Open up a text editor and save this line of code to a file named userContent.css:
iframe { display: none !important; }
Follow the instructions on Floppy Mouse for activating the userContent.css file in your browser. This trick works with Mozilla browsers and Apple Safari. I disable the remaining unaffected ad servers on a domain name basis with Saft.
The best one I’ve come across that works with Saft on Safari. It also synchronizes with the Adblock Plus plug-in for Firefox. When adding the list to Safari, make sure to strip out the whitelist section from the .txt file.
Blendtec answered my last remaining question regarding the iPhone. Oh, the humanity.
The price cut is expected to be announced later this evening. If this turns out to be true, I might go pick up a system, especially since it can be used as a Windows Media Center Extender.
The badness of a movie is directly proportional to the number of helicopters in it.
You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight-saving time.
People who feel the need to tell you that they have an excellent sense of humor are telling you that they have no sense of humor.
The most valuable function performed by the federal government is entertainment.
You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
A penny saved is worthless.
They can hold all the peace talks they want, but there will never be peace in the Middle East. Billions of years from now, when Earth is hurtling toward the Sun and there is nothing left alive on the planet except a few microorganisms, the microorganisms living in the Middle East will be bitter enemies.
The most powerful force in the universe is gossip.
The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status, or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we all believe that we are above-average drivers.
There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age 11.
There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”
People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
There apparently exists, somewhere in Los Angeles, a computer that generates concepts for television sitcoms. When TV executives need a new concept, they turn on this computer; after sorting through millions of possible plot premises, it spits out, “THREE QUIRKY BUT ATTRACTIVE YOUNG PEOPLE LIVING IN AN APARTMENT,” and the executives turn this concept into a show. The next time they need an idea, the computer spits out, “SIX QUIRKY BUT ATTRACTIVE YOUNG PEOPLE LIVING IN AN APARTMENT.” Then the next time, it spits out, “FOUR QUIRKY BUT ATTRACTIVE YOUNG PEOPLE LIVING IN AN APARTMENT.” And so on. We need to locate this computer and destroy it with hammers.
Nobody is normal.
At least once per year, some group of scientists will become very excited and announce that:
- The universe is even bigger than they thought!
- There are even more subatomic particles than they thought!
- Whatever they announced last year about global warming is wrong.
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.”
The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.
The value of advertising is that it tells you the exact opposite of what the advertiser actually thinks. For example:
- If the advertisement says “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile,” the advertiser is desperately concerned that this Oldsmobile, like all other Oldsmobiles, appeals primarily to old farts like your father.
- If Coke and Pepsi spend billions of dollars to convince you that there are significant differences between these two products, both companies realize that Pepsi and Coke are virtually identical.
- If the advertisement strongly suggests that Nike shoes enable athletes to perform amazing feats, Nike wants you to disregard the fact that shoe brand is unrelated to athletic ability.
- If Budweiser runs an elaborate advertising campaign stressing the critical importance of a beer’s “born-on” date, Budweiser knows this factor has virtually nothing to do with how good a beer tastes.
If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.
You should not confuse your career with your life.
A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.
No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.
Your friends love you anyway.
Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.
Dave Barry
Dear Mr. Prime,
We have received your accident-claim reports for the month of June—they total 27. I regret to inform you that GEICO will not be able to reimburse you for any of those repairs. I feel that I have sent the same letter to you once a month for the last six months, and I am now sending it again.
Since becoming a GEICO customer in January of this year, you have reported 131 accidents, requesting reimbursement for repairs necessitated by each one. You have claimed not to be responsible in any of them, usually listing the cause of the accident as either “Sneak attack by Decepticons” or “Unavoidable damage caused by protecting freedom for all sentient beings.”
The only reason Barry Bonds was voted into the All-Star game this year was so he could participate in the Home Run derby. Then he backs out with this lame excuse:
“Nope,” Bonds said Thursday when asked about the Derby. “Especially when you’re 42. It’s not that you don’t want to, it’s that you just can’t anymore. You can’t. It’s too long. Too much waiting. Too much sitting around. You can’t do that.”
The short cappuccino has the same amount of espresso as the 12-ounce tall, meaning a bolder coffee taste, and also a better one. The World Barista Championship rules, for example, define a traditional cappuccino as a “five- to six-ounce beverage.” This is also the size of cappuccino served by many continental cafés. Within reason, the shorter the cappuccino, the better.
When people ask me why I purchase albums on vinyl instead of from iTunes or on CD, I always think of this Bob Dylan quote:
You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like –- static.
