This will make a big, big difference in my next ticket purchasing decision.
Wonderful. Now when head office sends us overseas on investigative assignments, we won’t even be able to relax during the plane ride. Just kidding, we don’t have a head office. Or any kind of office. Or enough money to buy plane tickets.
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” - Thomas Jefferson
Around 2 years ago I stopped reading and watching mainstream news. I don’t read a single newspaper, offline or online, and I don’t watch any TV at all. I recently…
The founder of incredibly usable social media tool Buffer doesn’t read or watch mainstream news at all. And he says that makes him happier and more productive. Ever try doing that? Think it’s a good approach?
» The key word here is “purported.” Critics of SOPA alleged that the text of the bill was too draconian, and would have allowed for shutting down entire websites for questionable infractions (for example, linking to a message board with a comment that directed users to a site with copyrighted material). Opposition to CISPA, however, comes due to privacy concerns: Critics say the bill allows private companies (such as Facebook and Microsoft which opposed SOPA but support CISPA) to exchange personal information and private data with the government a bit too easily. We’ve still got to delve into the nitty-gritty here, but we recommend you seek out a few different takes on the legislation. TechDirt and Geekosystem are both opposed, GigaOm is so-so, and Lifehacker has a nice rundown as to why Facebook and Microsoft opposed SOPA but support CISPA.
“If someone suggested the idea of public libraries now, they’d be considered insane. If you said you were going to take a little bit of money from every taxpayer, buy a whole load of books and music and games, stick them on a shelf and tell everyone, ‘These are yours to borrow and all you’ve got to do is bring them back,’ they’d be laughed out of government.”—
Peter Collins, The Secret Life of Libraries (via jingc)
True. Publishers used to try to sue libraries, arguing that they were violating their copyright by letting people read books they hadn’t paid for.
A friend of ours doesn’t like libraries for this very reason. It’s a bizarre consequence of politics that we’ve moved so far away from the library that we’d never find our way down this road if we had to start over. The Internet used to be much more library-like in its conceit. (We remember hopping on our modems circa 1994 to use the Internet through a text-based interface. Yes, we’re that old. We know what GOPHER is.) Then AOL started charging $20 a month to take a hit of the pipe, and here we are today.
Insider insight into bin Laden mission: As stated by Obama administration counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, the U.S. would have claimed bin Laden alive if possible, but the al-Qaeda leader and his allies started a firefight that led to his death. He also said that President Obama and his aides were watching the operation in real time in the White House Situation Room, which he called “clearly very intense.” No kidding! Brennan also revealed that there are, in fact, photos of bin Laden’s corpse, but the White House has not yet decided whether to release them — a sensitive decision to be sure. source
Soon, your Kindle will replace your library card: Amazon is rolling out some great new features to Kindle users, including book lending and access to 11,000 public libraries. No word on when they’ll be out, though. source
The alerts will be specific to the threat. They may recommend certain actions, or suggest looking for specific suspicious behavior. And they will have a specified end date.Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano • Speaking on the topic of the oft-maligned terror threat level scale imposed following 9/11 (you know the one, orange=bad, red=really bad), Napolitano claimed that the future system of warning Americans about terrorism risks will be more informative. The old system, which merely stated the risk with no contextual information, was often accused of being vague and unhelpful. source (via • follow)
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