Friday, June 1, 2007

The World's Smallest Laser For HD DVD And Blue-Ray Discs

Sharp is today's star creating this small gadget for all of us to admire. First they create the largest LCD panel and now they create the smallest blue laser for the Optical disc drives. The larger, the smaller, the faster the better they will do on their sales.

Pocket GPS Navigator With Some Additional

GPS navigators have become very popular nowadays. You can go to a part of country that you do not really know and still find places that you need or want to visit. Garmin Nuvi Vehicle GPS is the right thing for you to have. This gadget can do more things then just tell you where to go.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Ixia Launches True 10 Gigabit Ethernet Test Device

Test equipment maker Ixia announced the industry's first true 10 Gigabit Ethernet test platform at Interop here.

The new XM12X 10 Gigabit Ethernet module, which is designed around the recently approved IEEE 802.3an-2006 standard for 10GBASE-T, contains 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and one 10GBASE-T port. The 12 on-board processors allow the module to completely fill either the 10 Gigabit ports or the 10 Gigabit port with full Layer 2 through 7 traffic. The traffic is user configurable to match the specific test needs of users.

Xirrus Shows 11n Multi-Gigabit Wi-Fi Array

Xirrus, maker of high capacity long range Wi-Fi access points, is showing a new, faster array that uses 802.11n to provide gigabit throughput.

Canon, Toshiba Delay Launch Of 'SED' Televisions

Japanese high-tech giants Canon Inc. and Toshiba Corp. said Friday they had decided to postpone indefinitely the launch of a new type of flat television panel which is mired in legal wrangling.

Keylogging Trojan Dodges Anti-virus Detection

A new variant of the Russian Trojan Gozi is circulating on the Web, this time armed with a keylogging function and the ability to scramble itself so it is difficult to detect by anti-virus software.

Friday, May 4, 2007

Unrest in Cyberspace

Residents of the virtual world Second Life rise up to protest technical troubles brought on by a burgeoning population.

The overseers of Second Life, a complex and booming virtual world hailed by many as the first step toward an immersive 3-D Internet, attempted yesterday to calm angry cyber-citizens who have petitioned for fixes to technical bugs recently plaguing the world.

The main problem, in members' eyes: Second Life is growing so fast that it's straining Linden Lab's resources to the limit, including its developers' ability to fix old bugs and roll out new software versions that don't introduce new problems. In a town-hall meeting yesterday inside Second Life, the company appealed for patience.

"We are working to fix bugs and enable incremental improvement," said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab, the venture-funded San Francisco startup that launched Second Life in 2003. The town-hall meeting was hastily arranged in response to a damning open letter published by irritated Second Life residents on April 30. "At the same time, we are building the foundations for the next-gen architecture that will radically improve our ability to scale," Ondrejka said.

Every day, some 25,000 computer owners, plus teams from dozens of major corporations, are rushing to join Second Life. But as these new members buy virtual land, set up house for their avatars, and start in-world businesses, the strain on the Second Life "grid" is increasing. Linden Lab is adding more than 120 new servers every week, according to Ondrejka, but users say that the company still isn't keeping up. Complaints have piled up in Second Life forums and blogs from longtime users impatiPublishent over frequent slowdowns and crashes, property that goes missing, messages that aren't delivered, search and friend-finder functions that don't work, purchases that aren't completed, and poor to nonexistent customer service and technical support.

The dissatisfaction culminated this week in the open letter, which demands that Linden Lab address the bugs "immediately," before rolling out planned features such as voice chat. More than 3,000 Second Life users have signed the letter so far.

"People feel that Linden Lab is failing them because they are paying a great deal, in some cases, for a product that is failing to work acceptably, from a company that will no longer communicate with its customers," says one signer, a United Kingdom-based IT manager known within Second Life as Inigo Chamerberlin.

Ondrejka spent most of the hour-long meeting answering residents' questions about the origins of the problems and explaining the steps his team of programmers plans to take to improve performance. As Ondrejka explained at the meeting and in an entry on the company's blog, many of the problems resulted from unnoticed errors in the most recent release of the simulation software and the viewer software that users must download to their PCs. Those errors are quickly being fixed, Ondrejka said.