Beginning in the early ’90s, audio engineers started using “hot” mastering to make albums sound as loud as possible, but at a loss of dynamic range, and thus fidelity. This resulted in a “loudness arms race” between record labels that still exists today. Luckily, vinyl records of new albums still retain a respectable amount of dynamic range:
At present the loudness war tends to only affect audio CDs and consequently any MP3 or other digital music files produced from them. Recent recordings released on vinyl do not undergo the same kind of loudness-based mastering. This is partly due to technical limitations of the format and partly due to vinyl now being a niche market product favoured by a small number of hi-fi enthusiasts — similar to the CD’s role in the mid-1980s.
Some SACD and DVD-Audio releases are affected as well. However nearly all DVD-Audio discs also contain a Dolby Digital (AC3) or DTS soundtrack to allow the disc to be played in a DVD-Video player that does not have DVD-Audio playback capability. Dolby Digital has a defined and calibrated reference playback level and the DTS track will also follow this. It therefore is beneficial that the high resolution DVD-Audio soundtrack will be produced at the same reference level - and this indeed is normally the case.
As these new high resolution formats are marketed largely at audiophiles, attempts to apply loudness mastering to them would almost certainly be counterproductive as the target audience is likely to be highly critical of sound quality and dynamics.
Recently, I have purchased some 5.1 remasters in DVD-Audio format, but for new releases I stick with the trusty old LP. Great warm, dynamic sound with better packaging and no digital rights management.
On June 29th, I created a thread on the Apple discussion forums regarding a cryptic error in iTunes 7.3 that kept popping up after I upgraded from version 7.2. Whenever I launched the program, a progress bar would appear indicating that a library upgrade was in progress. Once this finished, a dialogue box with the message “The iTunes Library file cannot be saved. An unknown error occurred (-50)” would appear. This same error popped up every time I attempted to play a track. This lead me to believe that my copy of iTunes 7.3 has a problem saving the library database files on my hard drive. I removed iTunes, QuickTime, and Safari from my system and re-installed. The error message popped up again.
That day, hours before the iPhone launch, many other users logged onto the discussion forums in search of an answer to the exact same issue. Apparently, this cryptic error I was receiving affected a lot of other people. None of the Apple employees hired to manage the discussion forums made an effort to help solve the problem. Users who called Apple technical support over the phone were told the problem was a non-issue. Hours later, the long-awaited iPhone launched. Apple sold 500,000 units over the weekend.
On Saturday, reports of the -50 issue flooded the discussion forums. The problem made the front page of Digg, and quickly became the top story. The Apple forums were brought to a crashing halt due to the traffic from Digg and new iPhone users. Apple scrambled to restore the forums, and a temporary version was launched with the search engine disabled. During the upgrade, the iPhone forums were moved to the top of the page, above the Macintosh Computing Hardware section. Clearly, Apple’s priority was the iPhone, and the iPhone alone.
Over a week has passed and still no fix has surfaced. The -50 error thread has over 38,000 views but no officially acknowledgment from Apple. This is not the way to keep a customer happy.
I saw Transformers on Saturday, and before the movie began, a trailer aired for an untitled J. J. Abrams film. Apparently this movie really doesn’t have a name yet — the working title is Cloverfield. Rotten Tomatoes has more information on the film, which is scarce.
Rob Mitchum’s Pitchfork review of the new Smashing Pumpkins record, Zeitgeist, aptly criticizes its one-dimensional sound:
I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that it sounds big when compared to the relatively thin, wispy sound of the modern alt-rock competition. Songs like “Doomsday Clock” and “Tarantula” wave the flag of stoner rock like Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult without embarrassment, and could likely pass for Queens of the Stone Age if it wasn’t for that characteristic Corgan whine. On the other hand, this hard-rock approach only used to be one aspect of the Pumpkins persona, call it the “Zero” dimension. By focusing only on this portion of the group’s character, Corgan misremembers the versatility that launched his band to the A-list: not just guitar-god bludgeoning, but epic psychedelia like “Rhinoceros”, fragile pop like “Today,” wide-screen symphonics like “Tonight, Tonight”, and synth-loop ballads like “1979″.
[...]
Of course, nobody wants progression from the Smashing Pumpkins, that’s the whole point of manufacturing this reunion in the first place. In that sense, Zeitgeist is interesting as a demonstration that the artist himself is usually not be the best person to play historian for his own career. Given the chance to revisit the good old days, Corgan has unearthed only a portion of the Pumpkins character– and while that portion is meticulously revived, all the parts left behind remain sorely missed. In the end, it’s the one-dimensional approach, not the lack of half the original members, that leaves Smashing Pumpkins Mk. II a cardboard cutout of the real thing– not the empty ATM-reunion it could have been, but still a ghost of the old band.
