Oracle of Delphi

I'm a bit of an Egyptophile, I like anything that has to do with Ancient Egypt, in total I've spent about 10 months there throughout my life. This Desktop background is in tribute to one culture I love ...

IMHO, I think the Supercharged 3800 engine is one of the best engines GM ever made ...

I thought this was a great product because I ride a Mountain Bike, but if you run, walk, jog, or are even out on a kayak etc, and something should happen to you, RoadID gives 1st responders immediate information about you, should you be involved in an accident or some type of medical emergency. Give it a look, if it works for you, then I'm glad I could help. Link: http://www.roadid.com/Common/default.aspx

Posted: Thursday, August 6 2009 at 03:27 pm CT by Bob Sullivan The best way to get the attention of a classroom full of rowdy kids is to turn the lights off. And the best way to get the attention of Internet users is to essentially do the same thing. Thursday’s Twitter denial-of-service hack certainly grabbed everyone's attention. Nothing like a total shutdown to make people sit up and take notice. But relatively speaking, denialof-service attacks are harmless. Everyone's been through it - CNN, Yahoo, Microsoft. Heck, Facebook and LiveJournal were hit Thursday, too, by the social media bandwidth bandit. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.) But Twitter's been hit by far more serious security issues in the recent past.. Just last month, a hacker wormed his way through Twitter and into personal documents of a company executive. Earlier this year, a hacker managed to impersonate several high-profile public figures (including President Barack Obama and CNN's Rick Sanchez) by hijacking their Twitter accounts. Not to mention all the spam, viruses, and malicious links that are finding their way around the microblogging site these days. Oops, we did it again. We invented a cool new technology, got millions of people hooked on it, seduced them into over-sharing information through a false sense of security, and created a wonderful playground for hackers. E-mail, Web browsers, online shopping, Facebook -- they've all gone through the same growing pains. It doesn't have to be this way, of course. Last week, the world's best security minds gathered in Las Vegas at the Black Hat/DefCon conference. One year ago, researcher Dan Kaminsky got everyone's attention by threatening to quite literally shut down the Internet. A flaw he discovered could have enabled a hacker to render the Web useless in a few minutes. It was fixed promptly. This year, Kaminsky was back with a slightly less dramatic flaw: a trick that would have basically disabled "https" and those security locks on Web browsers. That got fixed too. But still, he's frustrated. The vast majority of Internet perils are avoidable, if companies like Twitter baked security directly into their products. And still, nearly two decades into the grand public experiment of Internet use, nearly all consumer information is protected by a measly user name and password combination. "Sixty percent of all attacks are just passwords. Missing passwords, stolen passwords," he said. "We have this technology and it's not working. If we don't do things better it’s going to be a real problem." Authentication, he explained, is at the heart of all commerce, and all Web transactions. For the most part, we're no further ahead in authentication technology than we were in 1995. The hacker who attacked Twitter executive Evan Williams' e-mail claims he got in by simply guessing the answer to one of those silly "Forgot your password?" questions, like "What is your dog's name?” We warned users about this last year. Still, Twitter used the technology, Williams allegedly trusted it, and now people know what he purchased at Amazon recently. Criminals who got into his Twitter account used access to "escalate" their way into Williams’ Google Docs account as well, and obtained sensitive information about the company. Theoretically, it's not that big a deal for someone to hack your Twitter account - everything you say there is designed to be public. But increasingly, like Williams, Web users are slowly but surely moving everything they do online, and linking it all through various social media and document-sharing tools. If the thought of not being able to tweet for a few hours bothers you, stop for a moment and