Write for money

Isn’t this amazing, An artist unveils a 110-pound sculpture of the supermodel worth $2.8 million.What if the money used in this thing was given to people that needs this most, its a shame how people use their money.

Los Angeles (E! Online) - Someone has taken Kate Moss’ role as fashion’s golden girl rather literally.

British sculptor Marc Quinn is ready to unveil his latest creation to the world, a nearly $2.8 million, 110-pound solid gold statue of the supermodel, hyped as the largest such creation built since ancient Egypt.

Quinn, the artist behind 2006’s Sphinx, a painted bronze statue of Moss in a somewhat provocative yoga pose, has dubbed his new golden girl Siren.

And the British Museum has already heeded its call.

While the venerable London museum has so far only released a close-up photo of the statue’s face, the work purportedly shows Moss, once again, in the same contorted yoga pose as before.

"I thought the next thing to do would be to make a sculpture of the person who’s the ideal beauty of the moment," Quinn said of his fabulously excessive creation. "But even Kate Moss doesn’t live up to the image."

The British public will be able to determine for itself whether the statue succeeds where Moss apparently failed, with the objet d’art going on display in the the same British Museum gallery that houses the institution’s ancient Greek sculpture collection.

The statue will be on display from Oct. 4 through Jan. 25.

Senior Democratic officials are expressing serious concerns about the political risks posed by Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High tonight.

From the elaborate stagecraft to the teeming crowd of 80,000 cheering partisans, from the vagaries of the weather to the unpredictable audience reaction, the optics surrounding the stadium event have heightened worries that the Obama campaign is engaging in a high-risk endeavor in an uncontrollable environment.

A common concern: that the stadium appearance plays against Obama’s convention goal of lowering his star wattage and connecting with average Americans and gives Republicans a chance to drive home their message that the Democratic nominee is a narcissistic celebrity candidate.

"We already know he is a rock star; we already know he can bring 85,000 people together in a stadium. He has done it multiple times. He needs to talk to people who haven’t made up their minds yet," said Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen.

"It’s likely that the campaign would do it differently if it had to do it again because the decision was made before the European trip," said a senior Democratic elected officeholder who has worked closely with the Obama campaign.

The GOP narrative of Obama as celebrity took root during that trip, where the Illinois senator played to large crowds of adoring Europeans.

Obama campaign officials acknowledged the apprehension Wednesday.

"I have heard some of the concerns and criticism that it’s such a big venue," said a senior Obama campaign aide. "It’s no surprise that people could be a little nervous. We’re trying to do something new."

SAN FRANCISCO - The Olympic torch was rerouted away from thousands of demonstrators and spectators who crowded the city’s waterfront Wednesday to witness the flame’s symbolic journey to the Beijing Games.

The planned closing ceremony at the San Francisco Bay waterfront was canceled and another one was planned at San Francisco International Airport. Massive crowds had gathered at the waterfront to support and protest the flame.

The last-minute changes were made amid security concerns following chaotic protests over the torch in Paris and London.

Mayor Gavin Newsom told The Associated Press that the well choreographed fake-out was prompted by the size and behavior of the crowds amassing outside AT&T Park, site of the relay’s opening ceremony.

There was "a disproportionate concentration of people in and around the start of the relay," he said in a phone interview, while traveling in a caravan that accompanied the torch.

Less than an hour before the relay began, officials cut the original six-mile route nearly in half.

Then, at the opening ceremony, the first torchbearer took the flame from a lantern brought to the stage and held it aloft before running into a warehouse. A motorcycle escort departed, but the torchbearer was nowhere in sight.

Officials drove the Olympic torch about a mile inland and handed it off to two runners away from protesters and media, and they began jogging toward the Golden Gate Bridge, in the opposite direction of the crowds awaiting its passing. Further confusion followed, with the torch convoy apparently stopped near the bridge before heading southward to the airport, where a closing ceremony on the tarmac was planned.

