of the ways they do that is to provide free offers and free services related to food and healthy living.
Kroger Offers:
Kroger has continued in the the competition with Walmart and has added an offers page. The page is hosted on StartSampling and I expect it will be kept up ot date and that offers will change frequently.
Nestle Free Offers:
Nestle usually has several nice free offers including those from Very Best Baking and Very Best Baby.
Neutrogena Free Offers:
Neutrogena uses their “what’s new” page to list their current offers and promotions. Promotions may include rebates, free samples, coupons, or sweepstakes.
Olay Beauty Free Offers:
Olay Beauty almost always has one or more free offers and a couple discount offers on their site. I’ve listed both the US and Canadian free offer pages.
Pathmark Samples and Coupons:
Pathmark lists brand name samples and coupons. Some of the offers are similar to the Kroger listings, but there usually are some unique offers to be found.
Procter & Gamble Free Offers:
Procter & Gamble is one of the biggest and most reliable sources of free sample offers. They conveniently offer a single page which lists many of current offers and promotions.
Reynolds Free Offers:
Reynolds is one of those household brands that works hard to get consumers to understand that they have more to offer than their original product line. As a result, you can usually find at least one free offer on their site. Whenever they come out with a new product or are having a marketing push on an existing product, you can usually expect they will post a new free sample offer.
Walmart Free Samples:
Walmart has the ultimate brand name free sample site. They usually have from four to ten active offers and offers change rapidly, sometimes daily.
Whilst weddings can often cost the Earth at http://www.rs2guru.com we are helping are customers save money AND the planet. A huge variety of eco-friendly wedding invitations are on offer ensuring that the happiest day of your life won’t cost the planet. With a huge variety of styles and colors our wedding invitations are beautifully made with hand drawn wedding invites also available.
At http://www.rs2guru.com we appreciate that there are many things to think about in preparation for that big day and often the environment isn’t one of them. However, at rs2guru.com we understand the importance enterprise has on the environment and we ensure that not only will you get the most beautifully made hand draw wedding invites but that the will be friendly to the planet too.
Beutifully hand draw cards made with the greatest care and passion ensure our wedding invitations reflect the glamour and beauty of your wedding.
Made from 100% eco-friendly paper, we also offer a free selection of environmental envelopes and can match our invites to almost any theme you wish your wedding to take. At http://www.rs2guru.com we are experts in supplying wedding correspondence and invitations and have a whole host if helpful information on our website.
For all wedding invitation needs rs2guru.com have the perfect environmentally friendly solution at remarkable reasonably prices ensuring your wedding day doesn’t cost the earth!
# # #
Notes for editors
www.rs2guru.com is a provider of eco friendly wedding invitations including hand drawn invites
All enquiries via website:http://www.rs2guru.com
Go green and save money on postage costs by using the new desktop postal service, Docmail.
Docmail now offers its customers the option of having their mail printed on Toptree supported paper, and having trees planted in their name.
In association with The Woodland Trust, the Toptree Initiative focuses on the restoration of UK woodland, and plants twice as many trees in this country as were originally used to make the paper products that carry the Toptree logo.
All Toptree supported products are made from paper sourced from sustainably maintained forests. For every tree used to produce Toptree paper, the Initiative plants two trees in Woodland Trust managed woods, helping support the environment for future generations.
Dave Broadway, managing director of CFH Total Document Management, creators of Docmail, says, “Many companies try to reduce their environmental impact by reducing their paper usage and using recycled paper. With the environmental challenges we face today, conservation is not enough. We need restoration. The Toptree Initiative plants trees in the UK to help regenerate UK woodland for all to enjoy.”
Almost 80,000 trees have been planted by the Toptree Initiative since it began in 1997.
Users of the online mail facility can now opt to include a Toptree logo and special code in their letters. The Toptree Initiative will plant trees to replace that paper, and for every ten codes entered onto the Toptree website, an extra tree will be planted. Full details can be found at http://www.cfhdocmail.com/toptree.html
Docmail is an exciting desktop mail service with low postage prices starting from just 25pence. Customers compile and send post direct from their PC. One of the simplest, most user-friendly online mail facilities to use, there’s no software to install; all that’s needed is a computer with internet access and a web browser.
The system allows you to upload a Word document and any PDFs you want to include in your mailing, enter an address or upload a list onto the online database, and then simply click the mouse for Docmail to print, personalise, enclose and post, with no limits on quantity or destination.