Who wants to bet that “lucky 777″ couples getting married today are more likely to get a divorce? Good luck with that, Tony and Eva.
Researchers at UCLA have successfully manipulated nanomaterials to create a new drug-delivery system that promises to solve the challenge of the poor water solubility of today’s most promising anticancer drugs and thereby increase their effectiveness.
The poor solubility of anticancer drugs is one of the major problems in cancer therapy because the drugs require the addition of solvents in order to be easily absorbed into cancer cells. Unfortunately, these solvents not only dilute the potency of the drugs but create toxicity as well.
In a paper scheduled to be published in the nanoscience journal Small in June, researchers from UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute and Jonsson Cancer Center report a novel approach using silica-based nanoparticles to deliver the anticancer drug camptothecin and other water-insoluble drugs into human cancer cells.
The study is led by Fuyu Tamanoi, UCLA professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics and director of the Jonsson Cancer Center’s Signal Transduction and Therapeutics Program Area, and Jeffrey Zink, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry.
Tamanoi and Zink devised a method for incorporating the representative hydrophobic anticancer drug camptothecin into the pores of fluorescent mesoporous silica nanoparticles and delivering the particles into a variety of human cancer cells to induce cell death. The results suggest that the mesoporous silica nanoparticles might be used as a vehicle to overcome the insolubility problem of many anticancer drugs.
“Silica nanomaterials show promise for delivering camptothecin and other water-insoluble drugs,” Tamanoi said. “We have successfully loaded hydrophobic anticancer drugs into mesoporous nanoparticles and delivered them into human cancer cells to induce cell death.”
“The beauty of our findings is that these nanoparticles are biocompatible, contain tubular pores and are relatively easy to modify,” Zink said. “Additional modification by attaching a ligand against a cancer-cell-specific receptor can make the nanoparticles recognizable by cancer cells.”
A critical obstacle and challenge for cancer therapy is the limited availability of effective biocompatible delivery systems. Since many effective anticancer agents have poor water solubility, the development of novel delivery systems for these molecules without the use of organic solvents has received significant attention.
Camptothecin (CPT) and its derivatives are considered to be among the most effective anticancer drugs of the 21st century. Although studies have demonstrated their effectiveness against carcinomas of the stomach, colon, neck and bladder, as well as against breast cancer, small-cell lung cancer and leukemia in vitro, clinical application of CPT in humans has only been carried out with CPT derivatives that have improved water solubility.
“In order to be used on humans, current cancer therapies such as CPT or Taxol, which are poorly water soluble, must be mixed with organic solvents in order to be delivered into the body,” Tamanoi said. “These elements produce toxic side effects and in fact decrease the potency of the cancer therapy.”
To overcome these problems, drug delivery systems using pegylated polymers, liposomal particles or albumin-based nanoparticles have been developed.
The new research findings show that mesoporous silica nanoparticles offer great potential and a promising approach to the delivery of therapeutic agents into targeted organs or cells. The pores in the nanoparticles could be closed by constructing an appropriate cap structure. This provides the ability to control the release of anticancer drugs by external stimuli.
The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation and represents a collaboration between two totally different fields: bioscience and chemistry. The researchers came together because of their common interests in the identification of novel anticancer drugs and the potential for nano-delivery. Both Tamanoi and Zink are members of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, which encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration to solve problems in nanoscience and nanotechnology.
For information about Fuyu Tamanoi’s research, visit the Tamanoi Research Lab’s Web site at www.mimg.ucla.edu/faculty/tamanoi.
For more information about Jeffrey Zink, visit the Zink Group Web site at www.chem.ucla.edu/dept/Faculty/zink/index.php.
About the California NanoSystems Institute
The California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) is a multidisciplinary research center at UCLA whose mission is to encourage university-industry collaboration and to enable the rapid commercialization of discoveries in nanosystems. CNSI members include some of the world’s preeminent scientists, and the work conducted at the institute represents world-class expertise in five targeted areas of nanosystems-related research: renewable energy; environmental nanotechnology and nanotoxicology; nanobiotechnology and biomaterials; nanomechanical and nanofluidic systems; and nanoelectronics, photonics and architectonics. For additional information, visit the CNSI Web site at www.cnsi.ucla.edu.
The Tech Report has updated their econobox guide to include the AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+, GeForce 8600 GT, 2 GB of RAM, and a 320 GB hard drive for $538. What a deal!
Launch Terminal and enter this command:
defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE