The best web browser around, Opera, have now made their new version V8.5 free of Ad banners. It doesn't effect me as a (was) licenced user, but for all those who hesitated to try Opera because of the Ad's in the free version, your hesitation is now needless.
Opera is tiny yet extrememly powerful. It has a feature set envied by most other browsers, but the true key is not the features themselves, but their integration. One designer, making sure everything flows together. Because of that shared tight codebase, they can add features for very little cost. For example their future bittorrent support (currently available in a technology preview) is 24kb! And they have a very neat system where if you don't use, for example, the mail module, then just the browser core is used.
The killer features: mouse gestures, serious security, true window tabbed interface, spatial navigation, blazingly fast rendering, search-based mail, password manager, RSS support, full configurability (rewrite your UI with >500 commands), hierarchical notes and many others are all blended together with style; they are built to interoperate perfectly.
If you are using IE, well, apart from the appaling security record and abysmal feature set; politically Microsoft have tried to propritise the web. The web should remain free to all, irrespective of access method, and so the sooner you stop using IE (which has been a wrecking ball of interoperability) the better. It's slow, it doesn't support standards (and wont properly with future IE 7) and hasn't evolved since the last century (again the yet—to—be released IE 7's feature set is still 5 years behind others). Time to try something new and fresh. Time to discover the benefits of modern technology, of active craftsmanship in your tool you use to access that wonderful thing called the web.
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The tongue-eating isopod [Cymothoa exigua] causes degeneration of the tongue [through siphoning and consuming the arterial blood supply] of its host fish, the rose snapper, Lutjanus guttatus, and it then attaches to the remaining tongue stub and floor of the fish's mouth by hook-like pereopods. In this position the isopod superficially resembles its host's missing tongue. Brusca & Gilligan (1983) hypothesize that these isopods serve as a mechanical replacement for the fish's tongue and represent the first known case in animals of functional replacement of a host structure by a parasite. This relationship is so-far known only from the Gulf of California.
Amazing! This parasite structurally replaces the organ it removes from its host. This thing first hooks into the fishes artery supplying the tongue, which seems to be the cause of the tongue's atrophy (rather than it physically eating the hosts tongue); then basically takes over. I wonder if the host can still enjoy its food?
I think I'm not going to French Kiss (especially not fish) for a while; and remember, never open your mouth while swimming in California!
The Isopoda page on Tree of Life
Practical Fishkeeping News Story
Michael Meacher has written an interesting article on the links between British support and funding of Islamic insurgents in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and the current London bombings (and wider context of the "war" on "terror"). Although the lines he sketches are far from definitve, they do give us pause to imagine that Islamic radicals supported by the British Government, just as happened with the US, could have turned round and bitten the hand that fed and supported them. Meacher (a labour MP by the way), even suggests that our secret services could then even play a game of cat and mouse with the police obscuring the original organising forces behind the London bombers to hide their "men".
According to a recent report by the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, a contingent was also sent by the Pakistani government, then led by Benazir Bhutto, at the request of the Clinton administration. This contingent was formed from the Harkat-ul- Ansar (HUA) terrorist group and trained by the ISI. The report estimates that about 200 Pakistani Muslims living in the UK went to Pakistan, trained in HUA camps and joined the HUA's contingent in Bosnia. Most significantly, this was "with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American intelligence agencies".
Guardian Unlimited | Britain now faces its own blowback
See individual entry…Can you believe this; Bush's visit to New Orleans forced helicopters to be grounded for the duration of his visit, thus delaying distribution of three tons of food to the survivors: Bush Halts Food Deliveries...
There is even a report that a food centre photo-op was staged for his visit then torn down again.
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