“Outlaw Journalist” defies order to stop recording
July 9, 2009
It is said that silence is often louder than speech, that a voice quashed is more powerful than one left free.
So, as I undertake the third night of a six-day civil disobedience imprisonment, there is no urgent crush to communicate. But it is fitting to outline the events which led here and the cause which fires so many others to suffer a similar path.
It is Christendom’s two thousand and tenth year. But within the nation where that faith once held greatest sway, a cruel epidemic waxes. It is not a pestilence of truly natural origin, not a pestilence at all by the traditional meaning of the noun. It is a millstone fervently worn – literally celebrated – by the plurality of those who endure its crushing weight. Through its privations hapless families are flung apart, innocent souls ripped from feeble bodies and innocence itself shorn from the hearts of its unaccountable enforcers. All unfolds on the dime of the hapless worker and plundered businessman, above the graves of twenty-five thousands who died fighting a three percent document tax.
It is the grand, hungry march of exploding government authority, parading around the prison gulag which grows with every step of its progress. As these words take form its advance unfolds exponential. No truce or parley checks its dark course. Beside the New England forts which stood or fell in the first revolution, all ’round the siege lines which still mark the British surrender, lights are going out…the lights of homes stolen by State forfeiture or eminent domain, of businesses ruined by growing tax and mandate.
But the most golden beams to dim have been those of personal liberty and peaceable rebellion. Like night-blind children compelled toward the isolated candles of a primitive village, we who live for such light have found ourselves drawn toward the places where it still feebly shines. And of those places, one has stood above the others, cast a truer shadow, made possible a greater hope. It is the land English invaders lamented, a jungle of prodigious hilltops and ruthless ice.
In this unborn country, a calm revolt – or rather a series of revolts – is undertaken. Its politicians rebel (selectively) against Washington control, its people against its politicians and its media pipelines against any of the above which would muzzle them. It is a place of constructive defiance. It has never been anything less.
Toward this partially wild East, America’s most deliberate migration project since the Homestead Act enters its sixth year. Five hundred over-active refugees from the authoritarian states of “Republikrat” America link arms with New Hampshire’s native liberty community and cobble a loose but increasingly potent defense against the seemingly unstoppable march of Authority. With a calculated desperation not seen since the days of Parks and King, some clumsily follow the path of the same. To the unjust they say: Ignore us and admit the wrongness of your victimless crime edicts, or seize us and amplify our message.
There are, it is believed, several lines of defense which must be held in this manner against the encroaching cancer. Perhaps the most valuable of these is the newly decentralized exercise of press freedom. The practice of camcording official activity and placing it upon the waves of the electronic web for all to support or decry, that practice has fallen into the desperate hands of the “little people.” As a check against government abuse it is indispensable. It is, in this land of so many hills, a good one upon which to die.
Across New Hampshire, the freedom to record exists, but only in a tenuous, ambiguous form. An elderly “wiretapping” law is often cited by officials wishing to frighten from their presence the troubling light of independent recording. In courtrooms, judges are encouraged by law to permit independent taping but granted a hazardous leeway to limit the same. Some choose to expand their mandate and exert censorship over the lobbies outside their force-funded chambers. Others permit relatively unfettered access, ban cameras altogether or moodily swing from one extreme to the next.
In the twilight of 2008, videographer Tom Caruso gently presses Keene District Court for leave to film the controversial trial of a victimless defendant. The defendant approves, but Caruso’s lens captures the judge in a fit of anger. The New York documentarian has driven four hours to record this proceeding, but four minutes into it the flustered jurist’s enforcers compel him to stop. Meanwhile the defendant is hustled away and tried in relative secrecy. In protest, I report to the court with a promised course of action. I pledge that come the next such proceeding, weeks hence, I will follow Caruso’s path and endeavor to film. But I will peaceably disobey any unjust order to turn my camera off.
In the event, upon arrival, press recording is forbidden completely…both in the court itself and in the lobby outside. Lawful or not, the unsigned order has the weight of a smalltown army behind it. I am seized in the lobby, camera in hand, perhaps the first journalist to video-broadcast his own arrest live. Much of what ensues is well-known to our liberty community: The five arrests surrounding my arraignment, the more heroic and robust stand of videographer Sam Dodson, the eventual re-admission of our cameras to Keene District Court.
