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Spammers Announce World War III
schliz writes with the stub of a disheartening article at IT News: "Hackers are deluging web users with malware-laden spam claiming that World War III has started following a US invasion of Iran. Security experts warned [yesterday] that spam emails with subject lines including 'Third World War has begun,' '20000 US Soldiers in Iran,' and 'US Army crossed Iran's borders' have been intercepted. The emails contain links to a malicious webpage that displays what appears to be a video player showing the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion."
Doesn't spam generally imply that something is being sold?
... quaint, now. The good ol' days.
Bot nets are used to push out more malware-pushing content, the better to grow the bot net. These can be used very effectively to extort cash from web site operators by means of a site-debilitating distributed denial of service attacks. Many bot nets are used to try hugely random (and somewhat successful) SQL injection attacks from all sorts of random IP addresses, the better to target specific users of specific web sites with JS-based malware iFrames, etc. The days of just trying to get you to buy something are
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The problem with the Prius is the energy cost of battery production. While the study that came out a while back drew a nonsensical conclusion, it does appear that the lifetime energy cost of the Prius is similar to that of a Hummer.
Supposedly this problem will be greatly mitigated when the new battery plant opens in Fremont, CA. (IIRC it was Fremont, anyway.)
Yes, if one allows breeders nuclear is certainly better than coal; coal puts absolute craploads of nuclear material (including a small percentage of fissile uranium) into the atmosphere; in fact, so much that if you could extract it and use it in nuclear reactors (it is mostly thorium, followed by non-fissile uranium) it would produce more energy than the coal burned.
Coal is horrible, nuclear is potentially not so terrible, but without breeders is definitely pretty foul. Anyway there are two feasible sources of electricity available to us right now: Small-scale wind farms are cheap and easy to build and attach to the grid, and small vertical wind turbines could be installed on almost any roof and grid-tied, and photovoltaic solar panels pay back the energy cost of their production in less than seven years, and have been known to do so for over thirty years.
Solar is kind of dirty, but the wind turbines can be made out of almost anything. And a lot of the dirtiness of solar production is involved in the energy input. But the whole point of the exercise is producing more energy output which requires a minimum additional investment in energy consumption and pollution - so long that it can be done at an acceptable environmental cost.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm tired of this crap about Prius being the same lifetime energy cost as a Hummer. It's total bunk, and here's why: The Hummer's energy cost is in moving a giant object around inefficiently, which expends a lot of energy (Gasoline). The Prius's energy cost is creating it's batteries, which it then uses to move it around a lot more efficiently. However, when the lifetime of the Prius is over, all that energy isn't wasted. The batteries don't disappear. They are still there and can easily (And it's incredibly cost-efficient to do so) be recycled. Thus the 'total energy cost' of the next set of batteries is drastically lower.
So yes, the initial 'startup cost' of the batteries is high, but thereafter the batteries can be recycled an theoretically infinite number of times, which brings it's 'total lifetime energy cost' far below what a Hummer could ever expect.
Those wind turbines are LOUD. Let me put one in your back yard and you'll run screaming from the house in less than 24hrs. ... ask the bird population how much they like us sticking a bunch of food processor blades into the air?
FUD, FUD, FUD.
Modern wind turbines are neither shaped like a propeller, nor do they operate at high speeds. Consequently, they don't make much noise, either.
The most efficient designs are all vertical turbines, many of which actually operate at fairly low RPMs, and some of which were used by the ancient Romans. So actually, ancient wind turbines didn't have these problems either.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"