Lifestyle13

Yahoo! has been struggling financially with announcements in the past week that they’d be laying off about 1,000 workers.

Now Microsoft is making a $44.6-billion offer to buy Yahoo!

A U.S. spy satellite that can no longer be controlled could hit the Earth in late February or early March.

Link

Scientists think they have discovered the energy source of the wonderous color displays as we know as the Northern Lights.  According to The University of California’s Vassilis Angelopoulos , NASA’s Themis mission,  found the energy comes from a stream of charged particles from the sun flowing like a current through twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting Earth’s upper atmosphere to the sun.   The energy is then abruptly released in the form of a shimmering display of visible lights in the upper latitudes of the northern hemisphere. 

I ran across this article on WebMD about how many of us are addicted to e-mail. 

According to a recent America Online poll, 41% of adults check their e-mail right out of bed in the morning, before even brushing their teeth!  25% of adults believe it’s unthinkable to go more than two or three days with checking their e-mail.

Here are some tips from the article to help you loosen the grip your e-mail has on you, good luck!

• Work with your e-mail, not against it. Some programs, like Outlook, allow you to check for e-mail only every 15 minutes or half hour
• Turn off the “ding” that alerts you to new messages
• Send certain messages, like thank you notes or birthday cards, by snail mail only
• Set an unwavering e-mail timeframe, and tell yourself that e-mail is not allowed before or after the set times
• Never make e-mail the first thing you do in the morning or the last thing you do at night

If all else fails, try to close up e-mail shop completely for a few days. You’ll discover that the tangled worldwide web you weave can, in fact, exist without the World Wide Web.

The amount of spam e-mail has now surpassed the amount of legitimate person to person e-mail.   Spam accounted for 10.8 TRILLION e-mails last year, with legitimate e-mail at 10.5 trillion!!!

A research firm says that if there isn’t $42-billion to $55-billion invested in Internet infrastructure the Net could start “bogging down” by 2010.

While I wouldn’t mind if it slowed down the amount of SPAM that gets to my Inbox, the serious side of this is the impact it could have on the economy, especially in North America.  So many businesses in the U.S. have become dependent on the Web that “brownouts” could cripple those companies, especially the ones that rely on sales and service through the Web.

Report: Internet Outages Could Occur By 2010 As Capacity Stalls

Cell phone chargers, printers, and all those little items you leave plugged in are costing money.  These small chargers and devices use an estimated 5% of the nation’s electricity or $4 billion dollars worth a year!

 Check out these strange sounds from the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan.

Click on the link above to hear Radar echoes from Titan’s surface, eerie sounds of Saturn’s radio emmissions and much more!

It was only a matter of time before the Feds figured out how to keep track of everyone.  Satellites can now pick up your cell phone signal and see exactly where you are.  Click on the following link and put in your cell phone number and it will zero in on your location.   http://www.satellite-gps-locator.com/

Have you ever wondered what happens if you actually buy something from a SPAM email?

I’ve never bought anything from a SPAM email and I doubt that I ever would, but Mark Wade did.  Mark is a Manager of Research Content with CA’s Threat Research Team.  He wanted to find out exactly what would happen if he responded to a SPAM email and purchased something.

No surprise that they took his money and never sent what he bought.  What is interesting about it, is the route that things took through multiple spots in the US, China, and Cyprus.

Operation GreenDot, Following the SPAM

Here’s another new gadget idea: Twist and Spout  fits virtually any soda or water bottle with a screw-on cap. Use the Garden style to create an instant watering can.

Attach radio-frequency-emitting tags to your keys or other easily lost possessions and use Loc8tor to point you in the right direction. It will get you within an inch of your item while the tag itself beeps.

The Wovel, snow shovel on a wheel,  clears snow with little effort and is safer on your back too.