Since Facebook released the ‘Like’ button to the world at the end of April there has been a mad scramble to harness the viral power of the Like button. We’ve seen hidden I-Frame scripts, buggy directories, and blatant phishing attempts.

The fact of the matter is though, that someone is going to harness it.

Thus far, it is still early, but we favor the script at http://www.likelike.us

It’s easy, seems to work well, and the price tag isn’t astronomical.

Go have a look and if you want the script for yourself you will easily find it at the ‘Buy this Script’ tab.

knowledge

If you want to learn about all the aspects of the internet business world- starting a MMO blog is your best shot. This is because the bloggers in your niche (whose blogs you will or are reading or you better start now) talk about all the different aspects of making money on the internet. From communication to money, you’ll learn it all from a MMO blog. Let me show you how.

You’ll learn how to build relationships and networks.

You will learn how to blog… properly.

You’ll learn to overcome various problems that can occur anywhere. Procrastination, writers block

You’ll learn how to prepare yourself for anything. Organizing, setting goals, having back up plans.

You’ll learn how to make money online.

About 65 eager shoppers lined the south side of West 34th Street across from Macy’s in Manhattan at 11:30 p.m. Thursday waiting for the store to open. Verizon opened the store from midnight to 2 a.m. to give people in the Big Apple a head start on the morning cell phone rush. By midnight, when the doors officially opened, about 100 people stood in line as Verizon officials ushered in customers 25 at a time.

Once inside the store, about 13 sales representatives and another four or five device specialists milled around, helping customers and demonstrating the phone’s features. Representative were also helping customers transfer contacts to their new phone.

Verizon Wireless spokesman David Samberg said he felt confident that Verizon would be able to meet customer demand for the new Droid in New York City. The 34th Street store alone had at least 500 Droids as well as some HTC Android Eris phones, and Samberg said he expects anyone wanting to buy a Droid on Friday in New York City will be able to get one.

“Five hundred phones is a lot of phones to sell in one day,” he said.

Most of the people standing in line at midnight for a Droid were loyal Verizon Wireless customers. Geoffrey Aravallis, who stopped to pick up his Droid on his way home from a dance club in the city, said he has been a Verizon Wireless customer for nine years.

He said he had been tempted to switch to AT&T for the iPhone but didn’t because he felt Verizon has a better network than AT&T. Now that the Droid is out, he is glad he waited.

“I use Gmail and all kinds of Google services, so it’s nice to be able to have all that on my phone,” he said. “And the Droid is much more open than the iPhone.”

Gabrielle Dahms admitted she had also been tempted to get the iPhone. But she had heard terrible things about AT&T’s network and was leery about making the switch. Instead, she decided to wait for the Droid.

“It has all the features I like on the iPhone,” she said. “Plus it has a real keyboard, which sold me.”

Many people have been comparing the new Droid to the iPhone, and some have even called the new device the true iPhone killer. But judging from the people I talked with who were buying the Droid, it looks like it might be more of a BlackBerry killer.

Dahms and her boyfriend, Will Welch, had been BlackBerry Curve users. Welch said he had tried the BlackBerry Storm last year when it first came out, but he didn’t like it. He also thought the iPhone was cool, but was unwilling to switch carriers for it. And he said he would have probably upgraded to the BlackBerry Tour if the Droid hadn’t come along.

The Droid will hit store shelves nationally starting at 7 a.m. Friday in many stores around the country. CNET News will be covering the launch, so stay tuned for updates.
Originally posted at Signal Strength

“This is way cool. That will be the end of the technical discussion,” said Pete Worden, director of the Ames Research Center, which is managing the mission. As he spoke, his image was flashed onto a giant inflatable movie screen on a mall at the NASA center.

Just before 7 p.m., the spacecraft executed a maneuver that will bring it into position for the collision.

If everything goes according to plan, a NASA satellite will steer the Centaur into the Cabeus crater at 4:30 a.m. Friday. Four minutes later, the satellite, called the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Sateite, or LCROSS, will fly through the dust raised by the Centaur’s crash. When it does, its nine spectroscopes and cameras will sample the debris cloud for traces of water.

Many scientists have speculated that large amounts of ice could lie hidden in permanently shadowed polar craters.

Finding water on the moon would be as important as finding gold, since it would make building a colony on the moon much easier than transporting water from Earth at $50,000 a pound.

Among those waiting out the night to witness the collision was Stephanie Vaughan, 30, who recently moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles to begin her law career.

“This is a once in a lifetime thing,” she said, as she huddled against the chill in a folding chair. She wasn’t sure she could stay awake for the crash, but hoped the pizza and beer her friends had brought along might help.

John Thompson, 18, from Mountain View, wrapped himself in a sheet of aluminum foil to keep out the cold. He said searching for water on the moon is a good idea, “because if we find water, we could live up there.”