As the flame traveled toward the airport, news slowly dribbled through the crowds of more than 10,000 spectators and protesters gathered at the waterfront that the torch would not be headed there.

Spectator Dave Dummer said he was disappointed.

"That upsets me," Dummer said. "My back hurts from standing around on this lumpy sidewalk. … This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and other people messed it up by protesting."

There were signs of tension even before the torch relay began. Pro-Tibet and pro-China groups were given side-by-side permits to demonstrate, and representatives from both sides spilled from their sanctioned sites across a major street and shouted at each other nose to nose, with no visible police presence to separate them.

At least one torchbearer decided to show her support for Tibetan independence during her moment in the spotlight. After being passed the Olympic flame, Majora Carter pulled out a small Tibetan flag that she had hidden in her shirt sleeve.

"The Chinese security and cops were on me like white on rice, it was no joke," said Carter, 41, who runs a nonprofit organization in New York. "They pulled me out of the race, and then San Francisco police officers pushed me back into the crowd on the side of the street."

Farther along the planned route, about 200 Chinese college students mobbed a car carrying two people waving Tibetan flags in front of the city’s Pier 39 tourist destination. The students, who arrived by bus from the University of California, Davis, banged drums and chanted "Go Olympics" in Chinese.

"I’m proud to be Chinese and I’m outraged because there are so many people who are so ignorant they don’t know Tibet is part of China," Yi Che said. "It was and is and will forever be part of China."

The torch’s 85,000-mile, 20-nation global journey is the longest in Olympic history, and is meant to build excitement for the Beijing Games. But it has also been targeted by activists angered over China’s human rights record.

Hundreds of pro-China and pro-Tibet demonstrators blew whistles and waved flags as they faced off near the site of the relay’s opening ceremony. Police struggled to keep the groups apart. At least one protester was detained, and officers blocked public access to bridge leading to the ceremony site across McCovey Cove from the ballpark.

One of the runners who planned to carry the torch dropped out earlier this week because of safety concerns, officials said. The torchbearers competed not only with people protesting China’s grip on Tibet, but its support for the governments of Myanmar and Sudan.

Local officials say they support the diversity of viewpoints, but tightened security following chaotic protests during the torch’s stops in London and Paris and a demonstration Monday in which activists hung banners from the Golden Gate bridge.

Vans were deployed to haul away arrested protesters, and the FAA restricted flights over the city to media helicopters, medical emergency carriers and law enforcement aircraft. Law enforcement agencies erected metal barricades and readied running shoes, bicycles and motorcycles for officers preparing to shadow the runners.

Peter Ueberroth, chairman of the United States Olympic Committee, said the U.S. had struck the right balance between preserving freedom of speech for protesters, providing an exhilarating experience for the torchbearers, and preventing a repeat of the chaotic demonstrations that accompanied the torch in London and Paris.

"As close as anybody can do in a free society, so far its looking very good," Ueberroth said. "Virtually anybody and everybody is being heard."

The Olympic flame began its worldwide trek from Ancient Olympia in Greece to Beijing on March 24, and was the focus of protests right from the start.

Although torchbearers in other cities have complained of aggressive behavior by paramilitary police in blue track suits sent by Beijing to guard the Olympic flame, there was no evidence of problems in California.

San Francisco was chosen to host the relay in part because of its large Chinese-American population.

IOC president Jacques Rogge met with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Wednesday to discuss preparations for the games, and "a range of games topics were discussed," the IOC said.

Rogge is to give more details at a news conference Friday, when the IOC’s executive board is to discuss Friday whether to end the remaining international legs of the relay after San Francisco because of widespread protest. The torch is scheduled to travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and then to a dozen other countries before arriving in China on May 4. The Olympics begin Aug. 8.

Rogge has refrained from criticizing China, saying he prefers to engage in "silent diplomacy" with the Chinese.

In an interview broadcast Wednesday on the VRT television network in his native Belgium, Rogge warned that pushing China too hard on Tibet and human rights would be counterproductive.