But the company faces a far deeper challenge, in the form of an overall software architecture that wasn't designed to support as many people and transactions as Second Life now ho

Friday, April 27, 2007

Safari Browser Exploit Produced Within 9 Hours In Hacking Competition

Shane Macaulay and Dino Dai Zovi, a software engineer and security researcher taking part in the brilliantly named "PWN to Own" Hack-a-Mac contest at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, managed to hack into and take control of a MacBook by finding a security exploit that takes advantage of an open Safari browser window. Shane and his teammate Dino won the prize of a brand new MacBook -- presumably loaded with Firefox or some other browser variant -- for managing to find the hole on the second and final day of the contest.

The hack wasn't exactly a breeze, since the pair admitted to a total of 9 hours in order to find and exploit the weakness. Apple has patched OS X four times over the last year to fix dozens of security updates, and only regurgitated the corporate line when asked for comment on this particular vulnerability. ("Apple takes security very seriously", well duh!)

Even with the recent arousal of interest in Mac OS security, the world has yet to see any kind of exploit released into the wild world web; when / if one does, we'd probably expect the most damaging exploit to use good ol' social engineering rather than a complicated hack like this. Still, Mac users should take some form of satisfaction from knowing that the issue of Mac security is being investigated, rather than being taken for granted.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Top 10 Internet Crimes of 2006


The IC3 (Internet Crime Complaint Center) , a partnership betweeen the FBI and the NW3C (National White Collar Crime Center) issued a report for the year 2006.

In 2006, IC3 processed more than 200,481 complaints that support Internet crime investigations by law enforcement and regulatory agencies nationwide. These complaints were composed of many different fraud types such as auction fraud, non-delivery, and credit/debit card fraud, as well as non-fraudulent complaints, such as computer intrusions, spam/unsolicited e-mail, and child pornography. All of these complaints are accessible to federal, state, and local law enforcement to support active investigations, trend analysis, and public outreach and awareness efforts.

From the submissions, IC3 referred 86,279 complaints of crime to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies around the country for further consideration. The vast majority of cases were fraudulent in nature and involved a financial loss on the part of the complainant. The total dollar loss from all referred cases of fraud was $198.44 million with a median dollar loss of $724.00 per complaint. This is up from $183.12 million in total reported losses in 2005. Other significant findings related to an analysis of referrals include:

• Internet auction fraud was by far the most reported offense, comprising 44.9% of referred complaints. Non-delivered merchandise and/or payment accounted for 19.0% of complaints. Check fraud made up 4.9% of complaints. Credit/debit card fraud, computer fraud, confidence fraud, and financial institutions fraud round out the top seven categories of complaints referred to law enforcement during the year.
• Of those individuals who reported a dollar loss, the highest median losses were found among Nigerian letter fraud ($5,100), check fraud ($3,744), and other investment fraud ($2,695) complainants.

• Among perpetrators, 75.2% were male and half resided in one of the following states: California, New York, Florida, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. The majority of reported perpetrators were from the United States. However, a significant number of perpetrators where also located in United Kingdom, Nigeria, Canada, Romania, and Italy.

• Among complainants, 61.2% were male, nearly half were between the ages of 30 and 50 and one-third resided in one of the four most populated states: California, Texas, Florida, and New York. While most were from the United States, IC3 received a number of complaints from Canada, Great Britain, Australia, India, and Germany.
• Males lost more money than females (ratio of $1.69 dollars lost per male to every $1.00 dollar lost per female). This may be a function of both online purchasing differences by gender and the type of fraudulent schemes by which the individuals were victimized.

• Electronic mail (e-mail) (73.9%) and webpages (36.0%) were the two primary mechanisms by which the fraudulent contact took place.


• Recent high activity scams seen by IC3 include hit man scams, phishing attempts associated with spoofed sites, and counterfeit checking scams.

The total dollar loss from all referred cases of fraud in 2006 was $198.44 million. That loss was greater than 2005 which reported a total loss of $183.12 million. Of those complaints with a reported monetary loss, the mean dollar loss was $2529.90 and the median was $724.00. Sixteen percent (15.6%) of these complaints involved losses of less than $100.00, and (39.4%) reported a loss between $100.00 and $1,000.00. In other words, over half of these cases involved a monetary loss of less than $1,000.00. Nearly a third (31.6%) of the complainants reported losses between $1,000.00 and $5,000.00 and only 13.3% indicated a loss greater than $5,000.00. The highest dollar loss per incident was reported by Nigerian Letter Fraud (median loss of $5,100.00). Check fraud victims, with a median loss of $3,744.00 and investment fraud (median loss of $2,694.99) were other high dollar loss categories. The lowest dollar loss was associated with credit/debit card fraud (median loss of $427.50).3

