Wireless Cybercriminals Target Clueless Vacationers

The newest trend in Internet fraud is "vacation hacking," a sinister sort of tourist trap.

Cybercriminals are targeting travelers by creating phony Wi-Fi hot spots in airports, in hotels, and even aboard airliners.

Vacationers on their way to fun in the sun, or already there, think they're using designated Wi-Fi access points. But instead, they're signing on to fraudulent networks and hand-delivering everything on their laptops to the crooks. read more

Top Ten Unusual Drives on Earth!

This is a very cool read here:)
There’s a reason the road less travelled is less travelled! The world’s steepest roads, the world’s narrowest roads, the world’s most bizarre roads… here’s ten reasons to take out extra insurance on your next rental car!..... read it HERE

Text message scammers quietly prey on regional banks

You get a text message from your bank telling you there's been suspicious activity on your account. You call the number on your phone to see what's going on, and before you know it, you're a victim.

Welcome to the next big thing in phishing.

Law enforcement and security experts say that for more than a year now, scammers have been using scam text messages to prey on small regional banks and their customers. And according to a report set to be released next Tuesday by Cisco Systems, the problem has only been getting worse in recent months. read more

Google Maps Location Finder Pinpoints You in Chrome and Firefox

While mobile users have been able to rely on Google Maps to pinpoint their locations for some time, starting today Google Chrome 2.0 and Mozilla FireFox 3.5 users will also be able to locate their positions from their browsers.

To use My Location for Google Maps, just look for and click on the small blue circle in the upper lefthand corner of maps (above the street view man icon and below the compass). Google Maps should then find and place your approximate location using the W3C Geolocation API. Read more HERE

30th Anniversary of the Walcott Truckers Jamboree and the 45th Anniversary of Iowa 80

To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the Walcott Truckers Jamboree and the 45th Anniversary of Iowa 80 Truckstop a cake cutting will be held Friday July 10th at 2:00 pm. The amazing nearly 8-foot long semi truck cake is set to feed an estimated 2,000 people. The cake took over 2 days to construct. Weighing in at 300 pounds, this edible work of art is composed of cake, frosting, fondant and modeling chocolate. The cake cutting is open to the public.

The Walcott Truckers Jamboree began in 1979 featuring a few exhibits, live music, food and a small display of antique trucks. That first Jamboree only attracted a few hundred drivers, a far cry from the 30,000 it attracts today. Even though the size of the Jamboree has changed over the years, you can bet that its focus hasn"t. Celebrating America"s Truckers is definitely what the Jamboree is all about. "We are honored to have been serving the professional driver for 45 years," says Delia Moon Meier. "The Walcott Truckers Jamboree is our way of saying Thank You to drivers for the work they do and to let them know that we appreciate that they choose to stop at Iowa 80." source

Cap and Trade Sold under False Pretenses

The 1,500-page cap-and-trade climate legislation, also known as Waxman-Markey, passed by a narrow margin late in the day on June 26. Members of Congress added 300 of those pages early in the morning on the day of the vote. It is safe to assume that hardly any of the 435 Members of Congress read the bill in its entirety, meaning one of the costliest bills in American history was rushed through so politicians could enjoy their 4th of July recess.

Cap and trade is nothing more than a massive energy tax. source

Online attack hits US government Web sites

A botnet comprised of about 50,000 infected computers has been waging a war against U.S. government Web sites and causing headaches for businesses in the U.S. and South Korea.

The attack started Saturday, and security experts have credited it with knocking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) Web site offline for parts of Monday and Tuesday. Several other government Web sites have also been targeted, including the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT).

"The DOT has been experiencing network incidents since this past weekend. We are working with the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team [US-CERT] at this time," a DOT spokeswoman said Tuesday. source

If YRC fails, what happens to U.S. truck sector?

The fortunes of a particular corner of the U.S. trucking industry in the next year are as tied to whether one company, YRC Worldwide Inc (YRCW.O), survives as they are to a recovery in the recession-bound U.S. economy.

If YRC fails it could provide competitors with just the reduction in industry capacity they need to jack up pricing for the first time since late 2006.

While that would be good news for the less-than-truckload (LTL) market -- which refers to truckers who consolidate smaller loads into a single truck -- it will hurt customers already facing the pinch in a down economy.

