Author: Serkadis

With its 140 character limit, Twitter is all about brevity. But if you think the same shouldn’t apply for a job application, well then, “you’re done.”

This Craigslist job listing has some interesting rules, to say the least. While the eye-grabbing headline is asking for a “Twitter Genius” in Greenwich Village, the actual role is an “expert” social media marketer for some sort of e-commerce startup. “I need someone who tweets in their sleep and updates their fb status before calling their mom on Mother’s Day,” the description reads. And it gets better.

Background, education, references? Nah, these people don’t care about that stuff. All that really matters for getting this job is to follow the six little rules perfectly. Those are:

1) Email me two tweets. The first should be about your experience. The second should by why you’re perfect for this job. If you exceed twitter’s allotted character count, you’re done.

2) Email me your Twitter name in link form (e.g. http://www.twitter.com/YOURNAME)

3) Tell me how many followers you have and how many people you follow.

4) Tell me who’s the best person you follow and why (in tweet form).

5) Tell me what’s the best way to get more followers (in tweet form).

6) Specific salary requirement.

So basically, if this application is more than 600 characters or so, you’re done. And you better be damn well ready to talk briefly about how you can best self-promote, or you’re done. Also, it’s probably better if you don’t want too much money. But don’t say why, keep it short.

Think you can handle all that? Then you may have found your dream job with the easiest application ever.

[thanks Shmuel]

[photo: flickr/uaybet]

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So you’re cruising along, with your GPS-enabled phone on the dashboard, taking your dear wife back home to Reno. The little gadget says “turn right” and you follow its typically reliable instructions. At what point in the next three days of plowing deeper and deeper into snow-covered Oregon do you start suspecting that maybe something is amiss? Alright, so this isn’t quite on par with others driving buses into low-clearance tunnels, dipping their cars into rivers, or jamming heavy load trucks into unsuitably tight farm lanes. But we don’t discriminate here, all instances of idiotic GPS dependency deserve their moment in the sun, so here’s to Mr. John Rhoads and his tastefully named wife, Mrs. Starry Bush-Rhoads, who are now safe and sound after their phone pinged out its coordinates to emergency services when it began losing signal.

GPS leads couple into Oregon wilderness, lack of common sense keeps them there 3 days originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How many of you found themselves at any given moment in the need to find a flat surface in your car, so that you can better write down a phone number, a license plate number or whatever? We know we have and, by God, regardless of the cars we’ve driven, none of them provides such a surface.

Well, all that agony is now over, as AutoExec introduces the WM-01 Wheelmate Steering Wheel Desk Tray (a.k.a. laptop steering wheel desk). The device is as simple as they get, as is nothing but … (read more)

Imeem is the prime example that the online music business is far from a safe bet even now, as it’s beginning to look like 2010 may finally be the year when music streaming services become viable businesses for the companies running them as well as for the users. The free streaming service has been acquired by MySpace Music for a paltry sum, around $1 million, and has since been dismantled. And just when it looked like it couldn’t get any worse, the site gets a fine for $1.77 million in a copyright infringement suit.

The Orchard Enterprises, a music distribution company, filed a lawsuit against the company earlier this autumn over alleged copyright infringement charges. Things aren’t exactly clear cut though, as Imeem is accused of going over the bounds of a licensing agreement by streaming full songs instead of the previews which the license apparently allowed it to. Imeem decided to skip the hearings altogether leading the judge to issue a default judgment and fine the company.

However, the consequences of the decision are a bit murky as it looks like MySpace wasn’t involved in the lawsuit which would indicate that the assets it acquired from Imeem weren’t part of the legal battle. Because of the legal and financial troubles, MySpace Music only bought select assets from the company, the most valuable of which are… (read more)

After analyzing the trucks sold in America for the last ten years, the PickupTrucks.com website alongside AutoPacific decided to create a top ten of the most significant trucks, the models which introduced new technology.

"On balance, we thought the 2009 Ford F-150 was the most significant pickup of the last decade," said Jim Hossack, vice president of consulting for AutoPacific. "It sells in high volume, owners like it and its body, chassis and powertrain are all f… (read more)

Audi’s Q5 is the latest subject of a safety recall in the United States as it has been discovered that some trim covers might get loose once the head airbag is deployed. A notification posted on the official website of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) claims that around 6,000 model year 2009 Q5 units are concerned by the recall.

In the official recall information it is mentioned that a defective cover piece mounted on the A-pillar can detach if the head … (read more)

Romain Grosjean might just have a shot at keeping his Renault seat for the 2010 season of Formula One, as it now appears Franck Montagny is no longer favorite for the job. Although recent reports showed that the Frenchman was in pole position to becoming Robert Kubica’s teammate for the upcoming year, his latest comments hint that F1 is no longer an option.

Writing on his personal website, Montagny’s goals for the year 2010 seem to have taken a sudden turn towards a successful Le … (read more)

Indian carmaker Tata Motors recently launched an upgraded version of the Sumo in the domestic market. Dubbed Grande MK II, the car will be available in 3 variants, namely Gx, Ex, and Lx, with a seating capacity ranging between 7 and 9 seats in front and side facing configurations.

The vehicle will be available in three new colours, Walnut Gold, Platinum Beige and Castle Grey.

Exterior styling features for the Grande MK II include a new chrome lined grill, side rub … (read more)

Article Tags: Michael Asten, Reply To Article, Updated

THE Copenhagen climate change summit closed two weeks ago in confusion, disagreement and, for some, disillusionment. When the political process shows such a lack of unanimity, it is pertinent to ask whether the science behind the politics is as settled as some participants maintain.

Earlier this month (The Australian, December 9) I commented on recently published results showing huge swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide, both up and down, at a time of global cooling 33.6 million years ago.

Paul Pearson and co-authors in a letter (The Weekend Australian, December 11) took exception to my use of their data and claimed I misrepresented their research, a claim I reject since I quoted their data (the veracity of which they do not contest) but offered an alternative hypothesis, namely that the present global warming theory (which was not the subject of their study) is inconsistent with the CO2-temperature variations of a past age.

Updated Below

Source: theaustralian.com.au

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A young man named Jeremy Gillian stole another young man’s XBox 360 in a robbery and then turned it on… with the network and Gamertag intact. The results are as you’d expect: the victim was able to grab the IP, police tracked it to Gillian’s grandmother’s house, and the XBox and a trove of other stolen stuff were discovered.

Now this story comes to us from the NY Post, not one of the most tech savvy newspapers in our fair city. Also the thought that NYC detectives would “work with Microsoft” to track a stolen XBox is a bit hard to accept at face value, but apparently the story happened so kudos to Pelham Detective John Hynes and Microsoft for working together on this. At least a detective had a bit of fun learning about IP scanning.

We should also totes send the detective a new XBox. Anyone live in Pelham, Bronx?

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Digg has had one busy year and, while things are looking up, it still has a lot of work cut out ahead of it. Twitter was a major disruptor and replaced the social news aggregator as a source for many users who found Twitter’s immediacy a much better alternative to Digg. At the same time, Digg introduced quite a few products, mostly aimed at generating revenue, but also at improving the experience for the users. But as 2009 draws to a close, Digg is focusing its attention on the things that make the service what it is, its users and the stories.

From this perspective, it wasn’t a great year for Digg either, at least from the raw numbers, as the top stories of the year got half the diggs popular stories in previous years got. The biggest story of the year was US president Barack Obama’s inauguration getting almost 25,400 diggs.

This was followed by Michael Jackson’s death which captured the attention of the world and got 24,800 diggs, just shy of taking the first spot. At number three is “The Story of Prisoner F95488,” an US student and talented soccer player, immigrated from Ghana, which may have been wrongfully imprisoned.

Perhaps worrying, for Digg, is the fact that the numbers don’t stack up to previous years, for example the top story of 2007 and of all time for that matter, the whole AACS encr… (read more)

Article Tags: ClimateGate, Tim Ball

Climate science is a productive pursuit with Nobel Prizes, an Oscar, billions in research funding, massive tax grabs and wealth for exploiters

Climate science is a productive pursuit with Nobel Prizes, an Oscar, billions in research funding, massive tax grabs and wealth for exploiters. Continuation of these activities partly validated the claim the disclosed files from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) are of small consequence.

As I wrote earlier the scandal at CRU (Climategate) is diverting from the real scandal, which is the claim CO2 is causing warming and climate change. Climategate is the greatest orchestrated fraud in scientific history, but claims about CO2 are the greatest fallacy. Climategate lets those who’ve known what was happening to avoid being ignored as conspiracy theorists.

Everyone incorrectly talks about carbon when they mean CO2, which was the original focus of the claim human industrial activity was causing global warming. Theory assumed CO2 was a greenhouse gas that slowed heat escaping to space. As it increases temperature rises and it would because of increased industrial activity. This became fact immediately and challenging scientists were pushed aside. Mostly by nasty attacks from those who falsified records, rewrote historic records, distorted and misused science and statistics as the leaked CRU emails attest. Now they, their supporters, and all those benefiting, work to perpetuate the massive deception.

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Source: canadafreepress.com

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Remember the frenzy stirred by former Toyota attorney and his lawyer, Todd Tracy back in September, when they accused the Japanese carmaker of covering-up roll-over accident evidence and threatened with re-opening several suits against it? Well, forget it.

Todd Tracy, the man who in September said Toyota’s "cover-up of serious safety problems makes a ‘chump’ out of the American taxpayer," had a long few months and a sudden change of heart.

"I did no… (read more)

Article Tags: ClimateGate, Kenneth P. Green

Responses to “Climategate”–the leaked e-mails from Britain’s University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit — remind me of the line “Are your feet wet? Can you see the pyramids? That’s because you’re in denial.”

Climate catastrophists like Al Gore and the UN’s Rajendra Pachauri are downplaying Climategate: it’s only a few intemperate scientists; there’s no real evidence of wrongdoing; now let’s persecute the whistleblower. In Calgary, the latest fellow trying to use the Monty Python “nothing to see here, move along” routine is Prof. David Mayne Reid, who penned a column last week denying the importance of Climategate.

Unfortunately for Reid, old saws won’t work in the Internet age: Climategate has blazed across the Internet, blogosphere, and social networking sites. Even environmentalist and writer George Monbiot has recognized that the public’s perception of climate science will be damaged extensively, calling for one of the Climategate ringleaders to resign.

Source: calgaryherald.com

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Article Tags: ClimateGate, Joseph A Olson

We still do not know the back story to today’s greatest headline. The whistleblower and/or hacker who dropped the CRU email pebble may not have even realized the magnitude of the resulting tsunami. We must pray that this act of heroism goes unpunished. By threatening the current annual carbon exchanges of $125 billion, which were expected to rise to a trillion, there are plenty of upset money changers turned scalp hunters in the temple.

The “Blessed” thing about the Hadley hacking is that it has eliminated the eye glazing minutiae of science from the debate. No longer do we have to discuss the correct proxy value for cosmically irradiated isotopes of Beryllium and Chlorine atoms trapped in ice core samples. There are those who claim that this blessed event occurred due to respect for scientific purity.

The real reason for the event may well be the whistleblowers recognition of the underlying threat to humanity. Regardless, the debate has shifted. The layman has a good general knowledge of the concepts of lying, stealing and taxes. We can now discuss what this issue has secretly always been about: the theft of your nation, your assets, your freedom.

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The Armed Forces Foundation (AFF), with the support of Oshkosh Defense announced that the Rumble With a Cause sweepstakes has kicked-off, with entrants getting the chance to win one of two custom-painted Harley-Davidson Fat Boy motorcycles. The two motorcycles have been donated to the AFF for the sweepstakes by Oshkosh Defense.

Through April 15, 2010, donations raised from this sweepstakes campaign will support active and retired members of the US Military and their families.
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Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments.

The new app looks like a less elegant version of the Facebook iPhone app, but it’s less customizable. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company’s mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social media messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you’re looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post. Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it’s a work in progress and will improve soon.

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What’s The Most Important Kind of LinkedIn Update? People Getting New Jobs!

For some reason LinkedIn will not deliver you a simple feed of the new jobs that contacts of yours have taken. Not by email, not by RSS, not through its fancy new API and not on this new iPhone app. Update feeds are cluttered with imported ephemera from Twitter and all too often job changes are obscured behind the phrase “contact X has updated their profile.” They have? How did they update it? It’s maddening.

LinkedIn says it’s working on solving this problem, but it doesn’t seem to be a very high priority. Prompting users to click more and engage with a wider variety of message types seem more in line with LinkedIn’s strategy. The company clearly wants to be Facebook and Twitter for the business world – not just a place where we all go to find out essential work information that we use while doing other forms of social networking on other sites better suited for things like short, trivial messages.

Importing Contacts to Your Phone is Rudimentary

Perhaps LinkedIn isn’t to blame for this, but the ability to import LinkedIn contacts’ info onto your phone is rendered a whole lot less useful by the inability to merge that info with existing contacts. Say you’ve got someone’s name and phone number on your phone already – it’s a headache to pull in a person’s LinkedIn profile info and then merge the two manually.

Of course your phone number isn’t an optional field you can fill out on LinkedIn, so all those imported contacts will be people you’re unable to call. You won’t even be able to look them up on LinkedIn again from your phone’s contact list – peoples’ LinkedIn profile page URLs aren’t included in the contact info that gets imported.

There’s No Push Notifications

This is a professional application that people use on the iPhone – shouldn’t it include push notifications? LinkedIn is used by tons of sales people, for example – you know they’d like to get some of these updates pushed to them. As a writer, I would too.

Look at it this way. Last month my LinkedIn contact Tara Hunt changed her profile to show that she’s founded a new company called Shwowp. I want to know that, preferably right away. But I don’t know about it until a month later because I didn’t want to fish through a bunch of cross-posted Twitter updates inside LinkedIn to catch Tara’s news and I didn’t want to click through 3 screens starting with the bland “Tara Hunt has updated her profile” in order to see if she’s happened to change jobs or just noted a new personal interest on her profile page.

When someone who has accepted my contact request changes jobs, I want a push notification about what the new job is and the option to call them on the phone immediately to discuss it. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask and that’s when I’ll know that LinkedIn is really serving my professional life.

Update: LinkedIn’s Adam Nash, author of the company’s announcement blog post, responded on Twitter saying: “we’ve discussed all three of these enhancements internally. Some are harder than others. All in the queue…Rest assured, we wouldn’t have broken out profile updates into its own module if we didn’t have big plans for it. ”

Discuss

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CarMax, a used car retailer from the United States, decided to present this year’s top ten most searched used vehicles on their website, which gets more that 5.5 million visits per month.

This year’s list shows the variety of makes and models our customers are considering when shopping online for a quality used car. Every car in our inventory can be found on carmax.com and it will show the same no-haggle price you’ll see at your local CarMax store, said Ann Yauger, director of car… (read more)

We’ve written in the past how Thomas Edison — who is often held up by patent hoarders as the perfect example of why patents are necessary — didn’t actually invent any of the stuff he’s famous for “inventing.” Instead, he’s most famous for taking the work of others and innovating around it just slightly, to find a good market — but then also patenting the work of others and blocking anyone else from entering the market. I admire his innovative side and his marketing prowess, but find his abuse of patents to be unfortunate. Reader Michael points to a recent story in Wired which highlights how this worked with the incandescent lightbulb.

The story highlights how the incandescent lightbulb was really a function of progressive innovation, with different people adding little bits here and there:

English chemist Humphry Davy connected two wires to a battery in 1809 and inserted a charcoal strip between the other ends of the wires. The strip glowed, making it the first electric lamp.

Inventor Warren De la Rue about 10 years later enclosed a platinum coil in an evacuated tube and passed electric current through it to make it glow.

From there, it details how Joseph Swan built the first real “electric lamp” building on those concepts. Swan did get a patent on his work, but it didn’t actually work all that well. Edison’s revelation was to make a minor tweak to Swan’s work, making the incandescent bulb last much longer. It wasn’t an “invention” at all. It was a minor tweak on top of it, and then a massive promotional campaign. Of course, Edison originally couldn’t do as much with his better lightbulb, because Swan held that patent… so eventually Edison ended up merging with Swan’s company… and took all the credit for the incandescent bulb. And from then on, he used patents to keep everyone else out for as long as possible.

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Did you know that the vast majority of calls carried out on the 3.5 billion GSM connections in the world today are protected by a 21-year old 64-bit encryption algorithm? You should now, given that the A5/1 privacy algorithm, devised in 1988, has been deciphered by German computer engineer Karsten Nohl and published as a torrent for fellow code cracking enthusiasts and less benevolent forces to exploit. Worryingly, Karsten and his crew of merry men obtained the binary codes by simple brute force — they fed enough random strings of numbers in to effectively guess the password. The GSM Association — which has had a 128-bit A5/3 key available since 2007, but found little takeup from operators — has responded by having a whinge about Mr. Nohl’s intentions and stating that operators could just modify the existing code to re-secure their networks. Right, only a modified 64-bit code is just as vulnerable to cracking as the one that just got cracked. It’s important to note that simply having the code is not in itself enough to eavesdrop on a call, as the cracker would be faced with just a vast stream of digital communications — but Karsten comes back to reassure us that intercepting software is already available in customizable open source varieties. So don’t be like Tiger, keep your truly private conversations off the airwaves, at least for a while.

GSM call encryption code cracked, published for the whole world to see originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 04:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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