*ding ding ding* We have a winner! After a bit of trial and error, thats the only thing we could think of. I guess you get so used to seeing it that once you finally get around to updating it, you never really know whats going on "under the hood". That's why I trust... "aptitude safe-upgrade" haha MUCH less painful!!

Those fuckers are getting REALLY crafty! Case in point... As a software developer and PC repair tech, I've seen a lot of BS from both ends of the spectrum but nothing prepared me for a "virus" that was found on a buddy's PC a few weeks ago. We were sitting around coding our Quake III mod and the small "update shield" popped up in the taskbar. The bubble popped up and said that updates were available and he needed to install them... so he did. Bad choice, my friend! A few minutes later an "Avast" bubble pops up and says that a threat has been detected. He clicked the button to stop and within a few seconds, the PC shut down. Once he managed to reboot, there were at least 10-15 Firefox windows open (ads), numerous [fake] Avast bubbles, another update shield and a shitload of warnings and error messages. He got duped. They're getting good! Thank god I run Linux for nearly everything these days!

Take a hard look at one of the Metasploit frameworks (I'm sure most of you have heard of it). Now which OS has more vulnerabilities/exploit modules loaded for it? Go ahead... I'll wait.... That would be Windows, of course. Who owns Windows? Microsoft. Which Internet browser has the most exploits on Metasploit? No surprise there, it's MICROSOFT Internet Explorer. Granted, Firefox has a few too (such as the case here with IFRAMES) but it's no where near what IE comes with loaded with, straight out of the box. Now the point of this is simple... closed source versus open source. In a proprietary market, you run into the problem of having one large company (such as M$) try to "prioritize" their agendas to suit it's needs and it seems to show that they often lack in response to disclosed security vulnerabilities. It often takes much longer for M$ to patch a hole than it is for Mozilla. On top of all that, when M$ releases a product, it's often on a "deadline". They have to get xx units out by yy day. The whole "Well, we'll just fix that later" attitude tends to kick in and takes a toll rather quicky. I want to say that it's something like 300 out of the 500+ exploits in Metasploit are in Microsoft owned or other proprietary software. The rate at which open sourced bugs are FOUND and FIXED is incredibly fast in comparison. The amount of exploits you find for open source software is next to nil... and the ones that you DO find are often patched by users rather quickly as well. My point is simple... Firefox has an vulnerability... but what doesn't? But that's only of a small peanut compared to the mammoth amount of vulnerabilities discovered for IE. Now, I must say that I don't agree with Mozilla's viewpoint on not fixing the bug, but maybe they have their reasons. I'll do my own research/testing before I decided to take anyones side on that argument.

I agree completely. Finding any evidence of intelligent life, other than ourselves would be a huge leap for the human race. I find that thought to be fascinating. It's things like ALH84001, ancient Mayan/Sumerian/Egyptian artifacts and the fact that we received a short "message" from space that corresponded to the plaque on-board the Voyager probe... that stuff really blow my mind. There's bound to be life out there that we are oblivious to, and anyone who thinks differently needs to open their mind a bit. It just sucks that we may never know, at least in our life time what exactly is out there in our nearby cosmic neighborhood.

I don't understand this. Okay... so we're listening for signals coming from outerspace. These signals travel at the speed of light. Say we hear something that originated from 300 light years away... that means that it was 300 years ago when they emitted that signal. So in essence, if WE send out a "Hello?"... we're likely to get back a "What??" 300 years later. I really don't understand the logic, but more power to ya.