"If you know China, you know that mounting the barricades and using tough language will have the opposite effect," he said. "China will close itself off from the rest of the world, which, don’t forget it, it has done for some 2,000 years."

Fortunately, you missed the real heyday of computer viruses when anti-virus software wasn’t very widely used, and virus attacks caused millions of dollars in damages overnight. Today’s viruses can still be nightmarish, but for the average user, cleanup is considerably easier than it was just a few years ago, when the only solution in many cases was reformatting your hard drive and starting from scratch (and even that didn’t do the trick sometimes).

So join me on a trip down memory lane as we revisit some of the worst viruses of all time and count our blessings that our computers are still up and running despite it all. (Though, please note, "worst" is a matter of considerable debate in the security industry, as the number of infected machines and amount of financial loss is always estimated. If you think another virus was worse than these, please post it in the comments to remind us!)

The worst viruses of all time

Brain, 1986
It all started here: Brain was the first "real" virus ever discovered, back in 1986. Brain didn’t really hurt your PC, but it launched the malware industry with a bang and gave bad ideas to over 100,000 virus creators for the next 2 decades.

Michelangelo, 1991
The worst MS-DOS virus ever, Michelangelo attacked the boot sector of your hard drive and any floppy drive inserted into the computer, which caused the virus to spread rapidly. After spreading quietly for months, the virus "activated" on March 6, and promptly started destroying data on tens of thousands of computers.

Melissa, 1999
Technically a worm, Melissa (named after a stripper) collapsed entire email systems by causing computers to send mountains of messages to each other. The author of the virus was eventually caught and sentenced to 20 months in prison.

ILOVEYOU, 2000
This was notable for being one of the first viruses to trick users into opening a file, which in this case claimed to be a love letter sent to the recipient. In reality, the file was a VBS script that sent mountains of junk mail and deleted thousands of files. The results were terribly devastating- one estimate holds that 10 percent of all computers were affected, to a cost of $5.5 billion. It remains perhaps the worst worm of all time.

Code Red, 2001
An early "blended threat" attack, Code Red targeted Web servers instead of user machines, defacing websites and later launching denial-of-service attacks on a host of IP addresses, including those of the White House.

Nimda, 2001
Built on Code Red’s attack system of finding multiple avenues into machines (email, websites, network connections, and others), Nimda infected both Web servers and user machines. It found paths into computers so effectively that, 22 minutes after it was released, it became the Internet’s most widespread virus at the time.

Klez, 2001
An email virus, Klez pioneered spoofing the "From" field in email messages it sent, making it impossible to tell if Bill Gates did or did not really send you that information about getting free money.

Slammer, 2003
Another fast spreader, this worm infected about 75,000 systems in just 10 minutes, slowing the Internet to a crawl (much like Code Red) and shutting down thousands of websites.

MyDoom, 2004
Notable as the fastest-spreading email virus of all time, MyDoom infected computers so they would, in turn, send even more junk mail. In a strange twist, MyDoom was also used to attack the website of SCO Group, a very unpopular company that was suing other companies over its code being used in Linux distributions. 

Storm, 2007
The worst recent virus, Storm spread via email spam with a fake attachment and ultimately infected up to 10 million computers, causing them to join its zombie botnet.

For everyones information, THE I LOVE YOU VIRUS was made by a Filipino. Im not saying that its a good thing, but man! now that is cool! Yahoo shot down due to that virus. It cracked the world!

About the programmers, still don’t have a clue where they are now. Ive heard that they were recruited by the Bill Gates or something though(not really sure if thats true or just a gossip).

Japan has decided to beat France and the United Kingdom (both who have similar proposals) to become the first country to ban file sharers from the internet.

Oddly the agreement to do so has not come from the Japanese Government, but from Japan’s four internet service provider organizations after pressure (not surprisingly) from the record and movie industries. According to Torrent Freak, the agreement would see copyright holders tracking down file-sharers on the Internet using “special detection software” and then notifying ISPs of alleged infringers. File sharers will initially receive a warning for a first offense, then be disconnected for subsequent offenses, eventually be disconnected from the internet permanently (it wasn’t clear whether the agreement is a three strikes proposal).

