Since Facebook won’t provide you a way to opt-out of Beacon, their intrusive advertising platform, here’s how you can prevent them from harvesting data about you from other sites.

For Safari, first install the excellent PithHelmet plugin that lets you block sites, pages, cookies, and advertising with excellent granularity. It is not free, but well worth the $10. Go to PithHelmet preferences, right within Safari’s preference dialog.

In the next step, you’ll need the following Matching Pattern. Here it is for copy/paste convenience:
.*facebook\.com\/beacon.*

For Firefox, I refer you to Nate Weiner’s original post that inspired mine for Safari. He also has a detailed analysis of why Beacon is a privacy nightmare with no means for users to opt-out completely. The ‘No Thanks’ button only prevents the information from being displayed, but Facebook still logs and preserves it, and may do with it as they please (according to their terms of use).

If everyone in Virginia drove under the speed limit, the state budget would be in shambles.

I always thought that the purpose of laws was to ensure that everyone lived in a safe, secure society without intruding upon the rights of others. A society needs money, of course, so it’s fair game to have a few laws that assure the government of tax revenue.

Now, the State of Virginia is implementing laws to tap into drivers’ wallets — a minor traffic violation is seen as a major opportunity to extract cash for the state’s coffers. To be fair, we always knew traffic tickets were much less a way to keep the streets safe, and really a way to fill the state’s coffers. But now they’re going all out. If you’re speeding, you’re slapped with a bill to the tune of $1,050 for building new roads in Virginia. There seems to be no correlation between the level of “crime” and the level of fine imposed. The amount is dictated by the current deficit in the transportation budget.

You would think that being in labor might excuse you from this burdensome tax; you’d be wrong. Everybody’s doing it, even the politicians who enacted laws like this.

The Senator who pushed for these laws expects them to bring in revenue between $65m—$210m annually. So if I get this correctly, they’re enacting a budget that depends on people breaking the law. What if everyone decided to stick it to The Man and drove under the speed limit?

And to round off the absurdity, if you’re not a resident of Virginia, you do not pay these taxes. Further proof that these are taxes rather than a fine for a traffic violation. That makes them unconstitutional too.

And you thought Monty Python were just fooling around when they crafted this scene of the Killer Rabbit in the Holy Grail movie!

Apparently, there is (technically, was) a squirrel on a similar rampage in Berlin this week.

BERLIN (Reuters) – An aggressive squirrel attacked and injured three people in a German town before a 72-year-old pensioner dispatched the rampaging animal with his crutch.

The squirrel first ran into a house in the southern town of Passau, leapt from behind on a 70-year-old woman, and sank its teeth into her hand, a local police spokesman said Thursday. With the squirrel still hanging from her hand, the woman ran onto the street in panic, where she managed to shake it off. The animal then entered a building site and jumped on a construction worker, injuring him on the hand and arm, before he managed to fight it off with a measuring pole.

“After that, the squirrel went into the 72-year-old man’s garden and massively attacked him on the arms, hand and thigh,” the spokesman said. “Then he killed it with his crutch.”

This is a gem from a long time ago, when I used to be a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) at Virginia Tech. In all three semesters, I have received mostly positive reviews from my students, and I’m told that the scores I got were pretty high to be awarded by an undergraduate class to a GTA. Well, anyway, there’s always the occasional negative review. Here’s one. Any other comment I make on it will ruin it for you, so I’ll just shut up.

Which, on the whole, is a Good Thing™. But the way they convey the message is disgusting.

A friend pointed me to Microsoft India’s Vista Promotion (for its humor value, of course), which I tried to access using Safari on my Mac. This is the page I got back:

<HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0.1">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">
</HEAD></HTML>

It is not as innocuous as it may look; there’s an infinite redirect loop on line 1. Safari didn’t crash, of course, but MS still tried.

I figured I’d see what happened if I changed the user-agent string (which, by the way, is how websites can identify what browser you are using.) I asked Safari to masquerade as Internet Explorer using a fake user-agent string, just for kicks. And lo!, the entire page showed up! Quelle surprise!

Microsoft have pulled this trick before during the launch of Windows XP (and again, and again). Will they never learn? Will they ever stop being such immature kids and not try to prevent competing browsers from viewing their websites?

I would’ve said they just lost a customer, but I wasn’t one to begin with, so that doesn’t make much sense.

Users who bought music from Microsoft’s MSN Music Store (no one I know, but still) will not be able to play it on the newly-announced Zune portable player. (Oh, did I mention Zune is made by Microsoft too?)

Let’s see how many different classes of people they’ve alienated this time:

1. There are the users who bought players from their hardware partners. If they want to “upgrade” to a Zune, they’ll have to re-buy their music.
2. Their hardware partners, because this is going to affect their sales, no doubt.
3. Their music suppliers, because they’re discontinuing the MSN Store.
4. And this is in addition to all of us Mac OS X and Linux users for whom Microsoft doesn’t even have a media player (not that we care, but still.)

From playsforsure.com:

Look for the PlaysForSure logo if you’re shopping for a music or video device and you want to make sure the digital music and video you purchase will play back on it every time.

Heh. I’d just buy an iPod, then.

And the irony to top it all is that this initiative was called ‘Plays for Sure’. Yeah, right.

If you’ve recovered from that tongue-twister of a title (there I go again!), here’s the news! A high-schooler’s parent in Houston is asking the school to ban ‘Fahrenheit 451‘, Ray Bradbury’s book (and later, a movie) about the horrors of a government that burns books and controls all knowledge. The grounds for the objection are the language used in the book. C’mon, the language used by high schoolers these days is nothing compared to what’s in the book. And oh, by the way, the guy, Alton Verm, says he hasn’t even read the book about whose content he’s objecting. Someone please tell me this is the 1^st of April.

The irony (apart from the obvious irony in someone trying to ban a book about banning books) is that this happened just after Banned Books Week.

Update: A friend pointed me to a similar case where an art teacher got fired for taking her students to an art museum where a student was offended by a naked statue.

If this is reason enough to fire a 28-year-veteran school teacher, I think these easily-offended students should just spend their childhood in the confines of their home, snug in their overprotective nests with their parents. After all, there’s so much else to be offended about in this world. At least that way, the rest of them would be able to explore, appreciate, and understand life, without getting their teachers fired for doing their job.

Update 2: There seem to be far too many of these occurrences these days. A Christian parent from Georgia wants to ban the Harry Potter series from her kids’ school’s media center. The reason? “I think the anti-Christian bias — it’s just got to stop.” I kid you not.

And one element that’s common in almost all these frivolous complaints is this:

“She admitted that she has not read the book series partially because “they’re really very long and I have four kids.”

I’ll end this short post here, so you may quickly go to either have a hearty laugh, or weep quietly at the anti-intellectualism in society today.