He said he’d be willing to volunteer: “I’m getting tired of Earth.”

* 11 September 2009 by Paul Marks
* Magazine issue 2725. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
* For similar stories, visit the Energy and Fuels Topic Guide

PREDICTING how rumours and epidemics percolate through populations, or how traffic jams spread through city streets, are network analyst Jian-Wei Wang’s bread and butter. But his latest findings are likely to spark worries in the US: he’s worked out how attackers could cause a cascade of network failures in the US’s west-coast electricity grid – cutting power to economic powerhouses Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Wang and colleagues at Dalian University of Technology in the Chinese province of Liaoning modelled the US’s west-coast grid using publicly available data on how it, and its subnetworks, are connected (Safety Science, DOI: 10.1016/j.ssci.2009.02.002).

Their aim was to examine the potential for cascade failures, where a major power outage in a subnetwork results in power being dumped into an adjacent subnetwork, causing a chain reaction of failures. Where, they wondered, were the weak spots? Common sense suggests they should be the most highly loaded networks, since pulling them offline would dump more energy into smaller networks.

To find out if this is indeed the case, the team analysed both the power loading and the number of connections of each grid subnetwork to establish the order in which they would trip out in the event of a major failure. To their surprise, under particular loading conditions, taking out a lightly loaded subnetwork first caused more of the grid to trip out than starting with a highly loaded one.

“An attack on the nodes with the lowest loads can be a more effective way to destroy the electrical power grid of the western US due to cascading failures,” Wang says. To minimise the risk, he says, the grid’s operators should defend the west coast sections by adjusting their power capacity to ensure these specific conditions do not arise.

The US Department of Homeland Security is reviewing the research, says John Verrico, the department’s technology spokesman, who adds that countermeasures are already in the works. “Our engineers are working on a self-limiting, high-temperature superconductor technology which would stop and prevent power surges generated anywhere in the system from spreading to other substations. Pilot tests in New York City may be ready as soon as 2010.”

These precautions are well and good, but there are easier ways to bring a grid down, says Ian Fells, an expert in energy conversion at Newcastle University, UK. “A determined attacker would not fool around with the electricity inputs or whatever – they need only a bunch of guys with some Semtex to blow up the grid lines near a power station.”

from Slashdot

The Medium
Facebook Exodus
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing — some of them ostentatiously.

Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea, and sells T-shirts with the words “Shut Your Facebook.” What especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life. As Facebook endeavors to be the Web’s headquarters — to compete with Google, in other words, and to make money from the information it gathers — it’s inevitable that some people would come to view it as Big Brother.

“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”

The disillusionment with Facebook has come in waves. An early faction lost faith in 2008, when Facebook’s beloved Scrabble application, Scrabulous, was pulled amid copyright issues. It was suddenly clear that Facebook was not just a social club but also an expanding force on the Web, beholden to corporate interests. A later group, Harmsen’s crowd, grew frustrated last winter when Facebook seemed to claim perpetual ownership of users’ contributions to the site. (Facebook later adjusted its membership contract, but it continues to integrate advertising, intellectual property and social life.) A third wave of dissenters appears to be bored with it, obscurely sore or just somehow creeped out.

My friend Alex joined four years ago at the suggestion of “the coolest guy on the planet,” she told me in an e-mail message. For a while, they cultivated a cool-planet online gang. But then Scrabulous was shut down, someone told her she was too old for Facebook, her teenage stepson seemed to be losing his life to it and she found the whole site crawling with mercenaries trying to sell books and movies. “If I am going to waste my time on the Internet,” she concluded, “it will be playing in online backgammon tournaments.”

Another friend, who didn’t want his name used, found that Facebook undermined his whole notion of online friendship. “It’s easy to think of your circle of ‘Friends’ as a coherent circle, clear and moated, when in fact the splay of overlap/network makes drip/action painting a better (visual) analogy.” Something happened to this drip painting that he won’t discuss. He said, “Postings that seem private can scatter and slip unpredictably into a sort of semipublic status.”

That friend was not the only Facebook dissenter who was reticent about specifics. Many seem to have just lost their appetite for it: they just stopped wanting to look at other people’s photos and résumés and updates, or have their own subject to scrutiny. Some ex-users seemed shaken, even heartbroken, by their breakups with Facebook. “I primarily left Facebook because I was wasting so much time on it,” my friend Caroline Harting told me by e-mail. “I felt fairly detached from my Facebook buddies because I rarely directly contacted them.” Instead, she felt as if she stalked them, spending hours a day looking at their pages without actually saying hello.

But then came the truly weird part: “Facebook was stalking me,” Harting wrote. One day, on another Web site, she responded to an invitation to rate a movie she saw. The next time she logged on to Facebook, there was a message acknowledging that she had made the rating. “I didn’t appreciate being monitored so closely,” she wrote. She quit.

