Technorati State of the Blogosphere, October 2005 :Some highlights: * 34% primarily blog to be seen as an authority in their field. * Over 50% blog about companies at least once per week. * 63% believe blogs are the most trustworthy source of product information. * Over 98% take steps to correct factually incorrect portions of a blog post. * Over 80% prefer to receive information from non-executives. * Blogs of individual employees are considered more trustworthy than blogs endorsed by a corporation.Blogosphere Growth Summary: * As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 million weblogs * The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months * The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth * About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day * About a new weblog is created each second * 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs * Between 700,000 and 1.3 million posts are made each day * About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second * An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average

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Salty water crops , a great idea that is being reserched in many ways, including using genes from a Dead Sea fungus to increase the salt tolerance of other organisms and eventually to extend the salt tolerence capacity to crops.

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The UCSB International Capture The Flag (also known as the iCTF) is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of the participants from both the attack and defense viewpoints.The Capture The Flag contest is a multi-site, multi-team hacking contest in which a number of teams compete independently against each other.Each team is given a virtualized server installation (for example, a virtual Linux server). The server provides a number of services. The services have a number of undisclosed vulnerabilities, which have been included in the server's software by the contest organizers.The goal of each team is to maintain the set of services available and uncompromised throughout the contest phase. Each team can (and should) attempt to compromise other teams' services. Since all the teams receive an identical copy of the virtual server, the task of each team is to find vulnerabilities in their copy of the server and possibly fix the vulnerabilities without disrupting the services. At the same time, the teams have to leverage their knowledge about the vulnerabilities they found to compromise the servers run by other teams. Compromising a service will allow a team to bypass the service security mechanisms and to "capture the flag" associated with a service.During the contest a scoring system keeps track, for each team, of which services are available, and which services have been compromised.The 2005 iCTF was scheduled Friday, December 9, 2005, from 8am to 4pm, PST (note: this was changed from the initial date of December 7th).The winner of the last edition of the competition (which was held in June 2005) was the team "The Tower of Hanoi", from Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

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[White supremacist New Zealanders prepared to face up to the Sydney riots - Wikinews]

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Being on good terms with Google and googling people including blogger and bloging people, still did not stop me from thinking Streets are much better than the rough roads of the past centuries , too !

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