YRC, based in Overland Park, Kansas, nearly quadrupled its revenue from $2.6 billion in 2002 to a peak of $9.9 billion in 2006 thanks largely to two major acquisitions, and is important because it controls some 20 percent of the LTL market.

"One of two things has to happen: either we have to lose capacity or demand has to come back," said Morgan Keegan analyst Art Hatfield. "The rate at which YRC's business is deteriorating makes it more likely that it will be them to go out of business rather than someone else."

He said a YRC failure "would have a positive effect on the market, as it would help restore the balance between supply and demand. It would also help stop the bleeding on pricing." read more

Small town America pins hopes on West trade route

LIMON, Colo. (AP) — For Joe Kiely, the drone of thousands of trucks passing his Colorado plains town signals economic prosperity.

The caravans carrying billions of dollars worth of goods move along a 2,300-mile, mostly rural, two-lane trade route from Mexico to Canada, and frequently stop in on towns like Limon (LY-min) and bring business to their hotels, truck stops, gas stations and fast food restaurants.

If the Ports to Plains Corridor is going to be able to handle the increasing flow of goods, Kiely said, the highways need to be expanded. To realize the corridor's potential, Kiely and municipal officials up and down the highway want federal backing for a 20-year plan to expand the road to four lanes.

Some $900 million has been spent since 1997, and this year more than $80 million in stimulus funds went to road construction and improvements on parts of the highway in Colorado, Texas and New Mexico.

"Whether or not the four-lane divided highway gets built in the 20-year time, the amount of traffic that's on these will grow," said Kiely, vice chairman of operations for the Ports-to-Plains Corridor Coalition, a Lubbock, Texas-based lobbying group. read more

MDOT building $14M truck station on I-10 in Hancock

A large construction project that's been catching the notice of motorists on I-10 in Hancock County will be a modern truck inspection and weigh station. Officials hope it will expedite the flow of giant trucks through south Mississippi and simultaneously ease highway dangers. Kelly Castleberry, an engineer for the Mississippi Department of Transportation, said work began on the project about a year ago. The new station is on the south side of I-10 between the 10- and 11-mile markers, at the site of a former rest area.

The site now holds a new office building for MDOT officials and a tall barn to be used in weighing and inspecting long-distance trucking rigs. The barn includes a pit that MDOT enforcement officers can use to get beneath trucks to conduct brake, undercarriage and other safety inspections, as well as contraband searches.

The station will cost about $14 million, to be paid through a mix of federal and state funding, Castleberry said.

"It should hopefully be finished by the end of this year," he said. source

Landstar acquires 2 tech companies

Landstar System Inc. Thursday announced the acquisition of two technology companies that will allow the Jacksonville-based trucking company to offer more services to its freight customers.

Landstar acquired Detroit-based Premier Logistics Inc., which offers freight management services through Internet-based software. It also bought A3 Integration LLC, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based company that offers Internet-based transportation and supply chain management technologies.

Landstar said the acquisitions will not have a material impact on its revenue and earnings for the third and fourth quarters this year. The company incurred $2 million in costs related to the acquisitions, which will reduce second-quarter earnings by about 2 cents a share. source

The truth is getting ever more inconvenient - temperatures have dropped significantly

The truth is getting ever more inconvenient for Al Gore.
Once again, as we do each month, GORE LIED has taken significant liberties with Dr. Roy Spencer’s monthly UAH globally averaged satellite-based temperature of the lower atmosphere.  We’ve marked it up with a red marker to more fully illustrate the really inconvenient truth – that temperatures have dropped significantly,  .63°F (.35°C), since Al Gore released his science fiction movie, An Inconvenient Truth at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2006. source

Ocean temperatures: The new bluff in alarmism

There has been a change in direction by the alarmists, as shown by their new “Synthesis Report.” The independent scientists noticed it during the Wong-Fielding meeting.

The alarmists have abandoned air temperatures as a measure of global temperature, because the air temperature graphs are just too hard to argue with (like the second figure below, from the Skeptics Handbook). Instead they’ve switched to ocean temperatures, which they often disguise as ocean heat content (a huge number like 15×10²² Joules sounds much more scary than the warming it implies of 0.003° C/year).

