[Quote]:

One of my favorite things about the Star Trek franchise are all the great ambient sounds that represent the engine noise on the various ships. My favorite ambient noise from the whole series is the engine idling noise in TNG. I have cleaned up a sample from the show and then looped it for 24 hours. Great for ambiance and imagining that you’re in deep space.

Quote]:

usive advertising” option is enabled by default for all users but the ones using privacy filter lists (EasyPrivacy, Fanboy’s Tracking, Adverisity Privacy).

Apparently advertisers can now pay adblock to get whitelisted.

Let me quote a comment from Reddit:

Advertising is like a drunken party crasher. He invariably promises he’ll behave; and even starts out trying in his clumsy way to be non-intrusive. But in the end, he can’t do it — he lives to intrude. In fact he can’t survive unless he does.

So all too soon, he’s banging into the invited guests and loudly interrupting their conversations with a tediously repetitive story about himself. When he’s asked to quiet down, he loudly insists that he’s the life of the party, then lurches over to the buffet at the side of the room to pile most of the table’s contents onto his own plate.

That’s when I need to ask my friend AdBlock to help getting Mr. I’ll Be Non-intrusive out the door…

[Quote]:

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.

There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

– Commander William Adama

[Quote]:

A pair of senior Hill aides at the center of a brewing battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley are packing their bags for K Street, where they’ll work for two of the entertainment lobby shops trying to influence their former colleagues in Congress on the very same issue.

Allison Halataei, former deputy chief of staff and parliamentarian to House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and Lauren Pastarnack, a Republican who has served as a senior aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee, worked on online piracy bills that would push Internet companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook to shut down websites that offer illegal copies of blockbuster films and chart-topping songs.

[..]

“This is one of those mega-fights where there is a lot of money at stake and whenever it gets to that, it’s kind of ‘Katy bar the door’ as far as what they’ll pay for talent,” said McCormick Group headhunter Ivan Adler. “This fits into the perfect scenario of why senior-level people from well-placed committees get hired, and it’s because they really know the three p’s: people, policy and process. And that makes them very valuable in the Washington marketplace.”

There you have it: DC is a market place where people and legislation get bought.