It's brimming with interesting statistics, including the Top 10 IC3 Complaint Categories:
Category % of complaints
Auction Fraud 44.9%
Non-Delivery 19%
Check Fraud 4.9%
Credit/Debit Card Fraud 4.8%
Computer Fraud 2.8%
Confidence Fraud 2.2%
Financial Instiitutions Fraud 1.6%
Identity Theft 1.6%
Investment Fraud 1.3%
Child Pornography 1.0%

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Tiny Light Bulbs

Ultrasmall light-emitting fibers deposited on electrodes can serve as nanometer-scale light sources.


By depositing narrow light-emitting fibers on a silicon substrate patterned with gold electrodes, researchers at Cornell University have created extremely small light sources with dimensions of only a few hundred nanometers. The fibers are made of a polymer that is embedded with light-emitting molecules, which light up when exposed to an electric field. When the researchers apply voltage to the electrodes, the fiber glows orange at different points, much like Christmas lights, says Hector Abruna, a chemistry and chemical-biology professor at Cornell who is one of the project's leaders.

The researchers use a straightforward technique called electrospinning to lay down the fibers directly on the substrate. Because the method is relatively simple, the light sources should be easy to integrate into lab-on-a-chip devices, where light can be used to detect chemical and biological molecules, such as drugs and proteins, which could be tagged with fluorescent dyes or might absorb a portion of the light. And because the fibers are made of polymers, they could find use in flexible displays. "You can imagine these [fibers] integrated into clothing," says George Malliaras, a Cornell materials-science and engineering professor who is collaborating on the work with Abruna and Harold Craighead at Cornell's Center for Nanobiotechnology.

The extremely small size of the light sources could also lead to novel approaches to doing microscopy, Malliaras says. The fibers range from 150 nanometers to 5 micrometers in diameter. But the light-emitting spots on the fibers measure 240 and 325 nanometers or less. This makes the light sources smaller than the 600-nanometer wavelength of the light that they emit, a property that could be harnessed to develop new microscopy methods.

To electrospin the fibers, the researchers place a tiny droplet of polymer solution on a metal needle tip. Then they apply a voltage difference between the tip and the silicon substrate, which is etched with gold electrodes and is placed a few millimeters away. The voltage causes the droplet to elongate and form a jet that flows down to the substrate. As it moves down, the solvent evaporates, and hardened polymer fibers get deposited on the electrode-covered substrate.

The polymer in this case contains ruthenium-based molecules, which emit light when subjected to an electrical current. When the researchers apply a voltage to the gold electrodes, tiny spots on the stretches of fiber spanning adjacent electrodes glow orange. At high voltages of 100 volts, the light is bright enough that the researchers can see it in the dark in spite of the emitters' small size. "I would say [this] is a breakthrough in the way nanosize light sources are made," says Stefan Bernhard, a chemistry professor at Princeton University.

The electrospinning technique offers multiple advantages. Using the method, one should be able to make fibers with diameters of 50 nanometers or less, which could lead to even smaller light sources, Malliaras says. Plus, the technique should make fabricating nanoscale light emitters on practical lab-on-a-chip devices relatively easy, although one would still need to etch the gold electrodes.

"The distinguishing and extremely interesting aspect of this work is the minute size of the light sources they describe," says John de Mello, who researches nanoscale organic light-emitting devices at Imperial College London. Until now, organic light-emitting devices have typically been about one square millimeter in size, he says, which is ideal for standard lab-on-a-chip applications, such as detecting bacteria or proteins. But the nanometer-sized light sources would be important for niche applications requiring speed and a very small resolution--for example, monitoring how a chemical reaction is proceeding as chemicals flow through microfluidic channels. "This approach offers a means of dramatically improving the resolution of such measurements," de Mello says.

Much research remains to be done, however. For any practical application, the researchers would need to precisely control the arrangement of the fibers on the silicon substrate. But the work is a first step in making nanoscale light sources using a straightforward method, Malliaras says.

Says de Mello, "Once it's known there's a low-cost route to making sub-wavelength light sources, you can be sure somebody will find a use for them. That's the real excitement of this kind of work."

Your Virtual Clone

Chatterbots from MyCyberTwin can respond to questions about you when you're not online.

