On-line unnatural disasters:
- This is the preview for a print article from the January 2010 Scientific American about the proliferation of third-world virtual gold farmers in MMORPGs, many of whom make more money playing WoW and other games 12 hours a day and then selling the virtual goods for real-world money than they would working in factories. I can just picture the glazed look some people are getting thinking about playing WoW for a living... except we're talking third-world wages. Still, the workers do get ancillary technical skills that they can sometimes take with them into the wider job market.
- A 42-year-old Texas woman was arrested after she traveled to Ontario to see the 16-year-old boy with whom she'd been having a relationship via WoW. The story is even wackier than that. She didn't technically break any Canadian laws, even though the boy met her without his parents' permission and was gone for two days. The woman was only arrested once she arrived back in Houston, on charges of on-line solicitation of a minor.
- Snowbound Britons have apparently been spending a great deal of their time seeking on-line affairs. This article only mentions illicitencounters.com, a site specifically for, um, lubricating those on-line couplings, but it seems to me that WoW would actually be a better place for such goings-on, as it has a proven track record and especially since it doesn't look nearly as suspicious on the credit-card bill.
- Like I needed another reason not to want a Facebook page. Well, if I ever start to waiver, I just need to remind myself what an arrogantly presumptuous dumbass the founder is.
- A heated exchange on Twitter allegedly escalated to murder in Harlem.
IT:
- Surveys show that IT job satisfaction has hit a record low. I didn't need a survey to tell me that.
Misc:
- After this study, I'm sticking to bottled drinks.
- Contrary to what the TSA is telling us, a privacy group alleges that those full-body scanners can, in fact, save and transmit images. While we're all used to being lied to by the government, I'm going to apply Hanlon's Razor to this case: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. The TSA may very well not know how to operate the scanners well enough to save and send images.
- Verizon isn't the only cell phone company with absurd early termination fees. If you cancel your Nexus One contract in the first four months, you're looking at a $350 fee from Google on top of carrier T-Mobile's $200 fee.
- And, in a post full of dumbasses, this guy filed a lawsuit saying his neighbor's cell phone and wi-fi access point have driven him to live in his car because of his "electromagnetic allergies."
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