All three pages of the Synthesis Report that deal with ‘evidence’ are about factors or trends that tell us nothing about whether or not the warming is due to carbon emissions. If God put the galaxy in a toaster, sea levels would rise, ocean heat content would increase, and ice would melt. read more

World's first flying car prepares for take-off

Is it a car? Is it a plane? Actually it’s both. The first flying automobile, equally at home in the sky or on the road, is scheduled to take to the air next month. If it survives its first test flight, the Terrafugia Transition, which can transform itself from a two-seater road car to a plane in 15 seconds, is expected to land in showrooms in about 18 months’ time.

Its manufacturer says it is easy to keep and run since it uses normal unleaded fuel and will fit into a garage.

Carl Dietrich, who runs the Massachusetts-based Terrafugia, said: “This is the first really integrated design where the wings fold up automatically and all the parts are in one vehicle.” source

FMCSA Called on to Eliminate School Bus Driver Cell Phone Usage

The National Transportation Safety Board delivered its annual report to Congress this week including some recommendations concerning school buses as well as examples of some serious school bus accidents.

The report called on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to prohibit cell phone use by school bus drivers. Passenger restraints were also touched upon in the highway recommendation section, as the NTSB requested that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration design new standards to protect school bus passengers from being ejecting during a collision or a rollover. read more

Most complete Earth map published

The most complete terrain map of the Earth's surface has been published.
The data, comprising 1.3 million images, come from a collaboration between the US space agency Nasa and the Japanese trade ministry.

The images were taken by Japan's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (Aster) aboard the Terra satellite.

The resulting Global Digital Elevation Map covers 99% of the Earth's surface, and will be free to download and use.

The Terra satellite, dedicated to Earth monitoring missions, has shed light on issues ranging from algal blooms to volcano eruptions.

For the Aster measurements, local elevation was mapped with each point just 30m apart.

"This is the most complete, consistent global digital elevation data yet made available to the world," said Woody Turner, Nasa programme scientist on the Aster mission. read more

Mississippi's still fattest but Alabama closing in

WASHINGTON – Mississippi's still king of cellulite, but an ominous tide is rolling toward the Medicare doctors in neighboring Alabama: obese baby boomers. It's time for the nation's annual obesity rankings and, outside of fairly lean Colorado, there's little good news. In 31 states, more than one in four adults are obese, says a new report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

And obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year, and no state experienced a significant decline.

"The obesity epidemic clearly goes beyond being an individual problem," said Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust, a nonprofit public health group.

It's a national crisis that "calls for a national strategy to combat obesity," added Robert Wood Johnson vice president Dr. James Marks. "The crest of the wave of obesity is still to crash."

While the nation has long been bracing for a surge in Medicare as the boomers start turning 65, the new report makes clear that fat, not just age, will fuel much of those bills. In every state, the rate of obesity is higher among 55- to 64-year-olds — the oldest boomers — than among today's 65-and-beyond.

The report provides one of the first in-depth looks at obese boomers, and its implications are sobering. This first wave of aging boomers will mean a jump of obese Medicare patients that ranges from 5.2 percent in New York to a high of 16.3 percent in Alabama, the report concluded. In Alabama, nearly 39 percent of the oldest boomers are obese.
Health economists once made the harsh financial calculation that the obese would save money by dying sooner. But more recent research instead suggests that better treatments are keeping them alive nearly as long — but they're much sicker for longer, requiring such costly interventions as knee replacements and diabetes care and dialysis. Medicare spends anywhere from $1,400 to $6,000 more annually on health care for an obese senior than for the non-obese, Levi said.

"There isn't a magic bullet. We don't have a pill for it," said Levi. "It's not going to be solved in the doctor's office but in the community, where we change norms." read more

usa-zipcodes.com

I found this to be useful......
Welcome to usa-zipcodes.com! We offer free tools to find zip code(s) of city or state or county USA. Also, you may enter a zip code to perform a lookup. Make sure to visit our Most expensive counties and most expensive zip codes sections. http://www.usa-zipcodes.com/

Weed-Whacking Herbicide Round-Up Proves Deadly to Human Cells

Used in gardens, farms, and parks around the world, the weed killer Roundup contains an ingredient that can suffocate human cells in a laboratory, researchers say

Used in yards, farms and parks throughout the world, Roundup has long been a top-selling weed killer. But now researchers have found that one of Roundup’s inert ingredients can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells.

