Now here’s a view you don’t always get:

Wow! Click that to most cromulently embiggen!

An Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle patroled the launch area as the Space Shuttle Atlantis roared into space on its final flight in May. Check out the shadow of the plume on the ground!

The full caption reads:

Lt. Col. Gabriel Green and Capt. Zachary Bartoe patrol the airspace in an F-15E Strike Eagle as the Space Shuttle Atlantis launches May 14, 2010, at Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Colonel Green is the 333rd Fighter Squadron commander and Captain Bartoe is a 333rd FS weapons system officer. Both aircrew members are assigned to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C. (U.S. Air Force photo/Capt. John Peltier)

Thanks, gentlemen, for seeing off Atlantis in style.

Tip o’ the left wing to Reddit. Image credit: U.S. Air Force/Capt. John Peltier.

June 7th, 2010 1:58 PM Tags: Air Force, Atlantis, Space Shuttle
by Phil Plait in Cool stuff, NASA, Pretty pictures | 33 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

What a photograph!

Mark O’Brien: Mikel Arteta’s grudge-bearing revelation sheds new light on Everton FC’s Spanish star

Apr 22 2010 by Mark O’Brien, Liverpool Daily Post

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IT WAS fascinating to hear Mikel Arteta allege that the poke in the eye he administered to Morten Gamst Pedersen at the weekend was in response to a number of bad tackles from the Norwegian stretching back over a number of games.

That’s some excellent grudge-bearing by the Spaniard, who was clearly lucky to avoid dismissal for handing out – every pun intended – his own brand of summary justice to one of football’s least likely hatchet men.

It makes you wonder whether David Moyes, who we imagine does a passable Sean Connery impression, paraphrases the speech from The Untouchables before his players take to the pitch.

Presumably it would go something along the lines of: “If they kick one of ours in the ankle, we poke one of theirs in the eye. If they send one of ours to the physio, we send one of theirs to see respected specialist Dr Richard Steadman in Colorado. It’s the Everton way.”

Thankfully, Arteta only received a yellow card, as he was instrumental – as ever – in everything good that Everton did in what started out feeling like a pre-season friendly, what with the lovely weather and relaxed supporters on both sides, but ended up an absolute thriller.

Arteta makes Everton play, although he’s ably assisted by Steven Pienaar, and perhaps unsurprisingly the speculation has started in earnest about the South African’s future, with Spurs the first club to be strongly linked for a move in the summer.

All we can do is hope that Everton can somehow tempt him to stay, but you can’t help but fear that it’s going to be hard.

If a club come in offering to double what a player could earn at Goodison and the opportunity to play Champions League football, Moyes can make all the heartfelt pleas he wants, he’s talking to an empty chair.

It might sound defeatist to think in those terms, but as Evertonians we’ve seen enough of these situations arise in recent history to have a pretty good indication of how they usually play out.

Stranger things have happened though, so there’s some hope that Pienaar will still be at Goodison next season, when marked men like Kevin Nolan, Aaron Mokoena and Sotirios Kyrgiakos will all be well advised to don their safety goggles and an extra pair of shin pads.

Great article.

Miscreants have created a Trojan that poses as a Google Chrome extension.

Spammed messages attempt to dupe prospective marks into trying an add-on that “helps you better organise your documents received in your email”.

Interested parties are pointed towards a counterfeit Google Chrome Extensions page, which offers a malware executable.

More observant punters will notice that the download is offered in an .exe file and not a .crx Google Chrome extension. Such markers are easily missed, however.

The Trojan horse malware on offer (identified by Romanian security firm BitDefender as the Agent-20577) blocks access to Google and Yahoo webpages. Attempts to reach these sites on infected machines are hijacked and redirected to counterfeit sites. Such trickery is commonly a prelude to either phishing attacks or a technique by the hackers behind the trick to gain affiliate income from scareware slingers or other undesirables.

The appearance of the attack shows that cybercrooks have begun targeting Google Chrome users, something that only tends to happen when a product or service becomes widely used among end users and is therefore a compliment (of sorts) to the success of Google’s browser technology.

More on the threat can be found in a write-up, containing screen shots, by BitDefender here. ®

Beware those of you who have adopted Google Chrome as your browser of choice!

I like this solution!

Twitter

on Tuesday introduced a new service called Promoted Tweets, which will let companies send ads in the form of ordinary messages, according to a blog posted by co-founder Biz Stone.

The introduction is an important step for the company, since it represents the first step towards turning the microblooging service into a money-making venture.

Users will start seeing paid messages, which will be labeled “promoted,” at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages, according to Stone. Initially, up to 10 per cent of users will see the promoted messages. Twitter will work with Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America, to roll out the first ads, he said.

Twitter roll out the Promoted Tweets in several phases, with Tuesday’s announcement marking the first. Before Twitter develops the service further, the company wants to get a better understanding of the “resonance” of Promoted Tweets, the user experience and advertiser value, Stone said.

Future changes to the ad service could include showing the messages in users’ message timelines, he said.

The ads will have to fight to get user attention. Twitter will attempt to measure whether the advertising messages interest users and stop showing those that don’t, according to Stone. They will have all the functionality of a regular message, including the ability to reply, retweet and favorite.

On Tuesday, Twitter’s COO Dick Costolo will be talking about the offering in detail at the AdAge Digital conference, according to Stone. Costolo and CEO Evan Williams will further discuss Promoted Tweets and what it means for Twitter developers at Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference, on Wednesday, he said.

So will you keep using Twitter if you end up getting adds thrown at you? I suspect most people wont. How often would be too much for you?