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Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

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A controversial anti-blasphemy law is being scrapped by the Dutch government. The move is remarkable as two of the current three members of the ruling coalition are Christian parties and they had originally wanted to maintain the ban.

In scrapping the law the cabinet is meeting the demand of parliament where a majority of parties argued that offering religious groups an extra layer of legal protection is outdated.

As an alternative the cabinet is now seeking to strengthen anti-discrimination laws against groups whatever their background, thus taking the religious component out of the equation.

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The Republican vice presidential candidate attracted criticism for accusing Mr Obama of “palling around with terrorists”, citing his association with the sixties radical William Ayers.

[..]

The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin’s attacks.

Hate and fear is all the GOP has left…

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Over a period of about a month in the Spring of 2008, researchers at the University of California, San Diego and UC Berkeley sought to measure the conversion rate of spam by quietly infiltrating the Storm worm botnet, a vast collection of compromised computers once responsible for sending an estimated 20 percent of all spam.

[..]

This allowed them to redirect a subset of the spam to virtual storefronts created by the researchers to mimic the pharmaceutical Web sites advertised by the real Storm spam.

The dummy sites were fully functional until the instant when a visitor, who had loaded up his shopping cart, tried to check out. Before entering credit card and shipping information, the servers were designed to return a site error message, so that the researchers never gained access to their personal information and the buyer was unable to make a purchase.

After 26 days, the Storm worm sent 350 million e-mails advertising the researchers’ counterfeit pharmacy sites. Only 28 would-be sales resulted, and all but one of the potential clients ordered male enhancement drugs. The average “buy” from each “sale” was about $100, which would have totaled roughly $2,731 for the researchers.

[..]

“Under the assumption that our measurements are representative over time, we can extrapolate that… Storm-generated pharmaceutical spam would produce roughly $3.5 million dollars of revenue a year,” the team concluded.

Still, the researchers acknowledge their figures don’t take into account perhaps the most profitable aspect of the pharma spam business: The repeat customer who comes back time and again to purchase refills.

I actually have a friend called sudo rm -R /, but he’s a jerk, and I never have to call him.

A bit more than I can show you here, so just follow this link