clipped from slashdot.org An anonymous reader writes “This video shows a method by which a user can use a Linux distro called BackTrack to gain system access to Windows Vista without logging into Windows or knowing the username or password for any accounts. To accomplish this, the user renames cmd.exe to Utilman.exe — this is the program that brings up the Accessibility options for users without sight or with limited vision. The attack takes advantage of the fact that the Utility Manager can be invoked before the user logs into the system. The user gains System access, which is a level higher than Administrator. The person who discovered this security hole claims that XP, 2000, 2003 and NT are not vulnerable to it; only Windows Vista is.” Posted by kdawson on Monday May 26, @12:51AM from the seems-too-simple-somehow dept. Technology: Gaining System-Level Access To Vista

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I was driving into work one day when I heard a story which hit me good that I haven’t heard or stumbled upon on the traditional news outlets that I browse on a daily basis. A report released this year stated that over the page year, the earth has not suffered from any global warming, but instead has been suffering from global cooling.

Wait. What?

Hasn’t the rhetoric of the past year and year of a half been that the world is headed to hell in a handbasket and that every year we are getting warmer and warmer and that if we don’t do something about it soon, that our children will suffer from the unstable environment produced by this increase in temperatures across the globe.

Of course, that has been at all times, propganda used for political motivation and has never once been scientifically sound or based(just like evolution, but that is something for another time) to where the arguments make sense with the data presented for it.

Now, we find out, that last year the earth suffered the greatest fluxuation in temperature that has ever been recorded, with enough cooling to wipe out the past 100 years of “global warming” that we have seen. If you look at the temperature change in the native format of Celcius, to us Americans who rely on the Fahrenheit scale, it doesn’t seem that much. But when you convert this over to something that we understand…well…it becomes that much more significant. To start out with, the temperature change (Per the information found on the DailyTech website) of the earth this past year places the cooling of the earth anywhere from 0.65 to 0.75 degrees C. Not that bad right. I wanted to see what that was in a temperature I could understand so I dug out my old science notes and excell to do some calculations. Per my notes:
Tf=Temperature in degress Fahrenheit
Tc=Temperature in degrees Celsius

Tf=(9/5)*Tc+32

So if we plug our numbers into the equation here….
Tf=1.8*.65+32
Tf=1.17+32
Tf=33.17

This is the low side. So according to scientist, the earth cooled a whopping 33.17-33.35 degrees Fahrenheit in the past year. I didn’t believe my calculations, so I checked them against some sites that do it for you automatically with javascript. Same results. One of those sites can be found here.

So essentially what is happening here is that the polar opposite is happening of what Al Gore and his cronies have been saying will happen. Instead of the earth getting warmer and burning up, it is in fact getting cooler. Now while this drop in temperature may seem extremly significant, it could be just due to a weird cold cycle that we are going through. Or it could be the herald of something much worse on its way. What could be worse?

According to The Australian, our sun has not followed through on its cycles the way it is supposed to. This is how it is supposed to work. Sunspot numbers follow a cycle of a somewhat variable length, with an average of eleven years. The most recent minimum (by minimum it means end of cycle, or low of the cycle with the lowest/low number of sun spots in the cycle) ended last March(2007) and the next cycle (what they deem 24) should have started sometime after that. The only problem is, that it hasn’t. In fact, the very first sunspot that had been spotted was in January of 2008 and since then only a small handful and they have been really small and lasted only a little while. It is these very sun spots that provides the heat and the increase in temperatures we have seen.

I like the IBD as it summerizes a study quite well

A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.

“The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100,” according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.

The study says that “try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures.”

The study concludes that if you shut down all the world’s power plants and factories, “there would not be much effect on temperatures.”

The article also states:

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.”

Rather, he says, “I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet.”

So Mr. Gore and everyone else that thinks that we are killing our planet by overheating it. Sorry to say your wrong. Now, don’t get me wrong. We need to take care of our planet. We need to reduce pollution. But the impact that these so called greenhouse gasses are having on the planet is a joke. We need to look at this from a purely scientific standpoint and realize that we are not warming the planet at all. In fact, if predections are right, we will need to find ways to warm the planet due to the decrease in temperatures. So I’m gonna do my part. I’m gonna drive my nice SUV to and from Milwaukee each day. Gotta keep those greenhouse gasses in the air…never know….global warming in that regard could be our friend!

Sources:
The Australian: Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh

IBD: The Sun Also Sets

Power Line

EDIT:
Something just doesn’t feel right about those numbers. I’m triple checking some articles. Even if it was only 10 degrees F, that would still be alot, however.

Tags: cooling,false,global,global warming,scient
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