[video]
[video]
vertical feeding whaleshark by Paul Cowell on Flickr.
“
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
” — May 25, 2001: Towel Day Honors Hitchhiker Author Adams (via dullr)(via dullr)
Great white sharks, Isla Guadelupe by cathm2 on Flickr.
“There are serious consequences to badly implemented, default child protection blocking systems. They include restrictions on markets, censorship, a failure to address young people’s diverse needs and a false sense of security for parents” — Mobile Internet censorship: what’s happening and what to do | Open Rights Group
“At the moment BREIN wants a blockade of The Pirate Bay, but tomorrow there may be other interest groups preparing their wishlists,” Tele2 said. “The ruling is a threat to Internet freedom in our country.” —
ISPs Refuse to Block New Pirate Bay IP-Address | TorrentFreak
Push back from ISP’s on these exact grounds is encouraging. Remember this isn’t really about shutting down the Pirate Bay, it’s about lobby groups and special interest groups in politics censoring what’s available on the internet.
“Once you have established that someone who is in a position to censor other people’s communication has a responsibility to do so, the floodgates open and those middlemen can be politically charged with censoring anything that somebody objects to being distributed.” — Cynicism Redefined: Why The Copyright Lobby Loves Child Porn - Falkvinge on Infopolicy
[video]
“
If you work for IBM, you can bring your iPhone to work, but forget about using the phone’s voice-activated digital assistant. Siri isn’t welcome on Big Blue’s networks.
The reason? Siri ships everything you say to her to a big data center in Maiden, North Carolina. And the story of what really happens to all of your Siri-launched searches, e-mail messages and inappropriate jokes is a bit of a black box.
” — IBM bans employees from using Siri over privacy fears (Wired UK)
2007 ADV Homepage Photos
Damn….
[video]
:D rofl :))
Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox and allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web. It will show, in real time, how that data creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other trackers.
This page explains a bit more.
http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/02/secure-your-browser-add-ons-to-stop-web-tracking/You can install firefox extensions to block trackers –
Do Not Track Plus ( http://www.abine.com/dntdetail.php – direct add on - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/donottrackplus/ ) (this also works on IE, Chrome and Safari)
and / or
Ghostery ( http://www.ghostery.com/ - direct add on - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/ ) - you need to also go into the advanced options on this tool and select as much as possible
As ever with tools that give you more control and require your interaction, you may notice hits to functionality on certain websites you visit – you may need to add certain sites to the whitelists in these tools to regain that function. Again, this is basically a trade off that the industry money is banking on you not making.
[video]