Views from the Solar System (9)

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SPACE WATCH

NASA and Navy Veteran John Young
NASA – NASA salutes our country’s veterans this Veteran’s Day 2011.

In today’s image, John Young, astronaut and Navy veteran, salutes the U.S. flag at the Descartes landing site during the first Apollo 16 extravehicular activity (EVA-1). Young, commander of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, jumps up from the lunar surface as astronaut and Air Force veteran, Charles M. Duke Jr., lunar module pilot, took this picture.

The Lunar Module (LM) “Orion” is on the left. The Lunar Roving Vehicle is parked beside the LM. The object behind Young in the shade of the LM is the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph. Stone Mountain dominates the background in this lunar scene. Image Credit: NASA, Charles M. Duke Jr.

The problem is Europe, the solution … is Europe

By David Rothkopf – Europe is a generalization. As recent events have demonstrated yet again, sharing a continent with someone doesn’t necessarily make you their countryman … or even capable of cooperating with them when it is in your mutual self-interest.

Europe’s success stories not only quash absurd assertions that having a state with a strong social safety net is the problem, they offer examples that might be well followed outside Europe; say, in the United States, home to another broken, corrupted version of capitalism.

The point is that some parts of Europe are not only working well, but can be examples worth emulating — both by the continent’s more reckless debtors and the United States itself. more> http://tinyurl.com/cf2en6o

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• Financial crisis: Punishment Europe (theneteconomy.wordpress.com)
• Is Europe On The Verge Of Another Great Depression – Or A Great Inflation? (baselinescenario.com)
• Europe’s Economic Measures Too Little Too Late (usnews.com)
• Europe’s Structural Reforms Are Serious (usnews.com)
• American exceptionalism (tigerhawk.blogspot.com)

Euro zone failure could be vast geopolitical shock

By Peter Apps – Any euro zone failure would send shock waves around the globe, shifting the balance of geopolitical power and perhaps prompting a fundamental reassessment of what the world’s future might look like.

Suddenly, pundits, policymakers and other observers find themselves questioning one of their most fundamental assumptions — that an increasingly united Europe would be a key player in a newly multipolar world. more> http://tinyurl.com/d3eone5

Related articles

• Failing on Greece, EU must ring-fence Italy (theneteconomy.wordpress.com)
• Merkel rebuffs Sarkozy on euro zone solution (theneteconomy.wordpress.com)
• Euro zone debt deal tackles symptoms not cause (theneteconomy.wordpress.com)
• What if the eurozone implodes? (business.financialpost.com)
• Game Over? Reuters Says Germany, France Exploring Idea Of Core Euro Zone, End Of Existing Structure (zerohedge.com)
• France, Germany Explore Plans To Radically Overhaul European Union (huffingtonpost.com)

Weird world of water gets a little weirder

R&D Mag – Pradeep Kumar of Rockefeller University New York and H. Eugene Stanley of Boston University explain that water is one weird substance, exhibiting more than 80 unusual properties, by one count, including some that scientists still struggle to understand. For example, water can exist in all three states of matter (solid, liquid,gas) at the same time.

In another strange turn, scientists have proposed that water can go from being one type of liquid into another in a so-called “liquid-liquid” phase transition, but it is impossible to test this with today’s laboratory equipment because these things happen so fast. more> http://tinyurl.com/cearka3

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• Snow Crystal
• Weird Gets Weirder (talkingpointsmemo.com)
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• Weird world of water gets a little weirder (eurekalert.org)
• Weird world of water gets a little weirder with a new anomaly (physorg.com)

FBI takes out $14M DNS malware operation

Image via Wikipedia

By Michael Cooney/Layer 8 – Details of the two-year FBI investigation called Operation Ghost Click were announced today (11/9/11) in New York when a federal indictment was unsealed against six Estonian nationals and one Russian national. The six cyber criminals were taken into custody yesterday in Estonia by local authorities, and the U.S. will seek to extradite them. In conjunction with the arrests, U.S. authorities seized computers and rogue DNS servers at various locations.

Beginning in 2007, the cyber thieves used malware known as DNSChanger to infect computers worldwide, the FBI said. DNSChanger redirected unsuspecting users to rogue servers controlled by the cyber thieves, letting them manipulate users’ web activity. more> http://tinyurl.com/7xghtz9

Related articles

• IBM Security Services, StrategyGroup
• FBI, Estonian police execute ‘biggest cybercriminal takedown in history’ (business.financialpost.com)
• FBI shutters $14m major click-jacking fraud; 4 million computers affected (zdnet.com)
• In the Wake of Estonian FBI Bust, Have You Checked Your DNS Settings? (readwriteweb.com)
• Operation Ghost Clicks Nabs DNSChanger Malware Ring (forbes.com)
• FBI’s Operation Ghost Click takes out operators of DNS Changer malware network (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
• FBI’s Operation Ghost Click Busts Operators of DNSChanger Malware (techie-buzz.com)
• DNSChanger and PROTECT IP: FBI hit and legislative miss (eset.com)