Episode 779

Here at Buzz Out Loud, we are shamelessly attempting to launch a meme, based on the awesome Twitter ramblings of a guy stoned off his gourd at the dentist. Quick, somebody make a Café Press shirt! Also, today's show is rant-central, between the news that They can take our laptops for as long as They want for no reason, Apple's killing of a short-lived iPhone-tethering app, and the U.S. Congress' mandate that our nation's schools prop up our dying music industry. Good times.
==Stories Covered==
Judge rules Sprint’s early-termination fees illegal
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10004049-94.html
Travelers’ laptops may be detained at border
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/content/article/2008/08/01/laptops.html
In-flight cell ban advances in congress
http://mobile.slashdot.org/mobile/08/08/01/0124258.shtml
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10004170-1.html
Apple quickly kills popular iPhone-‘tethering’ app
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/007376.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10004278-26.html
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/07/31/nullriver-introduces-3g-edge-tethering-app-for-iphone/
College funding bill passed with anti-P2P provisions intact
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080801-college-funding-bill-passed-with-anti-p2p-provisions-intact.html
Hands on: Delicious 2 cleans up social bookmarking
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080801-hands-on-delicious-2-cleans-up-social-bookmarking.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10003874-2.html
China eases Internet restrictions for journalists
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/sports/olympics/02beijing.html
Online fantasy game's absurd cancellation policy leads to new law
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/final-fantasy-online-s-arcane-cancellation-policy-baffles-lawmakers-leads-to-new-law
iPhone + Twitter + sedatives = not a great idea, really
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/iphone-twitter-sedatives-not-a-great-idea-really
NASA: “We have water” on Mars
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/31/nasa-we-have-water-o.html
==Voicemail==
Grahame, New York
Gift card horror story.
BlackBerry Guy
A little hands-free headset stuff.
==Emails==
Hey Buzz crew!
A word in defense of providing lunch for employees. I recently joined a start-up here in Boston which does this. We just reviewed the policy and concluded that it’s a great investment. My personal top three arguments in favor:
1. Builds camaraderie and fosters healthy mixing of individuals from different departments.
2. Keeps an otherwise, uh… “distractible” team in the office, rather than wandering around Chinatown looking for Boston’s best dumplings. More importantly, it keeps lunch hour contained within a fixed window of time--1:00 p.m. is actually a usable meeting time in our company.
3. In a competitive recruiting market, free lunch is an attractive perk. We get far more bang from our lunch dollars than if we allocated them toward standard comp.
Waldron, in Boston
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Drunk Dialers in Norway get heard through fjords!…fjords..fjords…fjords…
http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/public_megaphone_for_drunk_dialers_in_norway_10660.asp
http://www.unsworn.org/telemegaphone/
excerpt:
By dialing the Telemegaphone’s phone number, your voice will ring out across the fjord, the valley, and the village of Dale. A bright light at the top of the pole will be lit as your call goes through, projecting your voice across the valley.
Wanna try? On Aug 2, go here for the phone number. (This’ll work day & night until September 6, 2008).
Best,
Shalin
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Tom, to help you out on the iPhone end, go into settings. Under Safari
there’s an option to switch the search from Google to Yahoo.
Steve from Buffalo, New York
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Hey BoL,
The caller in episode 778 who clarified some info on China’s Great
Firewall is right - VPNs are one path around China’s Net censors. A
friend of mine attended the Beijing University of Post &
Telecommunications, where she was taught how to use VPNs and other
proxy server techniques to evade the Great Firewall entirely. I
visited her dorm room when she was still in grad school there, and all
of her roommates (computer science students) were browsing and
downloading content quite freely. Apparently, they’re still huge fans
of ‘Friends.’
The real impact of the Great Firewall is psychological --China’s
government knows they can’t block everything, but if they make certain
information inconvenient enough to access for most of the population,
almost all users just get frustrated and give up. I’m constantly
surprised by how disinterested and oblivious my friend is about world
events, although I can’t speak for the other 1.32 billion. She’s
coming to the States for the second time in August and I’ll be very
curious to see how she reacts to western media’s perceptions of the
Olympics coverage.
<< “L O V E T H E S H O W”;
-Andrew
Portland, Oregan
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Dear Tom, Molly, and Jason, While the new FireWire standard may be
faster then the current USB standard, the soon-to-be-released USB 3.0
spec has a max throughput of about 4.8 Gbit/s.