H1N1 has found a second infectious life through Twitter. Comic Baratunde Thurston confessed at an event in New York City last week that he was responsible for the swine flu’s satirical Twitter account, which collected more than 1,500 followers in a few weeks.And here's my original blog post on the Swine Flu Twitter account.
Another reason why not to befriend people who you have never met on Facebook.According to a post on Consumerist last month, "Debt collectors are using cute chicks as bait on Facebook to track down and keep track of debtors." It told the story of one employee of a debt-collection agency, who after "friending" some 658 people, declared (rather bizarrely):
haha you guys i tricked you all my name is actually Emily and i work for cbv collections as a skip tracer i bet you guys got calls from them saying you owe money thats all my doing :) you want to call and bitch? i dare you to call me 604-[redacted]!!! I wait to hear from you :)"
Debra Sordillo, the Coldwell sales agent who brokered the deal, said several residents at 48 Commonwealth Ave. engaged in a bidding war for the space, driving the original asking price of $250,000 up to the record-breaking $300,000. The winning bidder did not want to be identified, she said.I cannot imagine that.
Though the price is more than what many people pay for a house, Sordillo said prime parking spaces in a neighborhood just a block from the Public Garden are in short supply.
[W]hen the federal General Services Administration announced this week that it had spent $287 million in stimulus money to buy 17,205 new cars, it turned out that the biggest beneficiary was the Ford Motor Company, the only one of Detroit’s Big Three automakers that has not received a government bailout.Maybe it's because Ford makes better, cheaper vehicles that they aren't going out of business -- and that the government bought more vehicles from them than either GM or Chrysler.
The General Services Administration, which manages a fleet of 213,000 vehicles for some 75 federal agencies, said it spent $129 million to buy 7,924 Fords; $105 million on 6,348 General Motors vehicles; and $53 million on 2,993 Chryslers.
Just recently Pontén received a letter from the Swedish tax authority (Skatteverket) informing him that his request for a change in his personal details had been accepted, which came as quite a surprise since he had made no such request.Pretty funny, but I don't think this will help the Pirate Bay supporters with their PR.
From May 29th 2009, said the letter, 43 year-old Henrik Pontén would have his name changed and become known as Pirate Pontén, undoubtedly to the high amusement of millions of file-sharers.
“The pirate movement have previously tried threats and when that doesn’t work, they do this,” Pontén told Aftonbladet.
I am not in any of those categories.• 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL• 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile• 68.68% have not specified a location• 55.50% are not following anyone• 54.88% have never tweeted• 52.71% have no followers
• The average user tweets .97 times per daySomething to look over if you are a Twitter user.
• The average user has tweeted 119.34 times in total
• The average user has a following-to-follower ratio of .7738
Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network. The stack of letters becomes the e-mail database on the computer, which gives way to Hotmail or Gmail. The clipping sent to a friend becomes the attached PDF file, which becomes a set of shared bookmarks, hosted offsite. The photos in a box are replaced by JPEGs on a hard drive, then a hosted sharing service like Snapfish. The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.Worth a read.
But where is “there,” and what does it look like?
“There” is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers. These centers run enormously scaled software applications with millions of users. To appreciate the scope of this phenomenon, and its crushing demands on storage capacity, let me sketch just the iceberg’s tip of one average individual digital presence: my own. I have photos on Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo, so they reside in a Yahoo data center, probably the one in Wenatchee, Wash.); the Wikipedia entry about me dwells on a database in Tampa, Fla.; the video on YouTube of a talk I delivered at Google’s headquarters might dwell in any one of Google’s data centers, from The Dalles in Oregon to Lenoir, N.C.; my LinkedIn profile most likely sits in an Equinix-run data center in Elk Grove Village, Ill.; and my blog lives at Modwest’s headquarters in Missoula, Mont. If one of these sites happened to be down, I might have Twittered a complaint, my tweet paying a virtual visit to (most likely) NTT America’s data center in Sterling, Va. And in each of these cases, there would be at least one mirror data center somewhere else — the built-environment equivalent of an external hard drive, backing things up.
As to his positive control for third-generation EPO, CERA, Kohl did not know why it was him who tested positive - along with teammate Stefan Schumacher and Riccardo Riccò - and not other Tour de France riders.Hat tip to John Fleck, the bicycling/science guru in New Mexico.
"Everybody in the cycling scene was convinced that this EPO was not detectable. Many more riders had taken it. Oddly enough, we were only three to fall. I am convinced that the top ten could have been positive," the Austrian said. "It just happened to be me, tough luck. I didn't ask for a counter-analysis: this masquerade was over."
