MS wins court approval to topple "botnet

Software giant Microsoft Corp has won a U.S. court approval to deactivate a global network of computers that the company accused of spreading spam and harmful computer codes, the Wall Street Journal said.

A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, granted a request by Microsoft to deactivate 277 Internet domains, which the software maker said is linked to a "botnet," the paper said.

A botnet is an army of infected computers that hackers can control from a central machine.

The company aims to secretly sever communications channels to the botnet before its operators can re-establish links to the network, the paper said.

Microsoft on Monday filed a suit that targets a botnet identified as Waledac, the paper said.

Judge Brinkema's order required VeriSign Inc, an Internet security and naming services provider, to temporarily turn off the suspect Internet addresses, the paper said.

Microsoft could not be immediately reached for comment by Reuters outside regular U.S. business hours.

On February 18, Internet security firm NetWitness said in a report that a new type of computer virus is known to have breached almost 75,000 computers in 2,500 organizations around the world, including user accounts of popular social network websites.

Five Steps to An Effective Business Plan

You have an idea for a business. You know what you want to sell, who you can sell it to, and how much you stand to earn from it. There's just one more thing you need: a business plan.

Many people dread the idea of preparing a business plan. They think of them as complicated, unnecessary documents that exist only to make it more difficult for them to get started as an entrepreneur. They are wrong.

Business plans are necessary because they help you “see” your business. Instead of just talking in abstract ways about your “customer base” and your “profit potential,” it lets you put those things in writing and in concrete terms. It forces you to think through every aspect of your business in advance so down the road you don't realize you've made a mistake that's cost you your business, your life's savings, and your job.

Besides all of that, they are also important tools for getting other people interested in your business. For one, if you've taken the time to create a business plan, others will realize that you are serious about this endeavor and that it isn't just some pie-in-the-sky dream. A business plan also shows people that you are a professional and that you understand what it takes to start and manage a business. This is all extremely important, particularly if you need any type of outside funding, such as loans or investors.

So while the bad news may be that you definitely do need a business plan, the good news is that they don't have to be complicated. The truth is that your plan only needs to cover seven main areas and none of these areas are going to require you to write a full-length novel. These five sections are the executive summary, the company overview, the business environment, the company description, and the action plan. All of those sections may sound complex, but most of them won't involve information that you don't already know.

Executive Summary

Even though this section will technically be first in your business plan, you should actually write it last because, just as its name implies, it summarizes the entire contents of your business plan. Because many readers never bother to get beyond the executive summary, you must make sure that it is comprehensive and well-written.

If that sounds difficult, it isn't. Just make sure to read through your entire business plan before you start writing the executive summary. Make a list of information that you think is the most important or that would really stand out to a reader, and be sure to include all of it in your summary.

Company Overview

This section explains the guiding force behind your business. It gives them a chance to see what you have in mind for the business and how you plan to get there. Generally, the overview does this by providing a mission statement, goals, and objectives for your business.

In a nutshell, a mission statement provides the answers to all of these questions in less than 50 words: What am I selling? Who am I selling it to? Why am I selling it? It doesn't need to be just one sentence, but keep it as brief as possible.

Goals and objectives, the other components of the company overview, are often confused by first time business plan writers. Remember that goals are things your company wants to achieve while your objectives are how they plan to get there.

Business Environment

This section will probably require you to do some outside research because it involves information relating to your industry, your market, and your competition. You need to take an honest look at the field you are preparing to enter and pay close attention to its structure, its trends, and its barriers to new businesses. Become familiar with the major competitors in your industry and decide how you will differentiate yourself from them. Also, get to know your potential customers and what makes them tick. The more you know about them, the more likely you will be to turn them into buyers.

Company Description

At this point in your business plan, you need to go into detail about your business. You can't simply define your company in terms of what you sell, but also in terms of who you serve, what resources you will use, what types of employees you are looking for, what type of distribution method you'll utilize, and more. All of this factors combine to create your company.

In addition to this, you should also state your company's UPS (Unique Positioning Statement). This is a one sentence statement that explains what sets you apart from all of the competitors.

Action Plan

The last part of your business plan is this section which outlines the steps you need to take now in order to make your plan work. These should also reflect the goals and objectives that you've outlined in your company overview.

Besides these primary pieces of a business plan, you may also need to include a financial section, particularly if you plan on using it to get outside funding for your business. This may take more thought and planning than the other sections because it will require you to make some assumptions about your business's revenue potential. The most important thing is to base any estimates on realistic expectations, not optimistic dreams.