The process will formally commence in April and will primarily target users of Winny, the most popular file sharing network in Japan.

The FBI estimates that a burglary occurs in the U.S. every 15 seconds and that the average loss to homeowners in a single burglary is more than $1,300. Busy schedules, second homes, and travel make "people of a certain age" targets. Until recently, home security was an expensive installation coupled with high monthly fees. Now, it’s a weekend project for the technically inclined.

You can buy home security kits in places like RadioShack or on Amazon. A typical starter kit includes motion sensors, a webcam, and some sort of base station. Additional sensors for lighting, heat, and water are usually available as add-ons. When your system is enabled and motion is detected (this could be an opening door or window or movement on your porch, for example), the sensors notify the base.

The base then takes various actions by contacting the security company, sounding an alarm, texting or emailing you to notify you about the security breach. Because these are sold as starter kits with add-on modules, you can start with a sub-$200 system and then grow.

Thanks to the Internet, most of these systems now provide a way to check up on things remotely or make changes to the settings via an Internet connection through a PC, laptop, PDA, or cell phone.

I recently installed one of these do-it-yourselfers from InGrid, but haven’t paid the money for the service yet. Just that fact that it has an alarm sound and notifies me via email is enough for my needs. (Gulp…!)

InGrid is typical of this two-tier security system. Tier one provides security inside your house. You install a series of wireless motion sensors (they stick on using double adhesive) at your doorways and windows. A single controller unit monitors the sensors. Tier one then reports to tier two outside the home, in this case a service called Guardian. You pay Guardian $30 a month to respond to your alarms. The best part of the InGrid system is the remote monitoring. From your PC or phone, you can check or modify the status of the system.

GE makes a number of popular systems, including the Simon 3, which work in a similar fashion. A starter kit includes a transformer base and two transmitters. GE lets you add all sorts of devices like smoke alarms, lamps, and more for as many as 24 different zones. The base station will give you voice-prompt instructions to tell you what’s alarmed and what isn’t. Allstate sells a custom brand of the Simon system. You can watch a video of how Simon works. At Smarthome’s web site, you can find a similar setup from AAA+ that starts at $153 and will work with up to 10 sensors, five control modules, and five keychain remotes.

If you already have a home security system, look at a product like uControl that taps into that system and provides the remote control piece. And if you’re looking for the poor man’s solution, there are a number of video cameras you can attach to an old PC that allow you, via the Internet, to either look, send you pictures at certain intervals, or even record the action (no alarm or remote monitoring service). The best resource for these is Smarthome.

How much of a techie do you need to be in order to install these systems on your own? Somewhere between a technophobe and a true geek. If you can follow directions and know a bit about the vocabulary and principles of sensors, then you should be fine.

*A word about homeowner’s insurance and alarm systems. Most, if not all, insurers will give you a discount on your homeowner’s policy premium if you install a home security system. The available discount varies. There’s usually a difference between choosing a professional system like ADT or Brinks and a less known, do-it-yourself. Make sure to check with your insurance company.

Wolverines are big secretive weasels with bad attitudes, but that doesn’t stop some people from getting awfully excited about them.

In California, wildlife enthusiasts are buzzing because a Oregon State University graduate student’s remote-sensing camera appears to have photographed a wolverine, making it California’s first substantiated wolverine sighting since the 1920s. Katie Moriarty was trying to get a shot of the American marten, but her research project probably is getting more attention now, thanks to the accidental grainy shot.

Here’s how the U.S. Forest Service describes the wolverine, and the photograph:

The North American wolverine is the largest member of the weasel family. Adult males weigh 26 to 40 pounds, while females are 17 to 26 pounds. It resembles a small bear, with a bushy tail and broad head. Its diet includes carrion, small animals, birds, insects and berries.

