Wildlife in Wire – ivan lovatt sculpture

 

Wildlife in Wire – ivan lovatt sculpture.

BBC News – X Factor agrees to make donation to Rhythmix charity

Simon Cowell’s company has agreed to make a donation to a music charity that successfully forced an X Factor act to change its name.

Syco was in a dispute with the charity Rhythmix over naming rights after one of the girl groups took the same title.

The Brighton-based charity, which has been operating in Kent, Surrey and Sussex for 10 years, claimed the trademark row had cost it £8,000.

The girl group agreed to change their name to Little Mix.

A statement on behalf of Syco and Rhythmix said the matter had been “positively resolved”.

via BBC News – X Factor agrees to make donation to Rhythmix charity.

Five Best Online File Storage Services

Working with the same files in multiple places used to be a hassle. You’d have to make sure to bring the file with you, email it to yourself, or save it in a place you could get to it later. Now, there are a number of online file storage and syncing services that will make your data available on as many computers as you like. Here’s a look at five of the best of those services.

Earlier in the week, we asked you which services you used to store your files online, or to at least make your data available so you could get at it anywhere you went. You responded with tons of great suggestions, and while we expected you to highlight Dropbox, we knew it isn’t the only service out there that you use. Here’s a look at the top five, based on your nominations.

via Five Best Online File Storage Services.

Naked Santas Go For World Record In San Francisco

It always feels good to be part of something larger than yourself; it’s why people march in protests, attend music festivals or voluntarily watch the World Cup.

This being San Francisco, it’s also why a large group of people, all dressed in Santa hats and little else, are planning on coming together in an effort to set the world record for the largest gathering of naked Santas ever recorded.

This world record attempt, which will be fully documented for posterity by the good people at Guinness, comes as part of San Francisco’s tenth annual Santacon party on December 10th.

Started in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, Santacon is an annual celebration of Santa Claus wherein hundreds of revelers dress up like Kris Kringle and commit wanton acts of intoxicated debauchery in bars and on street corners across the city.

If you’ve ever wandered past a rowdy pub on a crisp December evening and wondered why two gentlemen dressed as Santa Claus were engaged in a fistfight, Santacon was almost undoubtedly to blame.

via Naked Santas Go For World Record In San Francisco.

The Facebook Freaky Line — Scobleizer

It seems everyone is getting freaked out by Facebook once again. Molly Wood at CNET says that Facebook’s automatic sharing features are ruining sharing. That got everyone to pile on over on Techmeme.

First, what does this automatic sharing feature (otherwise known as “frictionless sharing”) do? Well, every time I play a song on Spotify, for instance, it tells everyone something like “Robert Scoble is listening to Skrillex on Spotify.” On Facebook’s web interface that shows up over on the right in the new ticker (not everyone has that, and only the web version shows it). It also puts that onto my new Timeline (only developers have that feature, so far).

It doesn’t just do this for music, either. Everytime I read a story in the Washington Post’s new newsreader it does the same. “Robert Scoble read Ex-MySpace CEO resigns as Zynga executive on Washington Post Social Reader.” (Which I actually did, right now).

via The Facebook Freaky Line — Scobleizer.

Fractally, breathing optical illusion – Boing Boing

 

Fractally, breathing optical illusion – Boing Boing.

WoodyGuthrie-AllYouFascistsBoundToLose1944.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object)

WoodyGuthrie-AllYouFascistsBoundToLose1944.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object).

BBC News – Today – Can time be reversed?

Albert Einstein’s law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light has come under threat again from the same controversial experiment which had been disregarded by many physicists.

Dr Giles Barr, a physicist at Oxford University, explains that if particles travel faster than light, time could effectively be “reversed”.

via BBC News – Today – Can time be reversed?.

The Good Bad Son

The last time Benjamin Barber saw Saif Qaddafi, in early December, they spent a cheerless evening together in London. Barber, a political scientist and board member of Saif’s Qaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, was in town for a board meeting that was supposed to have taken place in Tripoli but, a week before, had been moved to England. Over an Italian dinner in Mayfair, he asked Saif why.

“I don’t feel comfortable in Tripoli,” the 38-year-old son of Colonel Muammar ­Qaddafi said. “I have too many enemies there right now.” Saif was in a desperate mood. For years he had pushed his way into his father’s chaotic political orbit, urging him to support reform in Libya. Muammar had obliged in the past—but recently he hadn’t. Allies of Saif’s had been arrested and businesses of his shut down. He had decamped and wasn’t sure he wanted to return. “He felt he was not welcome,” Barber says. “He’d been struggling for a long time.”

via The Good Bad Son.

The Surveillance Catalog – The Wall Street Journal

Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal open a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people’s computers and cellphones, and “massive intercept” gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country.

The documents—the highlights of which are cataloged and searchable here—were obtained from attendees of a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C., last month.

via The Surveillance Catalog – The Wall Street Journal.