What does a blog title look like? What do you write in a blog? What do you eat for lunch? What do you do with life?
So much for questions. Just trying to make sense of what is around..
“There is not the slightest indication that energy will ever be obtainable from the atom”- Albert Einstein.
The Large Hadron Collider might have disappointed many nay-sayers around the world. It did not spurn the Doomsday by spinning off 'micro black-holes' that engulf the world but looks like it certainly can cook up a pizza pretty fast.
The 'forward thinking' editors at Sciam made an estimate on how long it will take a LHC to de-frost a pizza. As per the calculations, it would take about 3 * 10 ^(-8) seconds to defrost a pizza. This is about the same time taken by light to travel 1 meter.
"When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else." - David Brin (American science-fiction writer)
It is amazing and indeed a paradox of our times that America is one of those nations with an absolute madness for celebrities (with scant regard for their privacy) and an equally tight-fisted resoluteness about government turning a Big Brother and hence violating their personal lives!
Here is an article about the History of Privacy in America and its timeline. An interesting read!
As expected, Hillary Clinton finally ended her bid for a democratic nomination and endorsed Obama.
"Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it," she said to a crowd of teary-eyed supporters in a emotional speech.
While Obama lay a little low letting her opponent bask in the glory. In a press statement he later said, " Obviously, I am thrilled and honored to have Sen. Clinton's support".
This marked a highly tipsy-turvy year - last year Clinton was seen as a clear front-runner and a sure-shot to win the top seat but she lies in a dump now - defeated by a black Afro-American! Also ended there-in a bitterly contested campaign battle.
CNN does a analysis on why Clinton's bid failed here. It reveals how her supposed strengths - a great campaigner hubby Bill, her so-public face, the massive and well-oiled Clinton-machinery all could not face up to the challenge for a 'change'.
In the race between 'Change' and 'Experience' - Change won again!
“Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.”- Winston Churchill
I must admit myself as a golf illiterate, having been routinely bamboozled by the birdies, putts,flops, bogeys, eagles, albatross and vultures ( what is it about the birds?). All I know about the sport is that you have got to put the ball into the hole with the help of a stick in the minimum number of attempts. I am also aware that a certain Tiger Woods has been running around with the dough for quite some time now.
United States scores over rest of the world with nearly half of the world's total 32,000 golf courses. But according to this article, golfing has seen a decline over the past several years in the US. The number of people who play the sport has declined from 30 million to 26 million since 2000. The golf boosters (number of people who play 25 times or more a year) declined from 6.9 million in 2005 to 4.6 million in 2000.
This is a part of the broader decline in the outdoor sports like tennis,swimming and hiking among others. The reasons vary from the ravaging hurricanes to family commitments to popular electronic games to the long duration of the game and related etiquette rules (like not using their cell phones on course).
So the game about which Wodehouse famously wrote, "Golf, like the measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious." in danger of losing its charm?
“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.” - John Allen Paulos
Imagine having your laptop stolen! It was insured alright ensuring you suffer no financial losses, but how about the data? No worries there.. my machine is password protected you might say or I use disk encryption softwares. Really? Read on... : )
According to researchers at Princeton University, data stored on your machine can be recovered - yes, even if you locked it - with the help of something as innocuous as a dusting spray!
How does it happen? DRAMs (Dynamic Random Access memory) is a type of memory that is used to store data while your machine is running. It is a kind of "leaky bucket" (a capacitor) which has to be filled in periodically (charged) otherwise it runs out of water. It was believed that DRAM loses its data as the power is switched off. But actually it fades out over a period of seconds to minutes, depending on the chip manufacturer.
The researchers found out that cooling the DRAM chips with a spray of "canned air" would make the chips retain their contents for as long as 10 minutes! Use of liquid nitrogen would prolong this to hours. The chips could then be removed from the laptop and their data read from.
How they did it!
But I have Disk Encryption Software on my machine? Very well! The disk encryption softwares store their master decryption keys in DRAM. This is something like handing out the keys of the locker to the thief! The attacker can easily extract the keys from your DRAM and access your data. In this process, the researchers were able to beat the commercially available disk encryption software Bitlocker that comes with Microsoft's Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 OS.
Security Risk According to a report by Symantec, average laptop contains data worth approximately $972,000. Sometime back, GE reported the theft of an employee's laptop containing Social Security Numbers (SSN) of 50,000 employees. Ernst & Young, Fidelity investments, The Boeing Co., Ameriprise Financial are just some of those who suffered due to loss of a laptop containing sensitive data.