U.S. populations are found largely in the Northern Cascades in Washington, and Northern Rockies in Montana and Idaho. The nearest known resident population is about 900 miles north of the Tahoe National Forest in Northern Washington.

Attempts have been made for decades to photograph wolverines in California, according to Bill Zielinski, a Forest Service scientist with the Pacific Southwest Research Station and an expert at detecting wolverines, marten and fisher. He said periodic sightings have occurred, but never scientifically confirmed using detection methods that produce verifiable evidence.

Scientists will now conduct further detection analysis on the Tahoe National Forest using remote-controlled cameras and barbed wire snares that snag hair. They may also use dogs trained to find wolverine scat. Scientists have found dogs to be three and a half times more successful at detecting rare carnivores than remote-controlled cameras in forested areas like the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Zielinski said hair and scat samples would contain DNA that can be analyzed to determine where the animal originated.

Wolverines have large home ranges that vary greatly depending upon gender, age and food availability. In order to avoid interference with ongoing studies, Forest Service officials are not releasing the exact location where the wolverine was photographed.

The agency’s regional forester for California has listed the wolverine as a sensitive species, and the 2004 Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment directs the Forest Service to conduct an analysis to determine if activities within 5 miles of where a wolverine was detected will affect the species.

“This is an exciting research discovery, both for its scientific value, and as a demonstration of our success in forest management.” said Tahoe National Forest Supervisor Tom Quinn. “For now, we on the Tahoe National Forest have more questions than answers. We have initiated discussions with researchers about where this sighting occurred and how this could affect management of the National Forest. We are also consulting with wolverine experts and forest managers where wolverine populations occur, and gathering current literature and studies. As we learn more, we will assess which projects and activities, if any, might be affected.”

Over 18 million Xbox 360s have sold through since the console’s launch in November 2005, but just how many of those are still working? Squaretrade, a company that specializes in providing warranty support to purchasers of electronic goods from various manufacturers, claims 16% of Xbox 360s experience a hardware failure within six to ten months after a warranty purchase. Three out of every five failures were for the infamous "Red Ring of Death" general hardware failure error, a problem often linked to overheating.

The Xbox’s figures compare poorly to competing consoles, which have a failure rate of around 3% — and if anything, the Squaretrade figure underestimates the scale of the Xbox 360’s reliability issues. It’s a good bet that some buyers of Squaretrade warranties went straight to Microsoft after experiencing hardware issues and don’t factor into the 16% number. On its company blog, Squaretrade pointed out that failure rates are "certain to go up" as the machines in their study group grow older.

Microsoft is cagey about coughing up official failure rate figures, which has lead some commentators to speculate about the actual severity of the problem. Luke Plunkett, a blogger on respected games news site Kotaku, said in a recent post that if the real failure rate wasn’t in the 30-40% range, he’d "wolf down humble pie until his sides split."

Plunkett’s sides are likely safe. Stories of 360 owners making their way through eight or nine consoles aren’t hard to find, but to its credit, Microsoft has been working with the affected individual in at least one of those cases to lessen the impact of the constant failures.

16 Percent of Xbox 360s Are Likely to Break, Report Claims

Even so, there’s a surprise lurking for consumers who return their 360s for repair. When you purchase content — arcade games, extra tracks, etc. — over Xbox Live, it’s playable by any user on the console you used to make the transaction. If you go to a different console and sign in with your gamertag, you can download the content and play it only for as long as you’re signed in. Once you move back to your main machine, it will no longer be playable. Sounds like a handy system to let you take the content you own from place to place, right?

But the trick with this system is that once a broken machine returns from its little vacation, it generally has sufficient internal changes to make it look, to Xbox Live, like a different console. So all your downloaded content — which, if you’re a heavy user, could amount to hundreds of dollars worth of purchases — are only accessible to one gamertag, and only when the console has a live internet connection.

