Pregnant mother, tortured, dies in Ill. (Yahoo! News)
Daily Archives: 21 Mar 08
Naked-eye Gamma Ray Burst…
…from 7.5 billion light years away: “A powerful gamma ray burst detected March 19th by NASA’s Swift satellite has shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye.” (NASA Science News)
Onomastic Sobriquets in the Food and Beverage Industry
Clever restaurant and café names: A Paper Presented by
Lynn C. Hattendorf Westney (Associate Professor at The University of Illinois at Chicago)at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, Quebec 2001. (Dinersoft via kottke)
"Ethical but slightly deceptive"?
Salon shows how to read WSJ for free: “In his Salon Machinist blog, Farhad Manjoo shows how to read any article in the Wall Street Journal online (one of the few online papers that charges money for a subscription) for free. As a bonus, he includes an explanation about why this is ethical (though he admits it’s ‘slightly deceptive’).
Remember that the Journal is set up to disarm its pay gate if it thinks you’re coming from Google News or Digg. In order to get free access, then, you’ve got to convince the Journal that you’ve clicked on a link on one of those sites. How to do that?
The technical name for this is ‘referer spoofing’ (with the misspelling). Spoofing is an easy thing to pull off in Firefox — all you’ve got to do is download this add-on, refspoof.
When you’ve installed that app, you’ll see a new toolbar.
Now follow these steps:
* Go to WSJ.com.
* In the refspoof toolbar’s ‘spoof:’ field, type ‘digg.com.’
* Also in the refspoof toolbar, click the R icon, and select ‘static referrer.’
* That’s it. Click around the site; the WSJ thinks each click is coming from Digg. The WSJ is now yours for free!” [via boing boing]
Kiddie psychopaths?
English furor: “Gary Pugh, the director of forensic sciences for the British police has sparked controversy after he suggested that children as young as five who display ‘future offending traits’ should be placed on a DNA database so they are more likely to be picked up if they commit crime in the future.
Pugh is almost certainly talking about children who have what are known as ‘callous-unemotional’ traits, described somewhat less politically correctly as ‘kiddie psychopathy’.
These have indeed been found to weakly predict future antisocial behaviour, but the picture is more complex than it seems and, as we’ll see, they aren’t a good basis on which to base future crime fighting efforts.” (Mind Hacks)