The new findings intensify a debate about so-called “inerts” — the solvents, preservatives, surfactants and other substances that manufacturers add to pesticides. Nearly 4,000 inert ingredients are approved for use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Glyphosate, Roundup’s active ingredient, is the most widely used herbicide in the United States.  About 100 million pounds are applied to U.S. farms and lawns every year, according to the EPA. read more

Man Modifies Pickup To Run On Wood, Waste

KILLINGLY, Conn. -- From the first time he saw Emmett "Doc" Brown fire up the Mr. Fusion home energy reactor in the "Back to the Future" movies, Dave Nichols has always wanted to make a vehicle run on garbage.

Two decades after the trilogy, the 42-year-old home builder and auto shop owner from eastern Connecticut isn't traveling through time in a DeLorean, yet. But he's modified his 1989 Ford F150 pickup truck to run on wood, leaves, cardboard and other "biomass" with a fuel system that he says expels virtually no pollution.

The technology is called gasification, and it's been around since the 1800s, when it was used for street lamps and cooking. It even powered some vehicles during World War II, but faded away under oil's dominance.

Nichols and others say reviving gasification, which can also heat and power homes, has exciting possibilities, from reducing dependence on foreign oil to cutting pollution.
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"It's a simple science from 130 years ago that can be used today to solve all of our problems ... and it runs on potentially free fuel," Nichols said. "This type of technology has to be developed, and it has to be developed now."

Gasification projects have been sprouting up across the country. Others have also built car gasification systems, including a team in California that has a video on YouTube showing its modified Honda Accord.

Middlebury College in Vermont fired up its biomass heating and power plant last December.

The new interest in gasification comes as President Barack Obama presses to double the nation's use of renewable energy over the next three years, with $15 billion a year to be spent to develop solar power, wind power, advanced biofuels, fuel-efficient cars and other technologies.

Gasification works by heating organic materials to high temperatures without flames. The resulting chemical reactions produce a hydrogen-hydrocarbon gas mixture in vapor form that is almost as potent as gasoline, Nichols said.

His pickup truck appears to run like any other and easily reached 40 mph and above on local roads on a recent day, but it has no gas tanks. Nichols says he can get it up to more than 80 mph. The only noticeable difference is a contraption, right behind the cab's rear window, that takes up some of the back and looks somewhat like a wood stove.

A metal barrel, where the heating occurs, extends just above the cab's roof. The gas is captured from the barrel and a vacuum system sucks it through piping that runs under the truck to the engine.

Nichols says he's driven it 10,000 miles without gas, including a trip about three months ago when he loaded up the back with about 400 pounds of wood and drove some 600 miles across Connecticut, then to New Hampshire and Boston before returning home. A pound of wood or other material will fuel his truck for one to two miles, meaning that the truck costs about 8 cents a mile to fuel, compared to roughly 19 cents per mile if it used gasoline at today's prices.

"This is real. This is no game," said Nichols, who lives in town with his wife and two daughters, ages 15 and 11. "The mechanics at the garage thought I was crazy. They're not laughing anymore."

He started the project about seven years ago, after reading an instruction book about lamp gas technology in the 1800s.

Nichols has been trying to perfect the system ever since, with a few stumbles along the way, and says he's close. One of the final parts is an electronic system that would allow drivers to push a button, instead of having to start it with a propane torch like Nichols does now. He's applied for a federal grant to help with the electronic system and other improvements.

Nichols, a thin, mustachioed man whose hands are very active when he talks, had the "reactor" filled with slicked log pieces about 5 inches in diameter and 1 to 2 inches thick. That's where the gasification starts.

The organic materials in the reactor are exposed to extreme heat, which breaks them down into vapor gases. Then a startup vacuum system (using an old wet-and-dry shop vac) is turned on to get the gases flowing to the engine.

The temperature inside the reactor reaches over 2,000 degrees, but the gas cools to about 150 degrees about 5 feet from the reactor. Passengers in the pickup's cab don't feel the warmth.
source