Hitler was an expert in Demagoguery and was able brainwash the entire German population with his propaganda methods. He successfully used the prejudices of the German people to get into power and also to kill a large number Jews. He was so successful in demagoguery that there was rarely any opposition to his horrific actions.

Demagoguery doesn’t necessarily mean using lies or falsehoods. Subtle techniques such as stressing a word during speeches or concentrating on a series of events with a similar theme are examples of Demagoguery.

The common methods used involve absurd comparisons which the listener can’t fully understand, using half truths and using emotional attacks. Another technique is to use black and white comparison. For example, "you are either with us or with terrorists!". This leaves no choice to the listener and he feels obliged to follow the propagandist.

A more recent example of subtle demagoguery can be seen in the 2008 United States presidential election. Democratic candidate Barack Obama has been on the receiving end of this tactic. Attempts has been made to link the similarity between Obama and Osama (who is a wanted terrorist) and suggest that Obama is a Muslim (since his middle name is Hussein).

One major hurdle for Demagoguery is the presence of independent media organizations.

Memristor is called a memory resistor since the resistance of the device is dependent on the voltage applied and also on the time for which it is applied. The time element is what makes the circuit element unique. Memristance is defined as the ratio of magnetic flux between the device terminals and the electric charge passed through the terminals. If alternating voltage is applied to the device so that net charge transfer is zero, Memristance value becomes constant and can be used as a storage device.

The HP implementation promises giant leaps in memory implementation and memory density for future computing devices. It means more memory storage with less components and less energy. But as of today high speed operation is not yet possible on Memristors. Theoretically Memristor can be used to pack 100 gigabits in a square centimeter!!

In the future we may see Memristors used in computer memory, signal processing and neural networks.

These are terms used to define add on services provided as part of hotel accommodation. Each of these indicates a specific accommodation plan under which food cost may be included. Here is brief summary of each of these terms.

EP - This is called the European Plan. Under this plan, only room rent is included and any food cost will be additional. Usually this will have the lowest tariff.

CP - This is called the Continental Plan. Under this tariff plan, room rent and complimentary free breakfast is included. For dinner and lunch you will have to pay extra.

MAP - This stands for Modified American Plan. Under this tariff plan, room rent is included with free breakfast and free lunch OR free dinner.

AP - This stands for American Plan and this tariff includes room rent plus breakfast, lunch and dinner. Booking a room under this plan means that you won’t have to pay extra for food.

MAPI or API - This is an extended version of MAP or AP under which free evening tea/snacks are provided.

Please note that the above are only general guidelines. The actual schemes/tariff structure can vary from hotel to hotel and you need to verify it in advance.

Following is a sample resort package indicating the above terms.

We have the following packages for an AC double room during off peak season at our XYZ resort,

3 days / 4 nights (EP basis) - $100

3 days/ 4 nights  (CP basis) - $120

3 days/ 4 nights (AP basis) - $160

Gutenberg Project - Gutenberg project is a volunteer based project to digitise books for which copyright has expired or books which are in public domain. There are over 25,000 free e-books available for download and include a lot of classical books. Most of these books are available as plain text files or as HTML files.

Scribd - Scribd is a document sharing service where people share their documents. You can also find a large number of books here. It is supposed to contain over 350,000 documents!

Internet Archive - This is a huge list of public domain documents and books. Currently there are over 500,000 documents and many of these are direct scanned versions available in many formats (PDF, Djvu, text etc.)

WikiBooks - WikiBooks is an initiative by Wikimedia foundation to create free online books that anyone can edit. Many of the book hosted are still incomplete and not all are of good quality. Still you can find a lot of interesting stuff and the books cover almost all topics.

Google Book Search - Google’s advanced book search is a good tool to find free ebooks available online. Google has already digitized and OCRed over a million books and is continuing the scanning at about 3000 books per day. This includes both public domain books and copyrighted books. You will not be able to get the copyrighted books through the Google book search. When I tried "Aesop" it returned about 650 search results (with full view search option checked).

Rare Book Room - This is a small collection of small and rare old books mainly classical fiction. Currently there are about 400 books available for download in PDF format.

In United States, Axxo’s activities are considered illegal since encoding and releasing digital copies of movies is a violation of the copyright act.  If caught and convicted, axxo can expect a long jail term in United States.

The reason why axxo is so popular is the high quality of his movie releases. These movies are compressed as DivX videos and the audio is typically AC3 encoded.  Since the entire movie size is around 700MB, people prefer to download axxo torrents. The quality of the movie also ensured that the axxo torrent had a large number of seeders active at any time.

The popularity of axxo torrents have also resulted in the release of a large number of bogus torrent files also. It has also been rumoured that anti-piracy groups are using the name "axxo" to release fake torrents and to trap people downloading illegal movie torrents.

Axxo’s torrents can be found on a number of torrent sites including the famous Pirate Bay. Axxo is still an active torrent uploader as of September 2008. Recently other uploaders called klaxxon and FXG started to upload torrents which has good quality similar to that of axxo.

It is interesting to note that axxo has a page on Wikipedia.

A large number of users are using free proxies and anonymizer services such as tor to access blocked Web sites. People also use a wide range of techniques (running a proxy server at home or using translation services) to get around Internet access restrictions.

But bypassing Internet filters through proxies can be dangerous. In many countries such as China, accessing a banned site through proxies can lead to criminal prosecution. People who access blocked sites using a proxy from their office are violating their employment terms and can loose their jobs.