Historians of artificial intelligence never talk about AI's progress in the 1960s without a reference to Eliza, the first virtual personality. Eliza was a text-chat program written in 1966 by MIT AI expert Joseph Weizenbaum to parody a Rogerian psychotherapist, largely by turning every statement by the "patient" back into a question. If you tell Eliza "I am feeling blue today," it's apt to respond, "Do you enjoy feeling blue today?" To modern users, the pattern is obvious, and the illusion of talking to a real person drops away almost instantly. (See for yourself here or here.) Yet many people who used Eliza when the program was new were convinced, at least temporarily, that it was a real person.

Now there's a Web-based service that, in essence, lets you set up your own Eliza and train it to mimic your own personality. No one will be fooled into thinking it's you, but MyCyberTwin, launched earlier this month, does a decent job of acting as your stand-in or virtual public-relations agent when you're not reachable. If you embed your cybertwin in your blog, website, or MySpace profile, visitors can learn about you through an open-ended conversation. You can program your cybertwin with as much factual information and as much of your personality as you like. If you think visitors to your blog might ask "What are you doing Saturday night?", you can train it to respond "Going to see Harry Potter with friends. Why don't you join us?"

MyCyberTwin is free, up to a point. About 10,500 people have signed up for the service, which is a venture of a Sydney, Australia, company called RelevanceNow and is still in its beta-testing phase. Of course, the concept only goes so far. Like Eliza, your cybertwin has no real intelligence at its core, and it must resort to lame conversational gambits if you haven't provided it with a canned answer to your visitor's specific question. Helpfully, however, the MyCyberTwin site contains extensive tools to help you anticipate those questions, such as personality tests and quizzes about your views on sex, politics, and religion. Those tools are all free too. RelevanceNow plans to make money by charging heavy users, such as businesses, by the conversation if their cybertwins have more than 500 visitors per month; by licensing MyCyberTwin to social-networking sites, which might integrate it into their offerings; and possibly, in the future, through targeted Web advertising.

"We wanted to build software clones of humans that learn about you and effectively function on your behalf," says Liesl Capper, cofounder and CEO of RelevanceNow. "The problem with creating a chat AI is that it's very laborious, trying to think of variations on what people will say and then creating responses. Building one has always been a labor of love that takes months, if not years. What we have built is the ability for people to make a cybertwin really quickly."

"Quickly" is a relative term. If you opt to take advantage of MyCyberTwin's entire collection of training tools, you could easily spend a day or more programming your cybertwin. The reward, however, is a more convincing simulacrum than Eliza or most of the other consumer-level "chatterbots" that have been written since Eliza's day. Because a cybertwin can be armed with limitless information about you, it's much more intimate and engaging to converse with than many competing chatterbots, such as the instant-messaging-based bots from Spleak, avatar-based chatterbots from Verbots, or Microsoft's virtual search assistant, Ms. Dewey.

Of course, academic and corporate AI experts have built more-advanced chatterbots in hopes of one day passing the so-called Turing test by convincing human judges that a machine is human. Since 1991, the annual Loebner Prize competition has offered $25,000 to the programmer of the first chatterbot that passes this test in a text-only conversation; so far, the prize has gone unclaimed. But Jabberwacky, the winner of the smaller $2,000 prize for the most human-seeming chatterbot in 2005 and 2006, is capable of deep and sometimes bizarre conversations that make a cybertwin sound rather vacant. Designed by Rollo Carpenter of the U.K. AI company Icogno, Jabberwacky stores every conversation it has ever had and uses pattern-matching techniques to generate contextually appropriate responses in a new conversation.

For $30 per year, you can get a Jabberwacky chatterbot that mimics your own personality. But it can't be embedded into another website, and it must be trained through lengthy, repetitious conversation. Starting off with MyCyberTwin is far easier: you choose a base personality, such as "warm-hearted, intellectual" or "cheeky, down to earth," and answer about 30 questions about yourself drawn from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a widely used personality-assessment system. After that, however, there are optional "classroom" modules that ask a total of 425 fairly deep questions in 18 subject areas, such as family, humor, philosophy, and politics.

Writing a thoughtful answer to a question such as "What is the meaning of life?" is bound to take at least a few minutes; now multiply that by several hundred. Indeed, the classroom questions are so probing and thorough that I doubt many MyCyberTwin users will put in the work. I made an attempt with my own cybertwin. The basic setup process was simple and easy. But I spent about three hours on the classroom questions and only completed three subject areas.

