Get an online Doctorate

I stumbled upon this site, and a few hours later, I still am undecided on whether it's meant to be funny for a serious cause, or funny for humour's sake. Maybe it's because it's 7am and I haven't slept a wink.

Click http://www.theologicaluniversity.org/

Hollywood Stock Exchange

Ever wish you had $2 million to play with? Do you like movies? Well then, Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) might be the game for you. You're given 2 million Hollywood dollars (H$) to start with, and you can use this to 'invest' in various actor and movie stocks, funds and options; as if this were a real live stock exchange! You can invest in your favourite actors/actresses and bet on the latest movie releases and even movies in development. The trading system is simple: Buy, Sell, Short and Cover. You can even set limit prices at which you want to trade. Actor prices are based on their previous movies' performance in the Box Office.

I've been playing this for some time now, and so far, I've turned that H$2 million into H$26 million.

Sign up and play for free.

George Dubya vs Jesus

Who do you think would win? Would you badmouth Jesus?

http://www.wiseass.org/html/content-jesus.html

God only knows...

If you're in the mood for US Politics, why not check out the blog below
http://openyourmindseye.blogspot.com/
Some of the videos there are H-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s!

Random Funny

Sandrine Holt and Easter Island

I was actually looking for pictures of Sandrine Holt, and somehow ended up looking at island pictures of Rapa Nui (there was a movie), also known as Easter Island.

Easter Island is THE most isolated inhabited island in the world.

Easter Island Satellite Photos
Easter Island Wiki

And...
How the Polynesians claimed the Pacific


And on the subject of Sandrine Holt, you can find some pics from 'Once A Thief' in the link below:
http://www.nicklea.com/oat/gallery.htm

Blogger.com fights Spam Blogs

Blogger Buzz: Next Blog, Now With Less Spam!

This sounds great. I enjoy clicking that "Next Blog>>" icon, and if this helps to eliminate those worthless spam blogs (aka splogs), so be it. I myself had one of my blogs wrongfully labelled as a potential spam blog. Heehee.

The reason for that, is because, it's a picture blog! And the links were to larger images.

Anyway, the way it works, is that there's a word verification required to make new posts, thus preventing the spam bots from auto-blogging.

Word of the Day

schadenfreude

1. Malicious pleasure at someone's misfortune.

I suppose that's why people watch reality TV.

The Uneducated Superpower

I stumbled across an interesting website about literacy in the USA, or rather the LACK of it. I'm not talking about proficiency in reading and writing, but in terms of general knowledge, foreign language skills and basic geography & history.

http://www.rehydrate.org/facts/global_illiteracy.htm

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the above site:

• Almost 50% of the high school seniors in Baltimore, Maryland could not locate the United States on a world map. (LOL)
  
• 95% of American college freshmen tested could not locate Vietnam on a world map. (OMG)
  
• 75% of Americans responding to a nationwide survey could not locate El Salvador on a map. (It's between Honduras and Guatemala)
• Only 15% of U.S. high school students in 1979 studied a foreign language and fewer than 3% of all high school graduates achieve a "meaningful competence" in a foreign language.
  
• France and the Federal Republic of Germany commit 1% of their national budgets to (international) educational, cultural and information activities; the US Government less than .1%

The information on that site appears to be a bit dated (circa 1990s), but there is still some truth in it. Although considered a world superpower, the US still lags their 1st World counterparts in terms of education. Instead, the spending is diverted to the military-industrial complex and corporate America.

It is pompous to believe that the US is the centre of the universe, that everything needs to revolve around it. But, if the above info is even half true, the world needs to worry.

Especially now, with a leader that preaches a mantra of democracy and freedom in foreign lands, yet at the same time, increase the restrictions of those freedoms in his own country. The events of recent years have not helped the situation. The world watches, as the US, once the protagonist, turns aggressor.

Ignorance may be bliss, but not if you've got an arsenal of weapons and a trigger happy finger.

Firefox - it's a love/hate relationship

I first got hooked to Mozilla Firefox when it was called FireBird. Version 0.6, if I recall. I was fed-up with getting viruses and trojans via Internet Explorer, and didn't want to have Opera with all their ads.

I stopped using IE entirely, and Firefox became my one and only browser. I loved the idea of tabbed browsing, and the wonderful world of extensions. On the few occasions when I have no choice but to use IE (at a friend's, or at a cybercafe), I found the navigation cumbersome and icky.

Since switching over to Firefox, I've not had a single trojan virus on my computer. ActiveX is still a dangerous loophole exploited by hackers today.

Over the months, I've experimented with alternative browsers based on IE. They allowed greater flexibility with settings, and even tabbed browsing. But it's just not the same.

Now, I love Firefox, don't get me wrong. But, the last few versions have suffered badly from the dreaded memory leak. Basically, the program consumes mega loads of memory over a short period of heavy surfing. The current version, Firefox 1.5 is the worst offender yet. My latest record in terms of memory usage, was a whopping 800 MB of RAM, and over 1GB of Virtual Memory! Needless to say, Firefox crashed soon after. Now, in a perfect world, when you close a tab or window, you would expect the program to release the memory accordingly. But for some reason, this doesn't happen, and the memory use keeps on going higher and higher.