There is a bigger risk in using publicly hosted Proxy services. For example, when you can access your bank account or email address through a proxy server, the user id and password first goes to the Proxy server machine and then goes to bank or email service provider. The guy running the proxy server can easily get hold of your important account information and can later use it for illegal purpose. You may also loose money from bank or loose control of your email account!

A similar threat exists when you access important personal information from public computers (such as the one in an Internet cafe). There could be hidden programs or key logging hardware installed on these machines. Key logging hardware basically records every letter typed by you.

So stay away from suspicious Proxy server services and access your important Internet accounts from your home machine only.

There are two options to run Windows programs on Ubuntu or for that matter any Linux distribution.

The first is to use Wine software available on Linux distributions. Wine implements most of the Windows API functions on top of a Linux kernel. Using Wine you can run a Windows executable and as far as the Windows executable is concerned it sees only the Windows API layer. Note that wine only adds an extra layer of code and hence has minimal impact on performance. You don’t need to buy Windows to run your Windows applications anymore! Unfortunately not all Windows programs can run on Wine. Check the Wine application compatibility database to find out whether your favourite program can run on Wine! You may be surprised to know that a large number of Windows games can run without problems on Wine! Now gaming is not an excuse to buy Windows operating system

The second option to run Windows programs under Ubuntu is to use a virtual machine software package such as Vmware. But this requires that you should have a licensed Windows operating system with you! First you need to install Vmware on Linux and then you can install Windows operating system on the Vmware virtual machine. Unlike wine this guarantees that you can run almost all Windows programs. But the extra Vmware layer affects performance especially for Windows games. One good thing about this is that you can keep a backup of your virtual machine and easily move it to a different Windows machine!  You can also run a large number of operating systems on a single machine using this technique.

Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow - Turns the Windows Vista display upside down

Ctr+Alt+Up Arrow - Restores the display back to normal mode

Ctrl+Alt+Left Arrow - Turns the display 90 degrees to the left

Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow - Turns the display 90 degree to the right

In earlier Windows version such as Windows XP, the same can be achieved using the display driver software. For example, NVidia video card control panel has a rotate display section using which you can turn the display to 90 or 180 degrees.

So next time when someone changes your display upside down you can laugh. You can also try this prank on your friends and grandma!

For the complete list of Windows Vista Keyboard shortcuts Click here and then click on "show all" in the page. Following are some of the shortcuts which I found interesting,

left alt + left shift + print screen - Toggles high contrast display (another candidate for pranks!)

Windows logo + number - This will invoke the quick launch program represented by the number. For example, Win + 1 will invoke the first quick launch program you have configured!

Shift (immediately after inserting a CD/DVD) - This will prevent auto play of the CD inserted. This is a must if you are checking out a CD/DVD which might contain viruses. A better solution will be to disable auto play altogether.

Hence hackers are trying to find out WordPress vulnerabilities and to use it for monetary benefit. For example, hacking tools are available which scans for old WordPress installations and after hacking into them injects links and content for marketing and search engine visibility.  Eventually search engines such as Google and Technorati finds out that your blog is hacked and they black list your blog. It will no longer appear in search results.

Now how do you protect your blog against these hackers? Here are some simple tips which will minimize the risk of your blog getting hacked.

1. Delete the default admin user id - Many of the automated tools try brute force method on the default "admin" user on WordPress. Removing "admin" altogether reduces this risk. First create a user id which is difficult to guess and then assign administrative privilege to the new user id. Then login using the new user id and delete the "admin" id.

2. Use a complex password - Use a password which is easy for you to remember but difficult for the automated tools to crack. The idea here is to keep the password length at least 10 or more with special characters and numbers. The latest WordPress versions will indicate the strength of the password as you type it.

3. Keep your WordPress installation up to date - This is the most important thing to do to keep your WordPress installation safe. Whenever a new WordPress version is released wait for a few days and then upgrade your blog to latest version. Hackers find vulnerabilities all the time and the only way to fight them is to keep your installation up to date.

4. Use only reliable WordPress plugins - A large number of WordPress plugins are created by programmers who are not aware of advanced security loopholes. When a compromised plugin is used in your WordPress installation, the entire site is at risk. Plugins have complete control over WordPress engine. Use only widely used plugins and ensure that you minimize the number of plugins. I use WP-Cache, Google Sitemaps and WP-SpamFree only! Also ensure that you keep these up to date using the auto upgrade feature.

5. Disable XMLRPC - A large number of automated attacks use vulnerability in XML-RPC service. If you don’t need XML-RPC disable it! But for third party publishing tools such as Windows Live Writer, XML-RPC is required. It may be a bit tedious, but you can enable XML-RPC just before publishing and then disable it afterward.

Note that most of the techniques mentioned also applies to other blogging software packages such as Movable Type.

The auto update feature is good and ensures that you have all the latest Google talk features available on your machine. But is there a way to disable this auto update?

Currently the only way to disable auto update is to tweak Windows registry settings. Be very careful when you make these changes as a wrong modification in the Windows registry may mean unusable operating system!

How to disable Google talk auto update mechanism?

1. Open Registry Editor by invoking the command regedit on the command line.

2. Go to Computer->HKEY_CURRENT_USER->Software->Google->Google Talk->Autoupdate by expanding nodes.

3. Click on Autoupdate to see a list of keys under it.

4. You will see a key UpdateURL with a value like "http://tools.google.com/googletalk/google-talk-versioncheck.txt". This is the link Google Talk checks to see if there is a new version released. Change this value to blank ("") to disable auto updates.

Check out google-talk-versioncheck.txt. You will see something similar to the following,