>Dow plunges 800 points amid global sell-off

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The Dow Jones industrials skidded more than 800 points and fell below 10,000 for the first time in four years, while the credit markets remained under strain. Financial markets took a despairing view of the future Monday, seeing contagion in a credit crisis that threatens to cascade through economies globally despite government efforts to provide relief.Investors around the world have come to the sobering realization that the Bush administration’s $700 billion rescue plan won’t work quickly to unfreeze the credit markets. Global banks, hobbled by wrong-way bets on mortgage securities, remain starved for cash as credit has dried up.

That has sent stocks spiraling downward in the U.S., Europe and Asia, and driven investors to sink money into the relative safety of U.S. government debt. Fears about a global recession also caused oil to drop below $90 a barrel; and the benchmark index that gauges fear in the market jumped to the highest level in its 18-year history.

“The fact is people are scared and the only thing they’re doing is selling,” said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer’s Investment Research. “Investors are cleaning out portfolios and getting rid of everything because nothing seems to be working.”

The selling was so extreme that only 67 stocks rose on the NYSE—and 3,155 dropped. That’s a telling sign considering the stock market is considered a leading economic indicator, with investors tending to buy and sell based on where they believe the economy will be in six to nine months.

Monday’s steep decline on Wall Street indicates that investors are becoming more convinced that the country is leading a prolonged economic crisis that is spreading to other nations. Over the weekend, governments across Europe rushed to prop up failing banks, while the governments of Germany, Ireland and Greece also said they would guarantee bank deposits. – bb

Problem: A disease called “addicted to credit”. Buy gold.

>Head-to-toe hazards of the desk-bound body

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Graphic is from computer world.

>Sunspots Are Fewest Since 1954, Significance Is Unclear

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The Sun has been strangely unblemished this year. On more than 200 days so far this year, no sunspots were spotted. That makes the Sun blanker this year than in any year since 1954, when it was spotless for 241 days.

The Sun goes through a regular 11-year cycle, and it is now emerging from the quietest part of the cycle, or solar minimum. But even for this phase it has been unusually quiet, with little roiling of the magnetic fields that induce sunspots.

“It’s starting with a murmur,” said David H. Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

As of Thursday, the 276th day of the year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., had counted 205 days without a sunspot.

In another sign of solar quiescence, scientists reported last month that the solar wind, a rush of charged particles continually spewed from the Sun at a million miles an hour, had diminished to its lowest level in 50 years.

Scientists are not sure why this minimum has been especially minimal, and the episode is even playing into the global warming debate. Some wonder if this could be the start of an extended period of solar indolence that would more than offset the warming effect of human-made carbon dioxide emissions. From the middle of the 17th century to the early 18th, a period known as the Maunder Minimum, sunspots were extremely rare, and the reduced activity coincided with lower temperatures in what is known as the Little Ice Age. – nytimes

>Bank robber hires decoys on Craigslist, fools cops

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In an elaborate robbery scheme that’s one part The Thomas Crowne Affair and one part Pineapple Express, a crook robbed an armored truck outside a Bank of America branch in Monroe, Wash., by hiring decoys through Craigslist to deter authorities.

It gets better: He then escaped in a creek headed for the Skykomish River in an inner tube, and the cops are still looking for him. “A great amount of money” was taken, Monroe police said, but did not provide a dollar value.

It appears to have unfolded this way, according to a Seattle-based NBC affiliate: around 11:00 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, the robber, wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask went over to a guard who was overseeing the unloading of cash to the bank from the truck. He sprayed the guard with pepper spray, grabbed his bag of money, and fled the scene.

But here’s the hilarious twist. The robber had previously put out a Craigslist ad for road maintenance workers, promising wages of $28.50 per hour. Recruits were asked to wait near the Bank of America right around the time of the robbery–wearing yellow vests, safety goggles, a respirator mask, and preferably a blue shirt. At least a dozen of them showed up after responding to the Craigslist ad.

“I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour,” one of the unwitting decoys, named Mike, said to the NBC station. As it turns out, they were simply placed there to confuse cops who were looking for a guy wearing a virtually identical outfit.