Julie Klam, a writer and prolific and eloquent Facebook updater, said in her own e-mail message, “I have noticed the exodus, and I kind of feel like it’s kids getting tired of a new toy.” Klam, who still posts updates to Facebook but now prefers Twitter for professional networking, added, “Facebook is good for finding people, but by now the novelty of that has worn off, and everyone’s been found.” As of a few months ago, she told me, Facebook “felt dead.”

Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit? Sad, if so. Though maybe fated, like the demise of a college clique.

Points of Entry: This Week’s Recommendations

THE QUIT Put “Why I Quit” into Google, and the search engine proposes you look into both “Why I Quit Facebook” and “Why I Quit Church.” If you aim to be a lapsed social networker, wikiHow, the collaborative how-to guide, provides a useful step-by-step way to disengage, emotionally and practically: wikihow.com/quit-facebook.

AN INQUIRY You’re not the first to think it’s creepy to have your personal life commercialized. Jürgen Habermas has been especially eloquent about this. Start with “The Theory of Communicative Action.” Copies are available on AbeBooks.com. Also interesting on this score: “The Purchase of Intimacy,” by Viviana Zelizer.

GET BOARD ONLINE Scrabble is alive and well in cyberspace. If you like Scrabble, try lexulous.com. For backgammon: ItsYourTurn.com.

THE HAGUE (AFP) – A treasured piece of moon rock showcased in a key Amsterdam museum is nothing but petrified wood, museum authorities said of a gift made to a former Dutch prime minister by a US envoy.

The exhibit at the Rijksmuseum, originally gifted to Willem Drees in 1969 by then US ambassador William Middendorf as a souvenir of a pathbreaking trip by three US astronauts on July 20, 1969.

“When we received it, we insured it for 100,000 florins or 50,000 euros in today’s money,” said Xandra van Gelder, the editor-in-chief of the museum’s internal magazine.

But she told AFP that it was “hardly worth 50 euros,” adding that museum authorities had been alerted by space and other experts. This was confirmed by independent studies on the object, which is roughly the size of a matchbox.

“What is also strange is that in 1969, when Willem Drees was given this ‘rock,’ it was 11 years after he had stepped down as prime minister.”

The US space agency NASA gifted pieces of the alleged moon rock to several countries.

The Rijksmuseum, one of the world’s top museums, is better known for its vast collection of paintings by Rembrandt.

Induction is just plain cool. Instead of using a flame like gas, or radiant heat like standard electric burners, induction burners use a magnetic field. The field creates heat through the property outlined in Joule’s first law—you do remember your thermodynamics, right?—in which current passing through conductive material generates heat.

So what? Well, a couple of things. First, induction is super-efficient. Induction burners convert about 85% of the energy you pour into them into heat, compared to about 70% for electric burners and 40% for gas. That means you’ll spend less to cook on induction.

And since the burner itself doesn’t create heat, it stays cool to the touch—take the pan off, and you can put your palm on it. That also means that they don’t throw off ambient heat like gas or electric, so the kitchen stays much cooler.

Then, there’s the responsiveness of induction. Like gas, when you turn it off, there’s no residual heat from the burner, just the pan. Plus, there’s the flexibility of portable burners like Alinea uses. Frying something smelly? Got an outdoor power outlet? Set up a portable burner, and you can keep the stink out of your house. Want to keep soup warm at a party? Throw a burner on the buffet, and you’re good to go.

The one thing to keep in mind is that your pans do have to be magnetic. That might be a pain in the ass, especially if you’re hip deep in anodized aluminum pots. But the good news is that some of the cheapest (and most fun to use) cookware around—cast iron—works amazingly on induction burners, as will all your fancy pots as long as they’ve got some stainless steel kicking around in them. If in doubt, grab a magnet from your fridge door to check.

As far as specific models to check out, Circulon makes a nice burner, and Spanish appliance giant Fagor has one. For the best combo of power and price, check out the Max Burton 6000, which puts out 1800 watts for just $125 retail. [Wired]

There’s no doubt about it: TV is getting way more social. A recent patent filed by IBM reveals that Big Blue wants to help it get even more social, by developing a remote control that will automatically blog and/or microblog what you’re watching.

The patent talks about a networkable remote controller that can “send a blog posting to a blog,” which can be set up to send posts automatically. It includes the ability to comment on the shows you’re watching, either by selecting from a pre-populated list or authoring your own. It also mentions posting automatically to microblogging services, which to most of us means Twitter (Twitter).

The patent was filed April 14 of this year, and the approval process can take some time so it may be a while before this thing comes to market. Nevertheless, it’s another stepping stone on the road to socially-enabled television.

Check out the original patent diagram below. Let us know if you’re excited about the idea of social TV. Do you use applications like Boxee (Boxee) already? Do you watch Hulu with your Facebook friends? Do you have a TV that already supports social widgets? Let us know in the comments.