But it is our purpose which gives meaning to these deeds:
The purpose of accountability, holding “our” officials before the cleansing glare of a camcorder’s sunlight and saying to all who would interfere: “On the job means on the record.”
The purpose of liberty…the right of each soul to do all she pleases that harms or threatens none against their will…
And, as unprecedented government growth brushes a nation toward the cliff of collapse, the purpose of ensuring it may never be said we did nothing.
Decades after the largely peaceable struggles which brought partial liberation to the bonded peoples of India and the American South, children still asked “What did you do in the Struggle, grandpa?”
From this concrete box it is appropriate only to ask: Please do what you are able, while there is still time, to ensure that when you stand before this question, you may proudly provide a convincing answer.
Dave Ridley
RidleyReport.com
Grafton
THIS is the chart climate change sceptic Senator Steve Fielding hopes will convince Al Gore that global warming is not real.
Senator Fielding is trying to score a one-on-one meeting with Mr Gore, who is in Australia promoting several environmental causes, to prove to him that climate change sceptics are right.
Senator Fielding has promised to clear his schedule for any chance to meet the former US vice-president and Nobel Prize-winning environmental campaigner. “The ball’s in his court,” a spokesman for the senator told news.com.au.
The spokesman has said Mr Gore is aware that Senator Fielding holds a crucial vote in Parliament and that any major green schemes – such as the Government’s model to reduce carbon pollution in Australia – essentially rely on his support.
“(Mr Gore) said ‘look, the schedule’s tight but hopefully we can work something out’,” when Senator Fielding approached yesterday for a meeting on the issue, the spokesman said.”We’re clearing our schedule to see him. If he calls at three in the morning, we’d go,” he said.
It is believed Mr Gore will only be in the country for another day or so.
Senator Fielding wants to present a graph to Mr Gore which argues global temperatures have stabilised during the past 15 years, even as carbon emissions have risen.
The graph was used by the UN in its reports on the effects of climate change. UN scientists say the world has warmed in the past 150 years, but temperatures have plateaued at warmer-than-normal levels in the past decade after a particularly hot year in 1998.
It is the same graph Senator Fielding showed Climate Change Minister Penny Wong when the pair met to negotiate on the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which will set a price on carbon emissions.
“The Government needs to explain to the Australian people why global temperatures have remained steady over the last 10-15 years despite skyrocketing man made carbon emissions,” Senator Fielding said on his website.
Senator Wong and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd have set a targets of cutting emissions by five to 25 per cent by 2020. Mr Gore said that was not enough.
Experts have identified the body of Marc Dubois, the captain of Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic on June 1 in a disaster that has raised doubts about the safety of the world’s modern airliners.
The remains of Mr Dubois, 58, and those of one of the stewards, were among a dozen bodies identified from 50 that were found in the Atlantic off Brazil and taken to the coastal city of Recife.
All 228 people on board the A330 Airbus died when it broke up while crossing a storm zone on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
Brazil has called off the hunt for bodies and wreckage from an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic earlier this month with 228 people aboard. But the search for the “black boxes” that might explain what happened will continue.
Investigators are to present their first report into the disaster on Thursday but this is likely to be inconclusive without input from the flight recorders.
The recorders are designed to emit an audio signal for up to a month. That expires on Wednesday. However, investigators have said that the search by a nuclear submarine will continue into July in the hope that the beep will still be heard 12,000ft down.
Officials have identified 11 of the 50 bodies recovered from an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic three weeks ago, by using fingerprints and dental records.
The bodies were identified as “10 Brazilians and one foreigner,” officials in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco said yesterday.
Five of the Brazilians were male, the other five were female and the foreigner was male. The officials, part of a task force that also includes Brazilian police and forensic specialists conducting autoposies in the city of Recife, did not give further details about those identified.
They said the families of the identified Brazilians had been visited personally Friday and Saturday by police officers who broke the news. The embassy of the foreigner who was identified was also notified.
Some 600 pieces of debris from the Rio-to-Paris flight have also been recovered.
Suspicions have grown that faulty air speed indicators are to blame for the crash, prompting a separate investigation in America last week into two recent Airbus emergencies involving misleading readings. Both aircraft landed safely.
It has emerged that because of messages sent automatically from flight AF447 in the seconds before it crashed in a storm off northeastern Brazil on June 1, engineers were dispatched to the airport in Paris to meet the plane and replace its air speed sensors, known as “pitot tubes”.