Once you're finished training your cybertwin, you can give people the link to your personal page at MyCyberTwin.com, or you can make your cybertwin appear on another Web page by pasting the provided code into that page's source HTML. If your cybertwin turns out to be extremely popular and you pass the limit of 500 conversations per month, you can buy more credits for a price that RelevanceNow hasn't yet announced.

Before you put a cybertwin online, be sure to read the company's privacy policy. The MyCyberTwin site and the embedded cybertwin interfaces don't yet contain any advertising, but RelevanceNow does reserve the right to give voluntarily provided personal information to advertisers. This could become a significant revenue source for the company, given that advertisers often pay extra to reach "qualified leads" who have provided demographic data or professed an interest in a specific product area.

Also, be careful what you tell another cybertwin. Although the MyCyberTwin site does not make it obvious, the service actually saves a transcript of every chat session for the perusal of the cybertwin's owner. That's mainly so that visitors can leave information such as phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and requests for more information. But an unsuspecting user who gets into a racy conversation with a cybertwin on the assumption that there's no one at home might be in for some embarrassment.

MyCyberTwin can be a bit slow, taking up to 10 seconds to "think" before it responds to a visitor's question. Nonetheless, creating a MyCyberTwin chatterbot can give your online admirers much deeper, quicker access to your personality and background than dry autobiographical statements or even months of blog entries.

"People are spending a lot of time putting their personalities online," Capper notes, whether through their MySpace pages, blogs, or avatars in virtual worlds such as Second Life. "It may only be for an audience of 10 people, but it's important to them, and it's a taste of things to come. This way, you can have your friends chat to you when you're sleeping. It's about engaging with people and answering their questions without having to go through a hundred e-mails."

Thursday, April 12, 2007

MRI-Compatible Robots

A new motor made of nonmagnetic and dielectric materials can power a robotic medical device inside an MRI scanner, significantly improving cancer diagnoses and treatments.

Engineers at Johns Hopkins University have designed a new motor to be compatible with magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) so that it can drive an image-guided robot for medical applications, such as cancer biopsies and therapies. The MRI-compatible motor makes it possible for doctors to remotely perform procedures within the scanner, using the MRI to guide the robot.

"The real novelty of what they have done is the compatibility with the high-magnetic-field environments like the MRI," says David Trumper, a professor of engineering at MIT.

When physicians perform cancer biopsies on organs such as the prostate gland, they are commonly guided by ultrasound scanners. But such imaging methods are only able to image, for instance, the outer shape of the prostate. Therefore, doctors are blindly picking samples to test, running the risk that they will miss an actual tumor. Surgery guided by an MRI and a remote-controlled robot would be far more accurate because the robotic needle could be aligned directly with the tumor as seen by the MRI. But until now, there has been no device capable of operating inside the scanner's small tunnel without distorting the images, which depend on a strong magnet and electric currents.

The Johns Hopkins robot, built using conventional techniques, was designed to enable transperineal needle access to the prostate under direct MRI guidance. Essential to coming within a millimeter--a necessary level of precision--of the targeted tumor is a new motor specifically developed for this application. The motor provides controllable pneumatic actuation so that the robotic device is able to steadily and slowly move alongside the patient in the MRI scanner, says Dan Stoianovici, an associate professor of urology and mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins and the director of the Urology Robotics program, at which the robot was developed.

The engineers created a new type of pneumatic step motor. It's based on the idea that end-to-end motion of a piston within its cylinder is always exact and is very easy to achieve by pressurizing the cylinder. A pneumatic step motor is not an entirely new concept; previous versions were based on hydraulic and thermal power, but they lacked mechanical efficiency.

The motor designed by the Johns Hopkins engineers has three cylinders connected to a series of gears that achieve rotary motion by being pressurized equally by air flow. The team of engineers used six step motors to power the MRI-compatible robot, MrBot, that they built to give surgeons remote access to the prostate gland. The robotic device is networked with the magnetic-resonance imager so that when an image is taken, it can be mapped through the network connection by way of the robotic controller. The robotic controller is then in the position to start sending air to the robot to get it in motion.

"The motor is low power and low speed, but for the application, it seems pretty well conceived," says Trumper. "It is a cool design."