You may want to visit the following websites for some samples to give you an idea of how things should be formatted and worded:

Google News tunes into favorite topics

Google on Monday began letting online visitors tell its news website what topics they want to tune into.

People can click on "stars" to mark groups of stories on preferred subjects to signal Google News to watch for updates or developments, according to Google software engineer Jude Britto.

"When you star a story in Google News, it's one way to let us know that you're interested in that subject," Britto said in a blog post.

"When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information."

The 20 most recently "starred" stories will be tracked in a section added to the Google News page, according to Britto

B.E. students develop quake-detecting robot

Engineering students in Surat have developed an earthquake-sensing robot that can detect the onset of an earthquake three hours in advance.
The recent earthquake in Haiti prompted, students of the J. T. Engineering College to develop the 'Earthquake Detector Robot'.
"I have made a robot called Earthquake Detector Robot. When the earth starts vibrating, the robot senses it before and informs about the danger in advance. The information would help avert any unfortunate destruction caused by the earthquake," said Hiren Patel, a student who made the Earthquake Detector Robot.
Two transmitters and one receiver have been fixed to the robot. The transmitter's circuit is kept inside the earth, which senses the temperature of the earth, water and also the water level, and through microwave frequencies it transmits the information.
After sensing the temperature and water level, the robot, with the help of micro-controller senses the vibration in the earth and gives off an alarm.
The detecting robot can be operated from every corner of the country with the help of the Internet.

Floods

The greatest flood to be accepted by orthodox science may be the deluge of 14,000 years ago[†] in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia.

"It was an event that's very hard to describe- because nothing comparable has ever been seen by people," says Victor Baker, a geologist at the University of Arizona. "It's the largest flood we can document in the fossil record." At its height, he says, the water may have been 1,500 feet deep, racing along the Chuja River valley at 90 miles an hour.

Baker had been working with Alexey Rudoy, a Siberian geologist, who had argued for years that only massive flooding could have formed the oddly rippled terrain and giant bars of gravel found in the Chuja Valley and nearby regions - not glaciers, as was commonly believed.

"Near the end of the last ice age, they say, a glacier crawled out of a valley perpendicular to the Chuja Valley and cut across the latter, effectively damming it and creating a lake nearly 3,000 feet deep that held 200 cubic miles of water. Eventually that ice dam broke the lake either burst through the dam or lifted the entire glacier. Water rushed into the narrow river valley at the rate of 640 million cubic feet per second, in a deluge that probably lasted several days."

The Chuja Valley flood was just the largest of numerous ice-age inundations, says Baker. "Even the English Channel has been attributed by some to late-glacial catastrophic flood erosion," he says, "though it hasn't been proven."[34]

Meanwhile in North America:

The Missoula Floods, 16,000-14,000 years ago (Pleistocene)

Did you know that the largest floods to occur on the planet happened here? During the last ice age, ice sheets covered much of Canada. One lobe of ice grew southward, blocking the Clark Fork Valley in Idaho. This 2,000 foot (600 meters) high ice dam blocked the river, creating a lake that stretched for hundreds of miles. When the lake was full, it contained 600 cubic miles (2,500 cubic kilometers) of water. How much is that? Imagine a block of water a mile high (as high as the mountains around Bonneville Dam), a miles wide, and stretching from Bonneville Dam to San Francisco!

Eventually, water traveled under the ice dam. The water drained out of the lake in two or three days, flooding eastern Washington. The flood, moving up to sixty miles per hour, scoured out hundreds of miles of canyons called coulees, created the largest waterfall to ever exist, and left 300 foot (90 meter) high gravel bars. At Bonneville, the water crested at 650 feet (200 meters). If you look on the cliffs southeast of the dam, you will see a transmission tower (the one with three poles) that is 200 feet (60 meters) above the high water mark.

During a period of 2,500 years as many as 100 of these floods scoured the Gorge.

The source of this information is from a page at a U.S. Government website. It details the (orthodox) geologic history of the Columbia River Gorge. Like the Siberian flood, scientists describe a glacier that blocks a valley and creates a dam. However the trapped water does not freeze, it slowly builds up then bursts through the barrier of ice. This is apparently the only non-catastrophic, gradual situation they can think of!

Prior to the catastrophic floods, albeit 12-40 million years prior, this district was also host to a spectacular amount of volcanic activity. They state that 41,000 cubic miles (170,000 cubic kilometres) of lava spread to cover large parts of Oregon and Washington. This is enough to cover the entire continental USA with at least 12 metres of lava!! Elsewhere[35], sections of lava in the Columbia River area have been estimated to be 3,500 metres thick!!

