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POPSAbout 90 percent of all email is spam: Cisco
This year, botnets were used to inject an array of legitimate Websites with an IFrames malicious code that reroutes visitors to websites that download computer viruses into their machines, according to Cisco. "The botnet is, in many cases, ground-zero for online criminal threats," Peterson said. "Using malware to infect someone's computers is an incredibly common mechanism and harnessing them all together is a way they do their click fraud, spam emails, and data stealing." As computer security vendors such as Cisco get better at protecting machines from hackers and users grow wary of clicking on unsolicited Web links or email attachments, online criminals are turning botnets on Web-based email accounts. Hackers are "reputation hijacking" by using botnets to figure out weak passwords protecting Web-based email accounts, according to Peterson. Weak passwords consist of family names, birthdays, home addresses, or other terms considered relatively easy to deduce.
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POPSUSA VP Cheney Admits Approving Torture
This story comes from a TV interview yesterday. By way of background info, torture is a war crime and waterboarding is torture. Also, after World War II the U.S. convicted and sentenced to death and hung Japanese prison officials who did waterboarding. So now what? -- Well, of course there should be war crime trials, as I and hundreds of thousands of others have been strongly advocating for the last few years. Yet the current now news spin is: "The Democrats/Congress might not want to do anything about this, like it might be 'too messy,' or distract from their agenda. !? People have done well in getting a good number of better leaders this past election but now lobbying pressure - activist pressure -- advocating pressure is needed. JUSTICE - is the word we want to impress upon them. JUSTICE & ACCOUNTABILITY. Part of the issue, it seems, is Special Privileges Politicians think they have special privileges. Cheney must believe he can get away with murder and t
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POPSCHENEY FOR TORTURE AND GTMO He seems to be really proud and defiant. Not even jail would change this man's convictions. He considers himself a ground breaker and sort of a holy man for a holy cause. His religion is death and destruction.
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POPSWhen Charities Need Help! These are difficult times - even more so for charities than for for profit businesses. People have less money to give. Here's a professional who's made a career of helping the needy - in double time!
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POPSOne World, Many Minds: Intelligence in the Animal Kingdom In recent decades scientists have cast aside a linear, sequential view of brain evolution in which the human brain incorporates components resembling the brains of modern fishes, amphibians, reptiles and birds and have adopted a new view of divergently branching brain and mind evolution. Substantial cognitive abilities have evolved multiple times, based on differing neural substrates—including the mental agility that enables us humans to decipher brain evolution and its meaning
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POPSRed Carpet Rolled Out for the Poor Cooperating agencies, including the National Urban League and Washington's Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, will help the foundation identify people to be invited and help them get to Washington. Stafford has said he also plans to reach out to homeless shelters, community organizations and military hospitals in search of guests. Stafford was asked whether Obama might attend the Marriott events. "That certainly would be icing on the cake," he said. Lavern Chatman, president of the Northern Virginia Urban League, said the idea was not to have all the Stafford guests be disadvantaged. Organizers also want some movers and shakers so the disadvantaged and well-heeled can mingle.
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POPSYou won't give him money for food, but what about his dog?
More: Genevieve Frederick is the executive director and founder of Feeding Pets of the Homeless, a national charity based out of Carson, Nev., that collects and distributes dog food for homeless individuals. Other than her work to feed homeless animals, a lot of what Frederick does is to help inform people about what issues actually face the homeless and their dogs, and to distinguish those from stereotypes…a portion of homeless individuals have some sort of mental disorders, whether it be mild depression or severe schizophrenia.… for a lot of homeless people, a pet is their connection to reality. "When they walk in a park, people now look at them, where before people treated them as invisible…They're making a connection with society." …a book on the subject, titled "Pet-oriented Child Psychotherapy." Levinson wrote that a pet that responds to care and affection and that response to care can mean the difference between contact with reality and withdrawal into fantasy.
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POPSGadget Makes Water Out Of Air How much power does it use? What size solar array would it need to crank out 12 liters a day? And do areas with the 30 percent or better relative humidity this gadget needs have water problems? Can anyone weigh in on this?
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POPSObama Advisers to Public: Temper Expectations Surprise! Surprise! But he was The One, the Messiah. With a snap of his fingers he was going to make all things new. He rose those "expectations", so now deal with it. "We are inheriting an array problems unlike any president has faced, maybe since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932," ..." Oh please; they're crying for sympathy and shoveling the blame. Now that they're in the Big House, things aren't as simple or as manageable as they sound on the campaign trail.
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POPSTutorial: Concrete vs. Abstract Thinking
The Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham "ends with the narrator changing his mind from rejecting green eggs and ham under any circumstances to trying them and actually liking them. At a concrete level of understanding, the story is about a stubborn person changing his mind. At a more abstract level of understanding, it is about people in general being capable of modifying their thoughts and desires even when they are convinced that they cannot or do not want to do so. This more abstract level of understanding can be appreciated by two and three year old children only if the higher level of meaning comes out of a discussion of the book with a more mature adult. At older ages and higher levels of thinking, this same process of more mature thinkers facilitating higher levels of abstraction in less mature thinkers characterizes the process of teaching abstract thinking. For example, this is how great philosophers, like Socrates and Plato, taught their pupils how to think abstractly. "
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POPSDolly Parton Vs. Google I sympathize with event producers, and it feels wrong to disagree with Dolly -- but come on. If we make that spectrum available to the public, the benefit to consumers is huge, and it's easy enough to regulate them to avoid interference.
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POPSECRI: No End in Sight to Recession Wow! Cheerful! We're at the point where everything is bad. Nobody believes in the future. Feels horrible, though. And for states and local governments, it's just starting because of the lag time involved with collecting tax revenues. If anyone had the guts to be a contrarian and swim against the tide, it would seem that the time is at hand.
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POPSSpray-on solar cells
continues: "I think these materials have a lot more potential than traditional silicon," Jiang said. "They could be sprayed on any surface that is exposed to sunlight — a uniform, a car, a house." Another type of solar cell scientists are trying to develop are dye-sensitized cells, which so far are slightly less efficient than silicon cells, which convert about 12 percent of the sunlight that hits them into electricity. Typical organic cells only manage about 3 percent, prompting some scientists to caution praise for their use. Jiang and her colleagues made 20 tiny cells — each the size of a lower case "o" in standard 12-point print — and joined them together in an array to power the microscopic detector. The detector needs a 15-volt power source to work, and so far Jiang's solar cell array can provide about half of that — up to 7.8 volts in the lab tests she and her colleagues did. The next step, Jiang said, is to increase the voltage and then combine the tiny solar array
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POPSThe Sun Go to the site for jaw-dropping hi-res, an animation that won't clip and detailed captions.
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POPS"Will We Soon find Life in the Heavens?" 'let's hope there's intelligent life somewhere up in Space 'cos there's bugger all down here on earth" continues In the coming months, two new tools will greatly expand astrobiologists' capacity to hear and see other promising signs of life. Later this summer, the nonprofit SETI Institute, named with the acronym for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, will begin listening for alien broadcasts on the new $50 million Allen Telescope Array. A spread of 42 radio dishes in California's Cascade Mountains, the array is the first such facility built specifically to listen for E.T. "We're looking for life that's clever enough to hold up its side of the conversation," says Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. The array, half funded by Microsoft mogul Paul Allen, will search for alien signals at a clip "hundreds to thousands times faster" than current SETI projects, says Shostak.
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