Now, I did a test run, opening tabs in both Opera and Firefox, and after surfing about 100+ pages on each, the memory usage was as follows:

Opera 90MB RAM/110MB Virtual
Firefox 200MB RAM/310MB Virtual

Disabling extensions brought it down somewhat, but it was still much higher than Opera's memory consumption. There is still a memory leak in Opera, but it's not as bad as Firefox 1.5.

Now, if the developers of Firefox can do something about the memory leak, I'll be happy to stick with Firefox... but, if they can't fix it, I will probably have no choice but to switch to Opera.


Google Search: Firefox Memory Leak

Another Fun Test

The Girl Next Door
73% Sexy-Cute, 59% Dark-Light, 54% Artsy-Stylish

Cute, neither Dark nor Light, and neither Artsy nor Stylish. This sounds like a blah category, right? Oh, my, no. The Girl Next Door has been the subject of more dirty fantasies than you could possibly count. She's so sweet, and innocent, and infinitely corruptible. Every morning you glance out your window hoping she'll have forgotten to draw the blinds. You may feel bad about it, but you know you'll be doing it again tomorrow.

If you liked my test, Please rate it highly! Thanks!

Also, make sure to check out my Beautiful Faces Test if you haven't already.
See All The Categories

Sexy	Dark	Artsy	The Goth Girl
Sexy	Dark	Not Artsy or Stylish	The Brooding Poet
Sexy	Dark	Stylish	The Mistress
Sexy	Not Dark or Light	Artsy	The Hippie Chick
Sexy	Not Dark or Light	Not Artsy or Stylish	The Hot Friend
Sexy	Not Dark or Light	Stylish	The Sorority Girl
Sexy	Light	Artsy	The Actress
Sexy	Light	Not Artsy or Stylish	Your Friend's Sister
Sexy	Light	Stylish	The Prom Queen
Cute	Dark	Artsy	The Suicide Girl
Cute	Dark	Not Artsy or Stylish	The Bad Girl
Cute	Dark	Stylish	The Bettie Page Girl
Cute	Not Dark or Light	Artsy	The Art Student
Cute	Not Dark or Light	Not Artsy or Stylish	The Girl Next Door
Cute	Not Dark or Light	Stylish	The Debutante
Cute	Light	Artsy	The New Age chick
Cute	Light	Not Artsy or Stylish	The Favorite Friend
Cute	Light	Stylish	The Cheerleader

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 92% on Sexy-Cute You scored higher than 62% on Dark-Light You scored higher than 57% on Artsy-Stylish

Link: The Your Type of Girl Test written by dgc20e on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Fun Test for the Bored...

Pure Nerd 82 % Nerd, 21% Geek, 47% Dork

For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd. The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful. Congratulations! Also, you might want to check out some of my other tests if you're interested in any of the following: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Professional Wrestling Love & Sexuality America/Politics Thanks Again! -- THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 95% on nerdiness You scored higher than 21% on geekosity You scored higher than 81% on dork points

Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Microsoft WMF vulnerability

Windows image file exploit W32/PFV-Exploit

The exploit is currently being used to distribute the following threats:
Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Agent.abs
Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Small.zp
Trojan.Win32.Small.ga
Trojan.Win32.Small.ev.

Be warned. Microsoft has yet to issue an official patch/fix for this vulnerability, although the main antivirus companies do detect the W32/PFV-Exploit trojan.

-=-

Those using IE or any browser using IE engine like Avant or Maxthon to surf might want to consider switching to Firefox or Opera.

Those with Firefox 1.0.4 and below, you might want to upgrade to a higher release.

If you have not done so, best to also UNCHECK the “Allow websites to install software” and “Enable Java” in FireFox whenever you surf.
Tools -> Options -> Web Features

Note that you can get infected if you visit a web site that has an image file containing the exploit. Internet Explorer users might automatically get infected. Firefox users can get infected if they decide to run or download the image file.

In our tests (under XP SP2) older versions of Firefox (1.0.4) defaulted to open WMF files with “Windows Picture and Fax Viewer”, which is vulnerable. Newer versions (1.5) defaulted to open them with Windows Media Player, which is not vulnerable…but then again, Windows Media Player is not able to show WMF files at all so this might be a bug in Firefox. Opera 8.51 defaults to open WMF files with “Windows Picture and Fax Viewer” too. However, all versions of Firefox and Opera prompt the user first.

Switch to Firefox(Latest version is 1.5) today. Especially for those people who’s into 12 DailyPro and other autosurfs. You can check out the button on the bottom right on our sidebar. It’s free & integrates with Google toolbar, nifty.

Sources:
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-122005.html
http://www.hexblog.com/2005/12/wmf_vuln.html
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/181038
http://gohyip.com/blog/2005/12/30/surfing-...-do-the-switch/



Update: Microsoft have since released a patch to correct the problem, although many feel that the patch was rushed and didn't solve all the problems associated with this security flaw.

Download via WindowsUpdate or click below:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS06-001.mspx

Quote of the Day

"Sometimes, it's easier living the lie."
- Carl Hanratty, from "Catch Me If You Can".