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From USA today:
Unprotected PCs can be hijacked in minutes: Simply connecting to the Internet — and doing nothing else — exposes your PC to non-stop, automated break-in attempts by intruders looking to take control of your machine surreptitiously.
There is always the Macintosh...
If you have not seen this already, definitely check out the Weight Watchers Recipes from 1974. Did anyone ever really eat fluffy mackerel pudding?
I am not sure what is most disturbing about this study: Economic And Health Consequences Of Selling A Kidney In India
1. That people actually do this
2. That they found enough people to do a study
3. That these people are desperate enough to think this would be ultimately beneficial for them
Objective: To determine the economic and health effects of selling a kidney.
Conclusions: Among paid donors in India, selling a kidney does not lead to a long-term economic benefit and may be associated with a decline in health. Physicians and policy makers should reexamine the value of using financial incentives to increase the supply of organs for transplantation.
Feel like reaching through the screen and choking someone, but for politeness' sake you are forced to reply with a friendly e-mail? Watch this funny bit on the creative re-interpretation of punctuation.
We think of Florida as the land where old people go, but maybe California (or at least coastal California) will become the land of the old (and the rich) as young people cannot afford to live there.
"A fourth of all Californians [particularly younger ones] are thinking about moving either out of state or just to another town to bring down their housing costs, a new survey shows."
I don't really understand. I would be willing to bet that most of the election officials in charge have used a desktop computer that has crashed or hung or otherwise died on them, so why would they not think that an electronic voting machine could screw up, and that a paper backup would not be necessary?
This certainly seems like a cartoon: the wrong way to get a car out of the harbor. How did the car get in there in the first place? (Courtesy of our friends over at the third rail)
An interesting map and cartogram (a map in which the states have been rescaled according to their population) analysis of the voting results of the election.
The blue coastal states and the red interior states - how many times have you heard this on the news and read it in the newspaper? If one actually looks a bit closer, though, pattern looks more like this: blue cities and red suburbs and rural areas. Sean Wilentz has a great commentary in the Los Angeles Times on this split in the electorate (permanent link).
Want to get your digital photos printed (professionally) but not sure where to upload them to? Here is a basic comparison of what looks to be all of the online photo printing sites. There are 92 of them listed currently.
I have only used shutterfly.com, and the prints were pretty good.
The Institute for Justice (a libertarian organization) has an interesting map on interstate wine and alcohol shipping restrictions.
Public transit and technology are slowly converging. Paying your bus fare with your mobile phone is interesting and possibly faster, but it is it worth the implementation cost? At what point do the economies of scale and the potential time savings make it worth the investment?
There are some harsh words being written across the Atlantic because of our recent choice in presidents:
"THEY say that in life you get what you deserve. Well, today America has deservedly got a lawless cowboy to lead them further into carnage and isolation and the unreserved contempt of most of the rest of the world."
The New York Times tries to get some New Yorkers to shed some light on the cultural difference between New York City and the rest of the country, since the city voted overwhelmingly for Kerry and the rest of the country did not (permanent link). It would have been interesting if they have gone out to some place in say, Kansas, and asked people there what they thought about the difference in voting also. The "greatest city in the world" mentality definitely comes out in this article.
The Times of London has an article on inexpensive hotels in Manhattan (permanent link), part of a series on inexpensive hotels in major cities.
If you have not stopped using Internet Explorer already and started using Firefox, you definitely should. Sometimes even a young kid can help build something that causes Microsoft a bit of pain.
There is a new book out on spam: Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements
More than sixty percent of today's email traffic is spam, according to email filtering firm Brightmail. This year alone, five trillion spam messages will clog Internet users in-boxes, costing society an estimated USD10-billion in lost productivity, filtering software, and other expenses. Spam Kings:The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and Penis Enlargements is the first book to expose the shadowy world of the people responsible for the junk email problem.
Some people could have a surprise at the polls today, if they registered through a shady partisan consulting company named Sproul & Associates.
These guys are really serious about their balloon hats. And pretty damn good at them too.