consider what might happen if someone was able to access all your online activities, read all your e-mail, or impersonate you and send nasty notes to your boss or wife. Moving in the right direction Twitter deserves credit for trying to play catch up. Recently, it quietly instituted a security upgrade - disabling links to known hacker sites. A positive step, and one that could so irritate- the bad guys, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a connection between this new security tool and the denial-of-service attacks. Twitter has other enemies, too. Its shining moment came during the recent Iranian uprising, when Twitter proved robust in the face of government censorship. But the question remains: Why would a service like Twitter set itself up for this string of attacks and bad publicity? Kevin Haley, director of security response at Symantec Corp., says it's normal "growing pains" for a ragingly successful Internet startup. "Nobody has a full-blown security plan when they develop their business plan or their site," he said. "At the beginning, you are completely focused on getting your site up and your services up. Anything like security that makes it harder for people to join, you're not going to want to put that into place." Eventually security problems arise, and then companies address them, he said. That means you, me, and everyone else who hops on the next great Web thing is really just allowing the creator to experiment with our personal information. A few hours without Twitter is nothing to be alarmed about. But today’s incident, and other recent missteps, provide continued hints that things at social media sites aren’t as safe as we perceive. It’s enough to make you wish that the last hacker to break into a major Web site would turn the lights off when they leave. RED TAPE WRESTLING TIPS What does this mean for you? Once upon a time, it was consumer gospel that you never bought a new car in its first production year. You let the manufacturer work out the kinks with other suckers for a year before you jumped in. When it comes to exposing personal information, that's a pretty good strategy. Twitter, Facebook, online document storage, all these services have a lot of promise. But I'd let these security issues settle down for a while before I trust them with anything meaningful. Here's a good rule of thumb: Recent celebrity incidents should have taught all of us that anything we say to a police officer during a traffic stop could become public record and end up in front of the whole world -- so it's best not to say anything you wouldn't want everyone to see. That's a good rule for online services, too. Before you type or post, picture everyone you know reading it. If that gives you pause, you should probably hit the delete key. Also, it's more important than ever not to use the same password at all sites. A hacker who breaks into your Twitter account will immediately try to break into Amazon, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, and any other ubiquitous site. Imagine the trouble someone who read your Gmail could cause. And now's a good time to take a look at those "Forgot Your Password?" links on your favorite sites. If the question is "What was your high school mascot?" and your Facebook picture is you wearing a sweatshirt with a horse on it that says "Lake City 'Stangs," you should change your question. One theory has a new variant of the Koobface virus responsible for these outages. It’s easy to fall for Koobface, because it can arrive as a tweet that looks like it’s from a friend, with a link to video. Clicking on unexpected links is always a bad idea, but those clever “bit.ly” links, and their shortened URLs, create a particular hazard. Because you don’t really know where you are going (the landing URL is hidden), bit.ly links are great for hackers, bad for you. Just ask your friend to re-send the full link. That’ll foil most hackers. Finally, if you are so inclined, send a note to the CEO of the companies involved saying you are very concerned about security. The chief reason security pros like Kaminsky gather in Las Vegas every year is to commiserate on this fact: the marketing department always gets much more money than the security department. You could help their cause by letting companies know that you care about security and privacy. Link: http://redtape.msnbc.com/2009/08/the-best-...e-at.html#posts

