pkluss noted Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft making the proclamation that "Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."

During the Olympics we discussed the international monitoring effort as China shut down factories and curtailed automobile travel in an attempt to reduce pollution. Now reader Anti-Globalism sends in a story that reveals that monitoring effort to be ongoing, with a bigger mandate: assessing the impact of China's pollution on the US. In fact the problem is bigger still because, as one researcher put it, "It's one atmosphere." Scientists are finding that pollution from, for example, Europe can travel right around the globe in three weeks. "By some estimates more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach the US annually. The problem is only expected to worsen: Some Chinese officials have warned that pollution in their country could quadruple in the next 15 years. While some scientists are less certain, others say the Asian pollution could destabilize weather patterns across the North Pacific, mask the effects of global warming, reduce rainfall in the American West and compromise efforts to meet air-pollution standards."

Esther Schindler writes "Every year, there's some retailer whose e-commerce or supply chain fails. And it's a big deal, since the holiday shopping season can make or break their year. The IT challenge encompasses everything from server scalability to supply chain management to search engine optimization to database cajoling to business integration to... well, come to think of it, just about everything. To explore this, CIO.com has a big package of articles examining "Black Friday" and its implications, entitled E-Commerce and Supply Chain Systems Gird for Black Friday. Topics covered include online shopping and holiday IT failures. Despite all this—and at least ten years of industry experience in e-commerce sales—we all just know that someone will make yet another big mistake. I wonder who it'll be this year?"

KingKong writes "Scientists have unraveled the DNA of another of our primate relatives, this time a monkey named the rhesus macaque — and the work has far more immediate impact than just to study evolution. These fuzzy animals are key to testing the safety of many medicines, and understanding such diseases as AIDS, and the new research will help scientists finally be sure when they're a good stand-in for humans. 'Having a third primate will allow scientists to compare the three genomes, with an added emphasis on singling out the genes possessed by humans alone. The end goal is to reconstruct the history of every single one of the approximately 20,000 genes, to determine when they first appeared in history, and in what species. All of this requires an extraordinary amount of information.'"

rangeva writes "As anti-spam solutions evolve to limit junk email, the senders quickly adapt to make sure their messages are seen. an interesting article describes the application of an artificial immune system model to effectively protect email users from unwanted messages. In particular, it tests a spam immune system against the publicly available SpamAssassin corpus of spam and non-spam. It does so by classifying email messages with the detectors produced by the immune system. The resulting system classifies the messages with accuracy similar to that of other spam filters, but it does so with fewer detectors."