The BBC has imaginative headlines: FBI tries to fight zombie hordes

The FBI is contacting more than one million PC owners who have had their computers hijacked by cyber criminals.

The initiative is part of an ongoing project to thwart the use of hijacked home computers, or zombies, as launch platforms for hi-tech crimes.

The FBI has found networks of zombie computers being used to spread spam, steal IDs and attack websites.

The agency said the zombies or bots were “a growing threat to national security”.

…

The FBI has been trying to tackle networks of zombies for some time as part of an initiative it has dubbed Operation Bot Roast.

This operation recently passed a significant milestone as it racked up more than one million individually identifiable computers known to be part of one bot net or another.

Wow, I’m impressed – the FBI actually doing something that has a chance of cleaning up some the problems with spam and denial of service attacks.  On the other hand – Operation Bot Roast?

CNN trying to act like a news source by carrying this Associated Press story: Space station computers rebooted, partial power restored

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) — Russian computers that control the international space station’s orientation and oxygen and water supplies were partly working again Thursday after failing the day before.

Flight controllers in Moscow were able to re-establish some communication with the computers overnight, and Russian engineers were working Thursday to restore the rest of the system, NASA space station flight director Holly Ridings said.

“They’ve made a lot of progress,” she said. “There are some cleanup steps to do still and some investigation.”

Officials with NASA and the Russian space agency still don’t know why the computers went down. They had never seen that type of failure on the space station before, and they believe it may be related to electrical power rather than computer software.

A new solar array had been unfolded outside the station Tuesday to help provide power for the orbiting outpost, and astronauts spent Wednesday hooking up a joint that will let the solar arrays track the sun.

I don’t want to go all Fristian with an extremely long distance diagnosis, but the problem, possibly power related occurs as people are mucking about with the solar arrays that supply power. I get a feeling the two events might be related.

Why, you may ask are a picture readily identifiable as Thomas the Tank Engine [to anyone who is around toddlers] and the symbol for chemical weapons in the same post?

As Whig at Cannablog points out, the people who added counter tops to your pet food and antifreeze to your toothpaste are using lead paint on wooden toys.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission if you have any Thomas & Friends™ Wooden Railway Toys, you should immediately take them away from the children and return them to the place of purchase or manufacturer.

Nothing from China should be allowed in the United States without a complete analysis and 100% inspection.

The US Office of Strategic Services provided materiel to a gentleman named Ho Chi Minh to battle the Japanese in World War II. That certainly worked out well.

The follow on organization, the CIA, provided materiel to a number of people including a man named Osama bin Laden to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan. That worked just as well.

No matter how often, or how spectacularly the concept fails, some people keep returning to the “wisdom” of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

IT IS NOT TRUE! STOP ALREADY!!

As Swopa notes, the experiment with arming Sunnis in Anbar province isn’t working out so well, but they just will not learn.

Swopa, ‘Noz, Steve Soto, Charles 2, and BadTux all see it coming. They all know this is going to end badly, but Major General Rick Lynch thinks it’s a good idea to fight “al Qaeda in Iraq” by providing materiel to Sunni groups like the Islamic Army of Iraq.

Today Rook notes in his post, Under Estimated Again, that the military in Iraq is calling for a surge in the surge – more troops. No word as to where they will come from, but if I had a child in Scouting, I might be worried.

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Adopted as the flag of the United States of America by the Flag Resolution of 1777 enacted on 14 June, 1777.

The flag was first flown from Fort Stanwix, on the site of the present city of Rome, New York, on August 3, 1777. It was first under fire three days later in the Battle of Oriskany, August 6, 1777.

An official flag has a rise to run ratio of 1 to 1.9 [the flag should be 1.9 times as long as it is high] with the canton [the dark blue part] that rises over the top seven stripes with a run of 40% of the flag’s run.

The only time you will see a “correct” US Flag is if you see the official colors of a military unit. Most flags are 3’X5′ or 4’X6′ instead of 3’X5.7′ or 4’X7.6′.

Frances Bellamy, the Baptist minister and socialist who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance was from Rome, New York.