How can someone steal your identity? - http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/ Identity theft occurs when someone uses your personal information such as your name, Social Security number, credit card number or other identifying information, without your permission to commit fraud or other crimes.

People whose identities have been stolen can spend months or years - and their hard-earned money - cleaning up the mess thieves have made of their good name and credit record. In the meantime, victims may lose job opportunities, be refused loans, education, housing or cars, or even get arrested for crimes they didn't commit.

The State Data Statistical Center is an official sources of demographic, economic, and social statistics produced by the U.S. Census Bureau. These data are made available by the Census Bureau to the SDSC's at no charge. The SDSC's site, http://www.census.gov/sdc/www/, make these data accessible to state, regional, local and tribal governments, and non-governmental data users at no charge or on a cost-recovery or reimbursable basis as appropriate.

Demographics - Instantly (and free)! - http://www.freedemographics.com/ . Maybe you'd like to check the characteristics of your home town. Or perhaps some demographic data would help you in your job, in school or with your volunteer work. But, for sure you don't want to lay out big bucks to subscribe to a heavy duty service. These folks provide free, unlimited access to U.S. Census Data for all available U.S. geographies. You can access three distinct data sets giving you significant flexibility. They deliver summary, comparison and geographic ranking reports based on over 140 different variables.

Evaluate Products Before Buying. You may think the world of Bose speakers, but what does the world think of them? Before spending $3000 on a home theater system, discover how past purchasers view the item you're contemplating. http://www.consumerreview.com/ compiles opinions on everything from cars to golf clubs, and each review includes a summary and lists of a product's strengths and weaknesses.   

Look First! Homebuyers, especially first-timers, may be brimming over with questions from how to find the right mortgage or how lenders evaluate their credit. Go to the Federal Citizen Information Center homepage, which provides an online clearinghouse for federal consumer publications recommended for all consumers.

Why didn't someone think of this before!  As an accomplished "WWW Surfer", it's a safe bet you have hundreds of "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" filed away and, despite utmost care, you often have difficulty locating the special link you need quickly! Now the nice folks at DzSoft have come up with a free search bar integrates into your browser so you can find the "Favorite" or "Bookmark" you need in seconds! Great utility program -- and its free! Go to: http://www.dzsoft.com/favseek.htm

Consumer World - http://www.consumerworld.org/ -  is a public service, non-commercial guide cataloging over 2000 of the most useful consumer resources.

Enter an address here - http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/BasicFactsServlet  - and up comes the most recent census data with charts, graphs, maps -- the works!  Now that the folks at the U.S. Census Bureau have their most recent data in order, you can bring up tons of helpful data including Ancestry, Citizenship, Disability, Educational Attainment, Income, Industry, Language Spoken at Home, Marital Status, Migration, Occupation, Place of Birth, Place of Work, Poverty, Rent, School Enrollment, Tenure, Units in Structure, and much much more. Use it, you paid for it and it's free!

South Carolina - The Palmetto State - Thumbnail Information and links to SC state homepage, flags, maps, constitution, and representatives, etc.

The Internet Archive - http://www.archive.org/index.html - also known as The WayBack Machine -  Takes a digital snapshot of almost any Web site home page and stores each image in its massive searchable San Francisco archives. As with a paper library, researchers, historians, scholars and the general public can type in any Web site address and see how it looked back in the days of old. For advanced searches, visit http://web.archive.org/collections/web/advanced.html

Consumer & Business Online Resource Center  A free service to help consumers and businesses resolve legal issues. This site has thousands of government documents and forms for both the United States and Canada. You will find answers to a wide variety of commonly asked legal questions, many of which are available in RealAudio® and Windows Media formats.

You can download a short file at http://www.belarc.com/download.html and this software will take a snapshot of your system and display a Web page providing a complete summary. The data resides on your local system and is not sent to a Web server. The report provides information on all hardware and software you are running. It even tells you the version number. And, best of all, this handy program is free for your personal use and you can check your system anytime with the click of a mouse!  Belarc supports Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP.

http://catchup.cnet.com/ - It's never been easier to manage your PC. From software updates to security fixes, CatchUp automatically finds what you need to keep your PC up-to-date. Includes Adware Detect - Do you really know what's installed on your PC? Adware Detect automatically searches your PC for adware, "spyware," and other third-party components that may have been surreptitiously installed on your PC.