"The robot is a remarkable achievement," says Ron Rodriguez, associate professor of urology, medical oncology, and cellular and molecular medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. It will allow for more-rapid and -accurate cancer-therapy methods, such as radiation placement, explains Rodriguez.

The next step for the engineers is to test the robotic device in clinical trials. If those tests go well, the researchers will look into the development of additional MRI-compatible robots for other medical procedures.


Boosting the Power of Chemotherapy

Scientists have uncovered genetic targets that could increase lung-cancer cells' sensitivity.

Researchers have used a genome-wide screen to uncover genes that protect lung-cancer cells from Taxol (paclitaxel), a commonly used chemotherapy agent. Without the protection of certain genes, the cancer cells could be killed by drug doses 10,000 times lower than normal. The results could lead to synergistic drug combinations that combat tumors at lower doses with fewer side effects.

The study, performed by researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, is one of the first to use the gene-silencing technique called RNA interference to study drug sensitivity across the entire genome. Led by cell biologist Michael White, the researchers used a library of silencing RNAs to block expression of every known gene in the human genome--there are about 21,000--in only six weeks.

The University of Texas researchers found 87 genes that seemed to regulate the cancer's sensitivity to the chemotherapy drug. Drugs and natural products that interfere with some of these genes already exist, says White, and researchers can now test whether combining these drugs with Taxol leads to a better response.

The results point to "a way to be more savvy about how to combine drugs," says Tito Fojo, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute's Center for Cancer Research, although he cautions that "some trial and error" will still be required.

Cancer patients' responses to chemotherapy agents such as Taxol vary widely and unpredictably. Some patients do not get better; some do but later relapse as their tumors grow resistant to the drug. "We want to identify the molecular basis of the capacity of cancer cells to respond to a drug," says White. Taxol is given to most lung-cancer patients and is also a common treatment for breast and ovarian cancers. Like all chemotherapy, it causes side effects including pain, nausea, and tingling. A combination treatment that would allow the drug to be given at a much lower dose could make chemotherapy easier on patients.

To identify the target genes, the researchers used an RNA-interference library made commercially available only in the past year and a half. The library allows scientists to reliably silence every human gene.

That broad sweep pointed toward a role for some surprising genes in protecting the cancer cells from Taxol. The drug works by interfering with cell division, but many of the genes uncovered in the Texas screen, such as a sperm-specific protein often found in ovarian-cancer cells, are not implicated in that process.

While the Texas study uncovered some genes that seem to make cancer cells more vulnerable to Taxol than normal cells are, Fojo cautions that new therapies won't be on the way unless there are good drugs to take advantage of these vulnerabilities. "The more we understand about how drugs work, the better," he says. "We're going to see a lot of use of [RNA interference] in this matter."


Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Cargill's controversial soya port closed in the Amazon

Santarém, Brazil — In the heart of the Amazon rainforest a huge soya port owned by the giant US company Cargill has just been closed down by the Brazilian Environmental Agency (IBAMA). The orders to close the port came after a seven-year legal battle by the Brazilian Federal Prosecutors over Cargill's failure to provide an environmental impact assessment for the facility.

The port facilities, built by Cargill in Santarém, has been at the centre of a controversy as huge tracts of the Amazon were being destroyed to grow soya which was shipped from the facility to Europe, to provide cheap feed for chicken which is then sold in fast food outlets and supermarkets.

It's been a long struggle. Since 2000 the Federal Ministry of Public Prosecution (MPF) has been engaged in legal battle in order to have a thorough Environmental Impacts Assessment carried out. However, instead of complying with Brazilian environmental law, Cargill has exploited the shortcomings of a complex Brazilian legal system to buy time to construct and operate the terminal without assessing its potentially enormous environmental impacts.

"This is an important day for the Amazon rainforest and for its people. A big step forward has been taken in enforcing the responsible use of natural resources and bringing greater governance in the Amazon," said Paulo Adario, Greenpeace Amazon Campaign Coordinator in Brazil.

"We trust that Cargill will respect the judiciary and conduct a broad environmental impact assessment, which will result in concrete measures to minimize the impacts by its port and soya expansion in the region. In that way, the company will also confirm its commitment to the moratorium on further deforestation for soya planting, announced by the soya sector in Brazil

Eating up the Amazon' revealed that the world-wide demand for soya has been fuelling deforestation of the world's biggest tropical rainforest. In May last year, we launched a high-profile protest in the region, blocking Cargill's Santarem port with our ship, the Arctic Sunrise.

Last year also saw McDonald's being flipped from 'bad guy' to 'good guy' by consumers after it was revealed they purchased soya grown on the ashes of the Amazon rainforest. The unique alliance between Greenpeace and McDonald's that followed was instrumental in creating a moratorium on further destruction of the Amazon for soya.

The suspension of Cargill port activities in Santarém is the culmination of years of demands by the local communities and the people who are fighting the expansion of soya cultivation in the Amazon. Soya and other agricultural products are key drivers for deforestation, threatening huge loss of biodiversity and contributing to climate change.
last year."

Saturday, March 24, 2007

The Unnatural Museum - The Bermuda Triangle

No doubt you have wondered about the Bermuda Triangle. It is the greatest modern mystery of our supposedly well understood world: a region of the Atlantic Ocean between Bermuda, Miami, Florida, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, where disappearance of ships

The Bermuda Triangle is a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by a line from Florida to the islands of Bermuda, to Puerto Rico and then back to Florida. It is one of the biggest mysteries of our time - that isn't really a mystery.

The term "Bermuda Triangle" was first used in an article written by Vincent H. Gaddis for Argosy magazine in 1964. In the article Gaddis claimed that in this strange sea a number of ships and planes had disappeared without explanation. Gaddis wasn't the first one to come to this conclusion, either. As early as 1952 George X. Sands, in a report in Fate magazine, noted what seemed like an unusually large number of strange accidents in that region.

In 1969 John Wallace Spencer wrote a book called Limbo of the Lost specifically about the triangle and, two years later, a feature documentary on the subject, The Devil's Triangle, was released. These, along with the bestseller The Bermuda Triangle, published in 1974, permanently registered the legend of the "Hoodoo Sea" within popular culture.

Several books suggested that the disappearances were due to an intelligent, technologically advanced race living in space or under the sea.

The only problem was that the mystery was more hype than reality. In 1975 a librarian at Arizona State University, named Larry Kusche, decided to investigate the claims made by these articles and books. What he found he published in his own book entitled The Bermuda Triangle Mystery-Solved. Kusche had carefully dug into records other writers had neglected. He found that many of the strange accidents were not so strange after all. Often a triangle writer had noted a ship or plane had disappeared in "calms seas" when the record showed a raging storm had been in progress. Others said ships had "mysteriously vanished" when their remains had actually been found and the cause of their sinking explained.

More significantly a check of Lloyd's of London's accident records by the editor of Fate in 1975 showed that the triangle was a no more dangerous part of the ocean than any other. U.S. Coast Guard records confirmed this and since that time no good arguments have ever been made to refute those statistics. So the Bermuda Triangle mystery disappeared, in the same way many of its supposed victims had vanished.

Even though the Bermuda Triangle isn't a true mystery, this region of the sea certainly has had its share of marine tragedy. Perhaps the best known one was the story of Flight 19.

www.bermuda-triangle.org/

Friday, March 23, 2007

The Basics Of Customizing Wordpress Templates

Do you want to change the look of your WordPress site or maybe to put something like a banner or adsense code on your blog? In order to do this you need to know about three important things: template...
Author: Heris Yunora

Do you want to change the look of your WordPress site or maybe to put something like a banner or adsense code on your blog? In order to do this you need to know about three important things: template files, functions and CSS.

- Template Files

These files are stored in a directory (wp-content/themes/template-name/). So if you are using "default theme", you need to access the files that are stored in "wp-content/themes/default/" directory.

There are several common WordPress template files you should know:

1.header.php

This file is responsible for the appearance of the top section of your blog. If you want to change the header image, you have to access this file. Not only that, this file is also the place to add Meta Tags.

2.footer.php

Similar to the header.php, this file is loaded everytime any page or post of your blog is accessed. It is used to store the HTML tags and the code for the bottom section of your blog.

3.sidebar.php

A sidebar is a section which is usually used to display site navigation. Depending on the theme you are using, a sidebar usually provides links to archives, pages and latest posts.

4.index.php

In fact this file is the main template file. When someone visits the homepage of your blog site, this file will be loaded. Then he/she will see the contents (not the source code) of this file. If you want to make the appearance of your blog become similar to a common website, where there is a static description on the homepage, you may try to put the static content in this file.

Besides those files, a theme usually has some other template files with different purposes. For example, the archives.php is a file used to display posts you made in the past. Then the search.php is used to generate search results.

- Functions

A function is a blog of code to accomplish a specific task. In order to modify template files, you don't need to master any programming language. Although having a little knowledge in PHP, you can work faster. In WordPress, the name of a function is usually related to its purpose. For instance, "the_title()" is a function to display the title of a post and "the_content()" is used to display its content. Another example is "blog_info()" which is responsible for displaying the name or description of your blog, depending on the given argument (additional data).

- CSS

Style Sheet is a facility to manage the format and layout of a website efficiently. Without using it, changing small things such as the font type or the background color of all of your webpages is a daunting task where you have to do it page by page. But with the existence of style sheet, one change you make can affect the whole site. You should know that in WordPress a different theme may have a different css file. You also need to know that some styles may be defined in the header.php file. If you are using the "default theme", you have to access the header.php file in order to change the background color or the header image of your blog, not the css file.

Finally, before you customize the templates, it is highly recommended to backup any files you intend to change. If something doesn't work properly, you can always go back to the original settings.


Data Recovery - Let Your Hard Drive Cool

There are many reasons for the hard drive failures. Of course, when you lose your data, you think less about the causes of its loss, but more about the data, itself. However, if you were to learn about the cost of the hard drive data recovery, you would rather prevent it, especially, from the most common reason of hard drive damage overheating.

Learn, How to choose The Best File Recovery Solution


http://www.newsonfocus.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=578&Itemid=14

No matter what we do with our computer, storage is an important part of our system. Nowadays, we have been holding more and more information on our PC. Most computer users no longer keep their documents, letters, music, photos, pictures, etc. in hard copies, but store them on different data storage devices, preferentially the most popular one – the hard drive, counting on it's reliability.

In old drives, the rotating speed was low, so the overheating problem did not exist. However, most recent hard disks, with a speed of 7200-10000 RPM, heat up during their work, and the temperature inside rises up to 70 C and above. Of course, hard drives are now manufactured with internal temperature sensors, computers have fans, coolers, and other gadgets to prevent overheating, and software utilities indicate the temperature of your hard drive. Contemporary hard drive models are able to operate at 50-55 C, but we should point out that the hard drives are more sensitive to high temperatures than any other computer parts. The fact that the hard drives carry your precious data is indeed important, as well as its ultimate loss would be a disaster to you. There are data loss situations when even the most advanced data recovery companies can't guarantee that you will receive you data back.

Vital Data Recovery - Montreal, Quebec, Canada (http://www.vitaldata.ca) . Vital Data is data recovery company, which specializes in recovering data from hard disk drives and other media. Vital Data Recovery offers the most technologically advanced hard drive data recovery available.

Article Source:http://www.Articlestreet,com

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

LALU KE KHEL MAIN PISSTI RAIL

Railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, these days, is fully occupied in preparing his people-friendly budget on Feb 26. Like last year, this year too there are not going to be any major hikes in the railway fares or in freight rates.

After his party, the RJD, fared badly in the Bihar assembly elections, he is in no mood to invite the wrath of the electorate by raising train fares. Thus it is clear that under `Lalunomics’ the Railways would continue to bear further losses. Call it the charisma of Lalu, that from the time, he took over as the Railway minister, nobody has dared to look into the losses being faced by the Railways. Even the media, by informing only the profits being earned by the Railways, have sung peons in Lalu’s name. However, the truth speaks otherwise as the ministry has not been able to bring down the passenger trains losses being faced every year. According to an estimate, the Railways are facing an annual loss of Rs 6300 crores from passenger trains and parcel business. Last year it was proposed to bring down this loss by 50pc but it has not happened. The railway minister had proposed about three dozen plans to take the organisation out from the red, but it seems all related plans have met their end under the weight of the files. Some schemes did start but did not make much progress. The ministry had decided to overcome the losses being suffered by passenger trains, numbering 900, by introducing pantry car services. By this the railways had estimated to earm Rs 130 crores but this service could be started only in 16 trains. Besides, the railways had aimed to earn Rs 900 cr by setting up food stalls of branded cos on platforms. But this plan also did not succeed. The announcement of `Garib Rath’ for making the ordinary passenger sit in cool environs of AC coaches too has failed to materialise. Even the officials admit of its impracticality. Moreso Lalu’s ambitious train is even unable to earn the transport expenses for these `raths’.They are on the top of loss.