The British navy  has recently employed a new secret agent.

Step aside James Bond, Britney Spears is now serving Her Majesty.

British naval officers are starting to play Spears’ hits such as Oops! I Did It Again and Baby One More Time to scare of Somali pirates.

They hope to get “Lucky” using Britney Spears’ “Toxic” music to make all Somali Pirates say “I Wanna Go”. Enough with the song references….

Why Britney? Somali pirates who sail off the east coast of Africa hate western culture, and nothing says “American music” other than Spears’ poppy and dance tunes themselves.

Merchant navy officer Rachel Owens commented on the song selection by saying, “It’s so effective the ship’s security rarely needs to resort to firing guns”.

In other unlikely song partnerships, Barney’s “I Love You” theme song was often heard playing in Guantanamo Bay. It was used to persuade silent prisoners to talk. If that song doesn’t drive you crazy, I don’t know what will. 

We all have our favorite songs to hate. What tunes are on your list?

In his latest opinion column in The Baltimore Sun, Political Science Professor Thomas Schaller responds to an op-ed he wrote last month about the Western Maryland Initiative, an effort that calls for the state’s five western-most counties to secede from the state.

Schaller suggests that if people in those counties dislike Maryland’s politics, a solution is to move to a neighboring state that better reflects their ideology:

Among the blessings of our federal system are the variations across the 50 states. Conservatives usually champion these differences and states’ rights; indeed, they frequently employ the “vote with your feet” metaphor to encourage persons or businesses unhappy with one state’s political-electoral environment to find another state where they can start a business, buy a home or just gamble for a few hours. One of them, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, just stopped by Maryland to make that very point.

 

He also provides examples of people who recently moved from Western Maryland to West Virginia, including former Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett.

You can read the full column Don’t secede; vote with your feet in The Baltimore Sun. 

The Web Applications Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Widget Interface. This specification defines an application programming interface (API) for widgets that provides, amongst other things, functionality for accessing a widget’s metadata and persistently storing data.

The Web Applications Working Group has also published a Last Call Working Draft of Pointer Lock. This specification defines an API that provides scripted access to raw mouse movement data while locking the target of mouse events to a single element and removing the cursor from view. This is an essential input mode for certain classes of applications, especially first person perspective 3D applications and 3D modelling software. Comments are welcome through 28 November.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Web Performance Working Group has published two Proposed Recommendations and invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation today:

• A Proposed Recommendations of User Timing, which defines an interface to help Web developers measure the performance of their applications by giving them access to high precision timestamps. Comments are welcome through 28 November.
• A Proposed Recommendation of Performance Timeline. This specification defines an unified interface to store and retrieve performance metric data. This specification does not cover individual performance metric interfaces. Comments are welcome through 28 November.
• A Candidate Recommendation of Timing control for script-based animations. This document defines an API web page authors can use to write script-based animations where the user agent is in control of limiting the update rate of the animation. The user agent is in a better position to determine the ideal animation rate based on whether the page is currently in a foreground or background tab, what the current load on the CPU is, and so on. Using this API should therefore result in more appropriate utilization of the CPU by the browser.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Web Events Working Group has published a Group Note of Touch Events Extensions. This document defines extensions to the Touch Events specification that have been implemented by one or more browsers. This document is no longer being developed. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.