If we were to disregard the dating of these events, then we have two obvious after-effects of a pole shift, one occurring directly on top of the other.

Volcanoes

An event as catastrophic as a pole shift would undoubtedly create an increase in volcanic activity. In fact, I suspect that every volcano along the “line of most movement” would have exploded. Evidence of past lava flows indicate that our current level of volcanic activity is very low, a mere whimper. In my opinion, there has been a gradual decline of activity over the last 10,000 years, as the earth’s crust has settled into its new position, and the volcanoes have slowly died down.

A shift of the crust would require some stretching and contracting due to the equatorial bulge. Any section of the crust that moved into the area of the equator would have to stretch to accommodate the bulge. On the other side of the equator, where section of the crust were moving away, there would be contraction. Distortions of this magnitude would give us the “fire” element so often part of the flood myths – volcanoes.

"In Arizona, New Mexico and southern California there are very fresh looking volcanic formations. The lava flow in the valley of the San Jose River in New Mexico is so fresh that it lends support to Indian traditions of a “river of fire” in this locality."[36]

Ten thousand years ago, volcanoes were active everywhere. Listed here are the active areas of the southern hemisphere:[37]

Nigeria Kenya Tanzania Great Rift Valley Madagascar Indian Ocean Burma

Malaysia Indonesia New Hebrides Bismarck Sea New Guinea New Zealand Solander Islands

Australia: N Queensland SE NSW West Victoria Tasmania

Antarctica: S. Ant. Peninsula Ellsworth Land Marie Byrd Land The Andes (entire) Brazil – Mato Grasso Chile (800 volcanoes)

The northern hemisphere covers pretty much everywhere except Europe.

As we can see, Chile alone had more active volcanoes back then, than the 500 the entire globe has today. Volcanoes are so sensitive that we can assume the majority of them would erupt during a pole shift situation. Our atmosphere would be filled with dust and the sun would effectively disappear from view for a few years. An example of this is the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 – this single volcano lowered the mean earth temperature by about 1ºC for several years[38], and many parts of the world lost an entire growing season. With hundreds of volcanoes erupting at once our planet would be plunged into winter, with the new poles freezing over rapidly.

The amount of dust in the air, and corresponding lack of sunlight caused by a pole shift is unpredictable, but even a layman can guess that it would be many, many times more severe than the explosion of Krakatoa. A number of doomsday researchers have pointed out how the dust would create a tragic, incredibly cold period. However, the severity may well be offset in part by the carbon dioxide that volcanoes produce. While dust will stop the sun’s rays from entering our atmosphere, carbon–dioxide will stop heat from escaping, the much discussed “greenhouse effect”. Carbon dioxide also stimulates plant growth, but only when there is sunlight as well. The climate following a pole shift is very difficult to predict. Prepare for anything.

Volcanic Gases. All magmas contain dissolved gases that are released during and between eruptive episodes. These gases are predominately steam, followed in abundance by carbon dioxide, compounds of sulfur and chlorine, and lesser amounts of other gases. While they rarely reach populated areas in lethal concentrations, sulfur dioxide can travel downwind and react with the atmosphere to form acid rain that causes corrosion and a host of other problems. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air and tends to collect in depressions, such as valleys, where it can occur in concentrations lethal enough to cause suffocation of people and animals.[39]

Seashells

In my own travels, during a visit to mountains in New Zealand, I pondered over why there should be seashells high upon them. Yes, New Zealand is a relatively new country – supposedly it slowly rose from the ocean 26 million years ago. But how are these shells, which easily break beneath my shoes, which I could easily turn into sand, still in one piece after 26 millions of years? Have they survived earthquakes and weather for such a terribly long time? Or could the islands of New Zealand have risen only 12,000 years ago?[40]

Graham Hancock found a similar situation at Lake Titicaca, on the border of Peru and Bolivia:

Though now more than two miles above sea level, the area around Lake Titicaca is littered with millions upon millions of fossilized sea shells. This suggests that at some stage the whole of the Altiplano was forced upwards from the sea-bed, perhaps as part of the general terrestrial rising that formed South America as a whole…[41]

This would be in line with orthodox scientists, who believe that this occurred very slowly 100 million years ago. But Hancock points out that many of the fish and crustacea in the lake are of a salt-water variety, as if they hadn’t had time to evolve into fresh water types. Indeed this is the only fresh water location on earth where seahorses live.