Getting this situation resolved can be difficult. Affected users have reported having to make repeated calls to the Xbox support line, often to no avail. Some fortunate individuals were able to eventually convince the MS reps to refund all the points they’d spent so they could repurchase all the affected content, although they had to do it using a different gamertag.

How to Avoid Hardware Problems

• Air it out. Many failures are attributed to the inadequate cooling system of early-model 360s, so anything you can do to give it an easier time will pay off. Make sure you put the console in a place with cool, steady airflow.
• Move it and lose it. Don’t change the orientation of the console when it’s running. The DVD drive’s running gear isn’t as well secured as it could be, so knocking over a vertically-standing console can cause the machinery to collide with the disc surface. Characteristic circular scratches are the result and are generally fatal for the game.
• Think new. Thanks to a well-publicized cooling system redesign, newer machines are less likely to suffer problems. Any console bought in the last six months or so should have much better chances of surviving.

Red Ring of Death: What to do

Is it a "real" red ring of death? Somewhat confusingly, the true red ring error only has three of the four quarters of the ring illuminated. If all four are lit up, you have a much simpler problem: your A/V cable is loose!

Enterprising 360 owners have discovered a homebrewed way to fix the problem, although it only works for a short period of time. It involves turning on your console, wrapping it tightly in a towel, and leaving it on for 20-25 minutes. This might void your warranty from Microsoft, so consider yourself warned.

If all else fails, hit up the Xbox web site to request a warranty repair. They’ll send you a cardboard "coffin" for you to return your console and send back a fixed machine in a few weeks. The official warranty was extended to three years for this specific problem, so even launch-day 360s are technically still covered.

It"s makeover time! But before we even GET to the hair drama, Fatima strikes again! Upon getting a delivery of Applebottom jeans for all, Fatima tells Allison that her butt is the epitome of an "apple bottom," e.g. "big." She drives this point home by saying that Allison is "bigger in general." Allison, a "former" anorexic and current pill, really doesn"t take this very well at all. Fatima is all, "What? Did little ol" me say something wrong again?" Allison later does a little role-playing with some ebony and ivory Barbie dolls, wherein Fatima Barbie has a padded ass because she"s black. Uh, yeah. Though, granted, given some of the things that Fatima has encountered in her life, Allison could have done MUCH WORSE things in regard to that Barbie"s nether regions. Fatima gets really offended, and the whole thing isn"t made any better by the fact that they"re sharing a giant bed with four other girls. The girls head back to the House of Wal-Mart for a makeup challenge with our friends from Cover Girl. Claire, who is generally pretty great, wins. No one really freaks out at the makeovers. Anya goes platinum blonde, Whitney and Amis get big blonde weaves, Aimee goes red, Marvita gets the Tyra-invented horse mane hair weave, Lauren gets some glamorous extensions, Katarzyna goes darker, Claire becomes a yellow-blonde and gets almost completely buzzed, Fatima gets a weave — and okay, there is some complaining there, Allison goes lighter, Dominique gets a hideous bowl cut, and poor pretty Stacy-Ann looks like a brillo pad.

The photo shoot for the week sees the girls working with super-sweet Elle MacPherson as they model pieces from her lingerie line on a boat with New York City as a backdrop. While Fatima embraces her new glamorous look, Lauren still feels a little uncomfortable being pretty and girly. Despite thinking she"s the greatest thing ever, Allison actually is stiff and vacant, and, despite thinking that she"s fierce and high fashion Dominique is, as you might expect, a hot mess. They land in the bottom two and, much to her surprise and dismay, Allison gets the boot.

The newly released MacBook Pro offers a massive increase in computing power and energy efficiency thanks to the Core 2 Duo processor by Intel. With the greatly improved CPU, Apple took an already smart and sexy laptop and gave it a 39% faster, turbo-charged, Mensa-crushing, better base configuration and a 50% faster SuperDrive, all without increasing the price. With all its benefits, it’s no surprise that businesses, creative professionals and students are finding the new MacBook Pro hard to resist.