"The point of living and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come." - Peter Ustinov

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Trojan Installs Anti-Virus, Removes Other Malware - "At start-up, the Trojan requests and loads a DLL from the author's command-and-control server. This then downloads a pirated copy of Kaspersky AntiVirus for WinGate into a concealed directory on the infected system."

Bad boys big birds - All birds all the time!!! - SFW.

Prosecutor: Suicidal, text-messaging teen kills woman - "A lovesick teenage girl drove into an oncoming car in a suicide attempt that she counted down "8, 7, 6..." in a text message to the female classmate who spurned her, authorities said. The teenager survived but a woman in the other car -- a mother of three -- died."

Folktale Types - The Gold Scales - "Folktales are arranged in international folktale cataloges by (1) numbers, (2) titles and (3) summaries of the content (descriptions). Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson worked out the numbers that refer to folktale types. An AT-number may cover a whole folktale, or a sequence (an episode) of a folktale."
They have 2499 types of fairy tales. Wth.

College facebook-style Student Game - "Students from all colleges vote on pictures submitted by girls who voluntarily choose to be on the site. It’s meant as a fun, entertaining take on the Facebook.com college groups such as “The Absolute Hottest People on Facebook.” We figured we could democratize this process by letting students from all over vote instead of just a few Facebook.com group administrators."

ACCEPT JESUS, FOREVER FORGIVEN! - I haven't yet figured out if this is a joke.

What Can We Do to Prevent Suicide? - "If the majority of Micronesians really believe that suicide is an honorable option, then this paper is thoroughly useless and all of us had better resign ourselves to continuing high rates of suicide in the future. Young people, after all, are very quick in sensing the basic values of their elders. If they get the impression that we ourselves honor suicide, then they will be only too happy to oblige by hanging themselves."

gladder :: Mozilla Add-ons - "Get over Great Firewall with Great Ladder! This extension eases the pain of Internet censorship in mainland China. It automatically converts a binned URL to a good one. e.g. http://wikipedia.org to https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/. And all the URL replacement methods are being updated from the Internet every hour."

Putfile - Guinness World Records Highest vocal note by a male - This is amazingly high - off the piano. And yes, no more ban, it seems.

Nevada to vote on legalizing marijuana - "Gambling, prostitution, and now pot? Organizers of a Nevada ballot measure hope voters in a state where almost everything goes will go one better and legalize marijuana. If it passes Nov. 7, Nevada will be the first state to allow adults to possess up to an ounce of pot that they could buy at government-regulated marijuana shops... Proponents of the measure also argue that the legal system wastes time and money on low-level marijuana offenses, and that taxing and regulating pot would put drug dealers out of business while freeing law enforcement to focus on violent crime and more dangerous drugs such as methamphetamine... A 2002 study by researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas estimated taxing and regulating marijuana would generate $28.6 million in revenue."

Stonehenge makes list in new seven wonders vote - "The 5,000-year-old stones on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, will be up against sites including the Acropolis in Athens; the Statue of Liberty in New York; and the last remaining original wonder, the Pyramids of Giza in Cairo. An original list of nearly 200 sites nominated by the public was narrowed to 21 by the organizers and experts, including the former director general of Unesco Professor Federico Mayor."
7/21 isn't bad.

2007 GCE A-Level Examination - Exam Syllabus For School Candidates - So funky.

Justice, Institutions, And Multiple Equilibria (PDF) - "To focus attention with no higher appeal, it would be best to consult the highest possible authority. If the players share a cultural understanding that certain unpredictable processes may be used by the fundamental Spirit of the universe to answer questions, and that this Spirit will not allow itself to be bothered about the same question more than once, then a recommendation that is based on such a sacred randomization can serve as a focal coordination device that cannot be appealed to any higher arbitrator. The oracle's recommendations can be self-enforcing without any further intervention by the Spirit, provided that the recommendations to the players form an equilibrium. Thus our model can admit an important role of oracles and divination as an effective foundation for social coordination. (For example, see Evans-Pritchard, 1937. Moore, 1957, also offers game-theoretic perspective on divination.)"

Human species 'may split in two' - "The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures."
???

Parents given red card over snapshots - "A referee has been reprimanded by the FA for stopping a match and threatening to seize cameras. Families were banned from taking photographs of their teenage sons playing football after a referee said that they were breaking child protection rules."

Mother Says Daughter's Class Picture Was Doctored - "A local family is outraged by a school photo. When the pictures came back from the studio, a seven-year-old girl’s image appeared to have been doctored to give her cleavage."

Once Upon A Dreamer: Baba Yetu - "Great music from PC games is more rare than an honest politician. It is simply not worth the effort. The intended gamer audience usually doesn't care much for the subtlety good music provides. Besides, most of the music gets lost in the sound of explosives, special moves, and sound affects. It is very unlikely people buy a PC game for the music; therefore it is usually not cost effective to provide good music with games. That is why the opening song of Civilization 4 totally blew me away. It is like seeing a girl smile for the first time. Before her smile you have no ideal how pretty she can be. That is what the music did for Civilization 4, it made a pretty game into a beautiful game all by itself."

What Matters - "In 1962, poet-critic Randall Jarrell published his essay "The Schools of Yesteryear." In it, he examines the Appleton Readers, once the most popular school readers used in American public schools, and he found that in 1880, the fifth-grade reader contained works by Byron, Coleridge, Cervantes, Dickens, Emerson, Jefferson, Shakespeare , Shelley, Thoreau, Mark Twain and "simpler writers such as Scott, Burns, Longfellow, Cooper, Audubon, Poe, Benjamin Franklin and Washington Irving." Fourth-graders were reading Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and poems by Wordsworth. If you're thinking to yourself, "How could that be? I didn't encounter anything like this until college," well, that's exactly Jarrell's point. A decision was made about how to teach reading that, by the 1950's, ensured Americans would not know their own (or any other) culture. We're all consequences of that decision... We were taught to recognize words but not to enjoy reading, and we weren't given anything of value to read. So we learned not to read, but to respond to a reading technology."

Singapore's sexual evolution - "Others believe the younger Singapore ladies are too manly while the middle-aged ones are too sexually unexciting because they were brought up in a strict fashion. I have met local women in their 50s who still giggle when someone mentions the word “penis”. Many had stopped having sex with their husbands, while the men, virile or not, still hanker for it. This deprivation has shown up in many ways among some grandfathers. I notice that whenever there is an art (not photo) exhibition on nudes, many of the visitors are elderly “heartlander” men. At screenings of “X-rated” movies, one will likely find an audience made up predominantly of senior male citizens: many of them may never have seen a naked woman other than his wife."