The ancient city of Tiahuanaco, is currently 12 miles distant, and 100 feet higher than the lake. Yet, this city has ruined docks, which implies that within the civilised history this area was subject to a major upheaval. It is frightening to think that there are forces that can shift landscapes two miles vertically, and this may have happened 12,000 years ago in South America.

+++++

You may have noticed that we haven’t discussed any internal forces that can make the poles shift – I don’t think there are any. The RB-Effect of James Bowles relies on the pull of the sun and the moon. I believe the required forces must come from farther away.

Extra-terrestrial forces are infinite and mostly unknown. If something out there is capable of tilting the Earth, we are yet to discover it. But there are a few clues. Global cataclysms have occurred previously, and presumably will happen again. Any prediction of when must be based on calculable processes. If the Mayan calendar proves to be prophetic, then this cosmic disturbance must be a regular and predictable occurrence, not a random collision or interaction. If evolution is caused by cosmic rays (see Chapter XX), then they must be a component of the disturbance. And if humanity manages to survive each cataclysm, the disturbance’s effect must fall a little short of total annihilation.

Charles Hapgood (1904-1982)

After graduating from Harvard, Charles Hapgood taught history at Keene State College in New Hampshire. In 1949 one of his students asked about Atlantis, and he transformed the query into a research project, questioning the gradualist rules of geology and seeking evidence of a catastrophe large enough to destroy the fabled land. For 10 years, aided by his eager students, Hapgood worked on his theory of earth crust displacement - an update of Hugh Auchincloss Brown's theory that the entire planet has previously capsized. Brown's theory simply stated that as the Antarctic polar ice cap gains weight [9], the planet becomes less stable, eventually becomes unbalanced and topples over. The relative weights are more akin to a speck of dust on an automobile tyre than anything more serious - the Antarctic icecap weighs less than one millionth of the entire planet. Hapgood doubted that an accumulation of ice at the poles was enough to tip the entire planet over. He believed that only the crust shifted.

Crustal displacement, from Hapgood's point of view, is a very violent and sudden shifting of only the "skin" of the planet Earth (the crust's thickness is only 0.005% of the equatorial diameter). This shift causes various disasters, with each disaster triggering another, and so on. Hapgood suggested that each Ice Age would not affect the whole earth at the same time, but only two regions of it - those that shifted into polar regions.

If it were only the skin that shifted, as Hapgood proposed, then the ice cap mechanism becomes more likely. However I do wonder whether this process could be infinitely repeatable, for if the poles ever ended up in oceanic areas, then sufficient ice would never be able to accumulate.

Undaunted by this lack of acclaim, he continued to work on his theory, with a major update being published in 1970, re-named The Path of the Pole. Helped by recent advances in geology, Hapgood replaced the ice cap mechanism with a trigger coming from within the Earth itself. Although he was unsure precisely what that trigger was, it was most likely something involving gravitational imbalances and centrifugal forces. In the introduction he wrote:In 1958 an in depth explanation was published in his book titled Earth's Shifting Crust, with its endorsement by Albert Einstein. Perhaps his ideas were just too radical for, despite the endorsement, and although he managed to avoid the ridicule previously allocated to Velikovsky, academics and the public alike ignored his book.

"Polar wandering is based on the idea that the outer shell of the earth shifts about from time to time, moving some continents toward and others away from the poles, changing their climates. Continental drift is based on the idea that the continents move individually... A few writers have suggested that perhaps continental drift causes polar wandering. This book advances the notion that polar wandering is primary and causes the displacement of continents.... This book will present evidence that the last shift of the earth's crust (the lithosphere) took place in recent time, at the close of the last ice age, and that it was the cause of the improvement in climate."[10]

Hapgood suggested three previous locations of the poles. The most recent North Pole is Hudson Bay, which was the epicentre of the North American ice sheet during the last Ice Age. The previous sites were in the Greenland Sea, and the Yukon district of Canada, although his evidence for these is totally dependant on radio-carbon dating.[11] Each shift was approximately 30°. These diagrams show where the previous North Poles were located, with their corresponding equators:

Yukon Greenland Sea Hudson Bay Present Pole		1. Yukon
2. Greenland Sea		3. Hudson Bay

Interestingly, the Amazon jungle has remained at the equator during each of these shifts, which may account for its enormity.

---

James Bowles

James Bowles is a retired civil engineer who worked for NASA sub-contractors on the Apollo moon program. In his bookThe Gods, Gemini, and the Great Pyramid, gives us a straightforward, easy to grasp theory on how the crust can shift.