Authorities eventually found the getaway inner tube (a getaway inner tube!) and suspect that accomplices may have picked up the robber in a boat. According to the NBC affiliate, police hope to track him down by figuring out who posted the Craigslist ad in the first place. – cnet

>Anthrax Preparedness In US To Involve Mailmen

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Earlier this week the US government announced measures to boost the nation’s preparedness against a potentia outdoor anthrax attack: using letter carriers or mailmen on a voluntary basis to deliver supplies and medicines to residents in communities during an emergency.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Mike Leavitt, and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, have used their authority under law to enable the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that will allow eligible letter carriers to have medical kits with small amounts of antibiotics for themselves and their families to use in the event of an anthrax terrorist attack.

Should there be an outdoor anthrax attack, the antibiotics will protect emergency volunteers against the bacterium. The secretaries stressed that no imminent threat exists at the moment, but putting the legal framework in place now will ensure a speedy response is then possible if it should be needed. … –  mednews

>Confessions of a Gold Eater

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Also referred to as ORMES (Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements) or ORMUS and m-state elements, and the newest theories in physics as they relate to this area of research assert that some elements on the periodic chart might be diatomic (two atoms) or small atomic cluster “condensates,” which are known in the scientific community as “Bose-Einstein Condensates.” They are becoming more widely known as “m-state” elements. These elements are widely found.

The elements are very superconductive and supplementing with it seems to boost the energy of the cells within your body, this facilitates repair and regeneration at a faster level than before, online sources produce these supplements; by chemical and electrical manipulation that reduce elements such as gold, silver, indium etc to this M-state. The products are then lab verified for safe consumption etc. My personal experience with it has been interesting to say the least, I feel great, full of energy, my libido has increased, I am able to focus and have a much better mental clarity than before. The most interesting effect is that my teeth, (two front molars) having been accidently chipped when I was seven, are actually re-growing! – ac

Gold ordinarily doesn’t react with much at all, so it won’t do any harm or good when you eat it. Not sure about this:

Monoatomic? Maybe. A superconductor? We hope to know soon. Is it real? Absolutely! … Our White Powder Gold has been tested by the Department of Materials Characterization at a prominent English University.  … White powder gold is made from pure gold. It is not made from volcanic ash or sea salt or crushed rock. We sell this powder in 1/2 ounce bottles and in 1 ounce bottles . It is suspended in water with no preservative…  …  We would like to point out that since only a handful of human beings know how to produce a substance such as a white powder gold , the residue found at crop circles strongly suggests that they have an extra-terrestrial origin. – whitepowdergold

Someone should buy some and have it examined.

>Outer solar system not as crowded as thought

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A new finding has determined that the outer solar system appears not as crowded as some theories suggest, with astronomers unable to find small chunks of rock and ice in the region, which they were expecting to locate. The search in question, the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS), spent two years periodically photographing portions of the sky to look for small chunks of rock and ice orbiting beyond Neptune, in a region of the solar system called the Kuiper Belt.

The survey targeted Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) with sizes between 2 miles (3 km) and 17 miles (28 km). Since such objects are too small to see directly, the survey watched for stars to dim as KBOs passed in front of and occulted them.  … The outer solar system hence appears not as crowded as some theories suggest, perhaps because small KBOs have already stuck together to form larger bodies or frequent collisions have ground down small KBOs into even smaller bits below the threshold of the survey. – phenom

>Computer Problems Eat Hours and Hours of time.

>RANTS:

– Don’t buy an Acer 5610 laptop. They overheat and shut off without warning, screwing your entire operating system. ( At first I thought it was a virus, but the problem continues with a freshly installed OS. )

– Don’t think Maxtor backup software will get you out of trouble if your computer crashes. If you have a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini external hard drive backing up your data, note: 1) DriveProtect is not compatible with SafetyDrill. If you encrypt your  external drive with Maxtor’s software (DriveProtect) you won’t be able to use Maxtor’s software (SafetyDrill) to get your data back. 2) Save the Maxtor Manager software that comes on the OneTouch Mini on an external USB drive. They refuse to provide the software on their web site, despite complaints about this over a year old. You have to email them requesting it (and they don’t auto reply).

– Don’t expect to install Vista in the same time it takes to install Windows XP. The Windows Vista installation process may take several hours on some systems. I’m going back to XP Pro as soon as Maxtor sends me a link to the software I need.

Okay, this was exactly the video I needed to see right now. (Warning: strong language) I about laughed my arse off because I realized, watching someone else have a real honest to god hissy fit, that we are like junkies. We are addicts. We are sick. (See IAD).

>Anger management