Watch That Page is a service that enables you to collect new information from many pages on the Internet. You select the pages to monitor, and Watch That Page finds which pages have changed, and what the new content is. This information is collected and presented to you in an email and/or a personal web page. The free service is available at http://www.watchThatPage.com .

http://aldaily.com/ - What do a political economist, a philosopher, and a composer have in common? A penchant for the humanities and this hyperlink to Arts & Letters Daily, a site that connects visitors to high-quality (sometimes high-brow) articles, book reviews, and essays. Thought provoking.

http://firstgov.com - Government Resources in One Click! This powerful and rapidly developing site currently contains 47 million pages of government information, services, and online transactions all organized so you will think you are at Yahoo! You will find a powerful search engine that searches every word of just about every U.S. government document in a quarter of a second or less. You will also find a topical index, online transactions, links to state and local government and other tools set up so you don't have to know the name of the government agency to get the information you want anytime you want it!

http://www.re-route.com -  Re-route Your E-Mail. Occasionally a service that has a modest cost attached stands out and warrants mention. This is one of those. These folks have come up with a way to redirect your e-mail when you are changing Internet Service Providers and have to change your e-mail address. Their service forwards messages sent to your old address to your new address providing a smooth transition from one ISP to another. When they forward a message to your new address, they also deliver a message to the original sender explaining that the message was forwarded. With your permission, they also include your new e-mail address to inform your contacts of your new address. This service becomes particularly valuable when you change from an ISP that does not provide forwarding services. Good news--it works for AOL accounts!

http://www.refdesk.com -  Monster Reference Source. If you need even more convincing that the Web is one huge repository of valuable and useful information, your proof is right here!  The folks at this great source say, "The Internet is the world's largest library containing millions of books, artifacts, images, documents, maps, etc. There is but one small problem in this library: everything is scattered about on the floor, with growing hordes of confused and bewildered users frantically shifting through the maze, occasionally crying out, "Great Scott, look at what I just found!"  This powerful reference tool has organized the giant library to cover most major reference books, periodicals, newspapers, columnists (Dave Barry is there) etc. There aren't many facts left out! "The single best source for facts on the Net" is how they bill themselves. You be the judge.

http://www.score.org - With the click of a button, you can add 11,000 business mentors to your own small business advisor list! This national non-profit group of volunteer business counselors (Service Corps of Retired Executives) was formed in 1964 and nearly 4.5 million Americans have utilized their services. With their powerful on-line service just insert the topic for which you need help. Up pops a list of counselors for you to pick from. Then just fire away an e-mail covering your issue. These on-line counselors are well versed in how to develop effective business plans and create strategies for business growth along with hundreds of other topics. The service is free, confidential and available to all US citizens.

http://www.acronymfinder.com - Decode Those Acronyms! If your head is a swirl of letters these days, help is on its way! ARM, FHLMC, REO, ISP, SMPT, POP, FDIC, UPS, OPEC. We live in a world of acronyms! The Acronym Finder is a searchable database of more than 172,000 abbreviations and acronyms about computers, technology, telecommunications, the military plus many other assorted abbreviations. These folks make it easy. Just enter the jumble of letters, click and up pops the translation.

http://oxymoronlist.com/  - The weird world of Oxymoron's. You may not realize how often and how many contradictory phrases like "deafening silence" and "organized chaos" pop up in the English language until you visit a Web site devoted to listing them. As if that weren't entertaining enough, the list is sprinkled with tongue-in-cheek entries like "domestic bliss" and "legal brief." Here are some more: Government Organization,  Alone Together, Personal Computer, Silent Scream,  Living Dead, Same Difference,  Taped Live,  Plastic Glasses,  Tight Slacks,  Peace Force, Pretty Ugly, Head Butt, Working Vacation, Tax Return, Virtual Reality, Dodge Ram, Work Party, Jumbo Shrimp, Healthy Tan and  Microsoft Works

http://www.phonespell.org/  - PhoneSpell - 3 services in one! Enter a 6 to 10 digit phone number and they'll show you what words and phrases your phone number spells. Moving? Pick a new 7 or 8 digit phone number by typing in an available exchange (first 3 to 5 digits) and see what one-word numbers you can choose from. For the truly lazy, you can type in letters and they'll show you the corresponding phone number.