On the day of the pig roast everything was ready. The spit mechanism was in place, the pit had been dug, there were all kinds of charcoal, and all the guests were milling about. All we needed to start the festivities was the pig and a match. So my dear wife, along with Bonny, led us into the bathroom where the pig was laying covered with ice in the bathtub. But one look at the pig and I knew we were in trouble! . I'd figured on a fifty pound pig, because that's what we'd talked about, but this had to be 100 pounds if it was an ounce..

Well now that one and a half inch of galvanized water pipe looked like a tooth pick next to the pig, but it was too late to do anything about it at this point, besides somebody had lit the charcoal.. Half way through the night, the pipe broke, and the pig fell into the fire.. Well to make a long story short, a friend of mine and I went into town and got a bigger pipe from behind the garage and put everything back together again.[11a]

The Spit Mechanism

The point is that the pipe didn't just break, it broke from fatigue.

This is torque, forces created by rotation. Bowles calls it Rotational-Bending, or the RB-Effect. If enough tension is happening within our planet, and it is constant, then one day something must give, slip or break. Everything that suffers stress will eventually crack. In our planet's case it would be the semi-plastic attachment of the crust to the asthenosphere. The stress would also create heat, and this could be a simple explanation for volcanoes - an outlet valve for all the heat created by the stresses within the earth. Bowles points out that an easy way to break a piece of wire is to bend it backwards and forwards, over and over, until it snaps. The ends of the broken wire will be quite hot - heat being a by-product of stress.

Bowles uses the analogy of cargo on a ship to further clarify his idea: When cargo is tied securely, it will ride with the ship and not come to any harm. But if the ropes are loose, and the cargo slips and slides, then damage can occur.

The earth's crust is not securely tied; rather it is connected to the core via a series of semi-plastic layers, some of which are seas of molten rock and liquid iron. The waves in the cargo analogy correspond to the gravitational pulls of the moon, sun and (to a much lesser extent) the other planets. Our situation is that we have a crust that is 99.9% securely tied to the planet's core. The sun and moon are constantly tugging away, testing the attachment. Eventually something has to give.

The centrifugal forces try to shift matter towards the equator. This is where the stress is. We talk about a pole shift, but technically it's the entire crust that shifts, around two fulcrum points, due to stresses towards the equator. I came across a science Q&A website run by NASA, and found questions regarding the number of earthquakes in Antarctica. Here are the expert's answers:

Antarctica is unusual in that there are very few earthquakes there. Of all the seven or nine continents, or of all the 7 or 25 plates (depending on how you count), it has the fewest earthquakes, and it has none of the big, damaging kind.There are very few earthquakes in Antarctica. It is one of the questions we are trying to answer out there. There are numbers of plate boundaries and we have always been astonished that we haven't seen more earthquakes. We have wanted to see them, we have tried to record them, but Antarctica is a real puzzle because there are very few earthquakes. There should be many more considering the type of plate boundaries there are, and the type of continental structures there are, but there aren't that many. We are trying to work it out. But now it is still a puzzle.

The polar regions of this globe are unaffected by the forces at work, hence very few earthquakes.

It is a puzzle if the standard continental drift model remains in use. The R-B Effect theory of Bowles declares that the closer to the equator you get, the more earthquakes there are, due to the forces of tension and compression.

When I went to high school, I was shown a trick that fascinated me. Firstly, you wedge a ballpoint pen into your desk somehow. Then you get the spring from inside a broken pen, and you stretch it out. Using this wire like a two person wood saw, you cut through the bottom of the pen's clip, and saw right through to the top of the pen. It has to be done fast. This action cuts the plastic, but friction creates heat and causes the plastic to melt together again, just behind the cutting action. The result is a pen with a surgical scar where the clip joins. I figure this is what happens to the earth when the crust slips - it breaks away, and then cements itself in place again.

In recent times orthodox scientists are re-assessing our planet's internal mechanics, and have finally started to accept pole shifts as a possibility:

July 1996: Scientists at Columbia University in New York confirmed that the earth's inner core was spinning faster than the planet itself, by approximately 1/3 of a second per day, allowing it to lap the Earth's surface approximately once every 400 years. This may help explain Earth's magnetic fields, and why they periodically reverse.

1997: Researchers at the California Institute of Technology reported that an evolutionary big bang, with relative evolutionary rates of more than 20 times normal, coincided with another apparently unique event in earth history; a 90-degree change in the direction of Earth's spin axis relative to the continents.

