SBC, our local (Houston, Texas) phone company, is currently pushing Michigan HB-5237 which revises the Michigan Telecommunications Act, especially Sec304(9) which kills Virtual NXX service in Michigan. What that means to you is that local numbers that provide services like Internet access and Voice Over IP (VOIP) will be will be unavailable as a local call in many small towns across Michigan.

This would be good for companies like Riverside Internet because we have facilities here, but generally, anything that kills competition as this bill will do, is bad for everybody. The short term gains would probably quickly be erased as soon as SBC started the next part of their planned takeover of anybody that tries to compete with them, no matter how insignificantly. You can either hang on to your wallet or go to this site (http://telecommchoice.org/) and let your voice be heard.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Is Here! Just click on the link to download your FREE copy today.

As you will discover when you get there, OpenOffice.org is more that just a free word processor. It is a complete office suite that contains five powerful office productivity tools. It also contains MATH, which is OpenOffice.org's component for mathematical equations.

Writer is the word processor that will handle anything from a simple letter to complete desktop publishing projects. Calc is a powerful spreadsheet program. Impress creates effective multimedia presentations. Draw produces everything from simple drawings to dynamic 3D illustrations. Base allows you to manipulate database data with your own database or its own HSQL database engine.

As quoted from OpenOffice.org 2.0: "The OpenOffice.org Project is an international community of volunteers and sponsors including founding sponsor and primary contributor, Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice.org develops, supports, and promotes the open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. The project can be found at http://www.openoffice.org/. OpenOffice.org fully supports the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) OASIS Standard and is available on major computing platforms in over 60 languages."

For our money, it sure beats spending around $299.00 (PER COMPUTER) on MS Office Professional.