Nice Speed Racer helmet ...

Macaulay Culkin

He sounds just like an old drunk, nothing more ...

Lindsay Chappell Automotive News August 5, 2009 - 2:00 pm ET Suppliers and workers at General Motors' assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., thought they had the inside track this summer when GM had to decide quickly where to build a new family of subcompact cars. The plant boasts a recent renovation, a history of good labor relations and the sort of innovative supplier-automaker partnership that automakers profess to seek. It wasn't enough. A plant in Orion Township, Mich., got the nod. "A lot of us are still wondering how they made this decision," says Mike Herron, chairman of Spring Hill's UAW Local 1853. "Obviously, we're all hoping the best for Orion. But when you consider what we've achieved here, you have to wonder what it counted for." A look at how the plants stacked up, and why the Michigan plant won the new business, shows why suppliers and union leaders often remain skeptical about cooperating with carmakers. Factory vs. factory In June, GM's Orion Township, Mich., plant beat out Spring Hill, Tenn., as the site for a new small-car program. A third plant in Janesville, Wis., was widely considered a long shot. ORION TOWNSHIP, MICH. Assembly plant work force: 1,400 Current products: Pontiac G6, Chevrolet Malibu Last plant update: 2003-04 SPRING HILL, TENN. Assembly plant work force: 2,500 Current product: Chevrolet Traverse Last plant update: 2007-08 $700 million -- twice In 2007, a $700 million renovation had turned Spring Hill into GM's most agile plant, where reprogrammable welding lines, paint booths and vehicle carriers were capable of building anything from a small car to a Chevrolet Tahoe SUV. How long would it have taken Spring Hill to convert its production lines to the new family of small cars? "A matter of weeks," Herron estimates. "That was the point of our renovation — to be able to respond to market chang-es without a lot of new investment." Orion Township, a 26-year-old plant, now will undergo its own $700 million makeover. The investment will bring Orion up to Spring Hill's level of flexibility in its body shop and paint operations by 2011. The transformation also will require Orion to embrace "Value Added Assembly," a new GM practice that debuted at Spring Hill in 2008. The practice uses lower-paid employees of third-party companies to work inside the GM plant, assembling parts side by side with GM workers. At Spring Hill, several hundred workers from Penske Logistics and Premier Manufacturing Support Services intermingle on the assembly lines and work the same shifts as their vehicle assembly brethren. But while the GM employees earn normal UAW hourly rates of about $28, the parts workers earn $12 to $14 an hour. Premier workers, who previously cleaned out paint booths, unloaded trucks and maintained the plant grounds, now assemble headliners and door modules. Penske workers perform parts sequencing inside the GM plant and deliver parts to the line. The practice helped make the Chevy Traverse a profitable product. Nissan North America and Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing North America have adopted similar practices inside some of their U.S plants. But it remains a radical departure for GM and the UAW. Other factors GM spokeswoman Sherrie Chil-d-ers Arb declined to say what criteria the automaker used in selecting Orion for the new small cars, which originally had been slated for a Korean assembly plant. She rejected press speculation that GM had selected Orion in response to political pressures to tackle Michigan's high unemployment. GM received various state tax abatements, training funds and other public incentives totaling nearly $1 billion to renovate Orion. Arb declined to put a dollar figure on the incentives package. Ron Harbour, a consultant with the international firm Oliver Wyman who has measured automaker efficiency factory by factory for two decades, believes GM considered factors beyond manufacturing flexibility in selecting Orion — possibly including politics. Bob Corker, a Republican U.S. Senator from Tennessee, had been part of the contingent of politicians who argued late last year in favor of allowing GM to fail without federal money. He later publicly called for GM to give the new program to Spring Hill. "Orion has never been one of GM's shining stars," Harbour says. "It received some degree of flexibility earlier in this decade when it began building the Pontiac G6. And its quality has been pretty good, although not GM's best. But when it comes down to a decision like this, you weigh a lot of different factors, and it's obvious that GM did," he says. "Just because a plant is flexible and efficient —even if it's your best-performing plant — doesn't mean it's a given for getting the next product." Spring Hill will stop building Traverses in November, leaving only a separate engine plant and a parts distribution center operating at Spring Hill. Herron is hopeful there will be still another product that comes Spring Hill's way and that its downtime will not last long. "We still have a role to play as a flex plant," he says. "As the market comes back, we can build anything we're asked." Link: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti...173362474407669

My point was they were not American companies ...

Love

There's nothing pretty about Michigan, well except maybe Flint ...

Pssst NOS, Mrs. PCS doesn't ride in MOPAR products ...

Who got the other 53%?

I'm sure if you ever stop having accidents and speeding, it will eventually go back down ...

You'll get lost in the snow ...

I'm just funnin ya. I'm a neat freak, I couldn't have that ... Germans like order ...

Congrats, may you stay married as long as Mrs. PCS and I have been, 20 long grueling years in the Gulag ... I'm just funnin ya, it's been great ...

Price point was too high ...

I agree 100% with this statement ...

Someone has a lot of French Fries under their seat ... Less fries and the seat might still be working ...

Very nice indeed ...

Soup

Well I like the following sports and the following teams that play them ... Rugby (played it since college) - The team I follow Internationally is the Argentina National rugby team, nicknamed Los Pumas. European Football (Soccer in the US) - I follow the German National team in the World Cup. American Football - My team is the Baltimore Ravens.

Well you could always go Green and put this on your sig: "Gasoline is dead! Get it through your head!" I can see it now, a nice Eco El Camino for you that runs off of French Fry grease ...

The difference here, is what Saturn sold was the old Astra. What Buick will be selling is the new Astra, totally different cars ...