The poleshift began about 530 million years ago, taking roughly 15 million years to complete. [Throughout this book I ask that you ignore these large time periods, and allow that current dating techniques might, for some reason, be fallible.]

But how can the poles shift?

Rather than the Earth being a solid piece of rock, it is divided into distinct layers. We live on the outer surface of the crust, which is broken up into six main continental plates and a few smaller ones. Geologists have differing opinions on what is further below, but for our purposes this simplified model will suffice:

The inner core consists of solid iron and is surrounded by an outer core of liquid iron. The lower mantle is made of molten rock. The upper mantle and crust are solid, but only loosely connected and are able to slip and slide against each other, the least effect of which is continental drift. All layers are capable of independent movement.

Apart from being a permanent constant (orthodox gradualist view), this movement of a miniscule 1-4 cms a year could also be the low point in a fluctuating system, or the crust's momentum finally coming to a halt after a major slippage of 30 degrees, which occurred in recent times - perhaps 12,000 years ago.Directly below the Earth's crust (or lithosphere) at a depth of 50-150 kilometres is a layer called the asthenosphere. It is constructed of a low-velocity plastic material capable of flow. The crust is split into plates, and the tectonic plate theory says that these plates move individually, slipping over the hot semi-plastic asthenosphere, at a rate of 1-4 cms a year. The action of these plates pushing against each other causes mountain ranges to form, causes earthquakes and stimulates volcanic activity.

There are two ways in which the location of the poles might shift:

1. Poleshift: A sudden and radical displacement of the planet's axis of rotation (the earth tips over).

-or-

2. Poleshift: A slippage of the planet's solid crust over the molten interior - so that the polar locations change.[6]

Entire planet tipping over

The layers of the Earth remain stable, and the entire planet tips over as one unit. This could either be caused by unknown extra-terrestrial forces, or the Earth somehow becoming unbalanced. A similar unbalancing event probably happened on Mars. Along its equator is a massive volcano known as Tharsis, which is the largest known gravity anomaly in our solar system. Either this volcano formed on the equator and has remained there ever since, or, more likely, it formed elsewhere and then migrated there due to centrifugal forces. If a point on a spinning globe is much heavier than average, then centrifugal forces will try to shift that point towards the equator

If this happened to Earth then it is hard to say how fast it would shift, or what level of catastrophe would occur. It could feasibly be so slow and uneventful that we wouldn't even notice.

In 1955 Thomas Gold[7] stated that if the earth were a perfect sphere instead of a flattened spheroid, 'the smallest beetle walking over it would be able to change the axis of rotation relative to markings on the sphere by an arbitrarily large angle; the axis of rotation in space would change by a small angle only'.

Fortunately, that cannot happen, because the earth has an equatorial bulge. This gives our planet stability, in the same way that a spinning top, which is wider in the middle, manages to stay upright as long as it keeps spinning.

Made out of solid wood, a top could happily spin forever without any harm coming to it. But if it were hollow, however, and something loose was rattling around inside, then its spinning actions would eventually cause it to wear our - friction and interaction between two objects will always eventually cause fatigue and destruction. The earth, as we saw above, is not a single solid unit - it has layers that scrape against each other.

Slippage of the crust

Charles Hapgood proposed that this slippage between the top two layers of the Earth allows for the continental plates to move as a single unit, rapidly over great distances - just as the skin of an orange, if separated from the fruit's inner part, can move as one piece. The core remains where it is, and the axis and orbit of the planet remain unchanged. Orthodox science, fixating on the idea of gradualism, has chosen to ignore this idea. They have yet to disprove it.

The crust's movement over the asthenosphere would create mayhem. If the current level of volcanic and earthquake activity is caused by plates shifting 1-4 cms a year, then imagine what would happen if they shifted thousands of kilometres in less time!

In 1955, just prior to his death, Albert Einstein wrote this foreword to a book on pole shifts:

I frequently receive communications from people who wish to consult me concerning their unpublished ideas. It goes without saying that these ideas are very seldom possessed of scientific validity. The very first communication, however, that I received from Mr. Hapgood electrified me. His idea is original, of great simplicity, and - if it continues to prove itself - of great importance to everything that is related to the history of the earth's surface.. The author has not confined himself to a simple presentation of the idea. He has also set forth, cautiously and comprehensively, the extraordinarily rich material that supports his displacement theory. I think that this rather astonishing, even fascinating, idea deserves the serious attention of anyone who concerns himself with the theory of the earth's development."[8]