Sad, isn’t it? I mean, I have nothing against social networks. In fact, I think they could actually be helpful and useful in many cases. But sometimes, there are those who put too much of their worth or their life into these sites, that they’re driven to do really crazy stuff in some extreme situations.

Just a few days ago, a couple from Tennessee were murdered because they “unfriended” a woman named Jenelle Potter. In a fit, her father and some other guy went to the couple’s home and shot them in the head. Their 8-month old baby was found unharmed in the mother’s arms. Maybe there was more to this than just the Facebook unfriending, but as things stand right now, the whole thing sounds pretty sick.

Image credit: DarkDelaqroux

There’s also this video on YouTube that’s gone viral the past few days. It’s from an IT pro named Tommy Jordan who talks about Facebook parenting. In the clip, he shoots his daughter’s laptop because she posted “disrespectful status updates.” There’s some NSFW language in the video, so be aware before hitting play.

Maybe the video was just made to drive traffic, but it kind of makes you think: what’s happening to society? It’s not that the daughter’s status updates were appropriate by any means, but it’s a bit of a hyperbolic response to her behavior. Why not just take her laptop away – or donate it to charity?

I really don’t think that anything that happens on Facebook is worth taking someone else’s life – or shooting a laptop, for that matter.

While Netflix caved and signed the agreement with Warner, Redbox has simply let its agreement that has been in place with Warner for a few years expire. That agreement allowed Redbox to buy new DVDs and Blu-rays in bulk at a discount directly from Warner.

By letting the agreement lapse, Redbox has done two things. The first thing is Redbox no longer has to delay the launch of new DVD and Blu-ray releases in its kiosks by the 28 days that the old Warner contract had stipulated, much less than the 56 day delay that Warner now wants. The second thing that not signing the contract has done is force Redbox to buy DVDs in bulk from retailers and wholesalers at higher prices. That could mean the rental prices at the kiosks will go up, but it should give them a competitive advantage over other outlets who have to wait if they want discounted discs for rentals. FWIW, Blockbuster made the same move with Warner recently, too.

Personally, I would gladly pay a little more money at the kiosk then have to wait two months to watch a new film that I want to see. What do you think of this move? Would you be willing to pay a little more to rent a movie if Redbox refuses to renew these contracts that force delays in getting the movies you want to see?

[via LA Times]

Apparently, the protest was over the fact that some workers on the line were being moved to other facilities. Reports say that about 45 workers voluntarily quit and were given salary and bonuses based on how long they were with the company.

Microsoft has noted that the production change that required 150 workers to be removed for the facility was due to regular production adjustments. I wonder if this is any sort of indication that a new Xbox might be coming soon and the move is to reduce inventories. Probably not, but you never know.

[via PCWorld]

The 13-ton probe failed to get into space far enough to continue its journey and will now fall back to Earth sometime this coming weekend. The swath of land that the remnant satellite parts could fall onto include some of the most populous cities on Earth. The Russian space agency director Vladimir Popovkin has now hinted that some sort of weapon might have caused the satellite to fail.

Previously, a retired commander that was in charge of a missile early warning station said that strong radar signals from Alaska could have damaged the spacecraft. Russia didn’t accuse the US or any other countries of attacking its satellites. However, the insinuation was there. Popovkin said, “We don’t want to accuse anybody, but there are very powerful devices that can influence spacecraft now. The possibility they were used cannot be ruled out.”

[via NYTimes]

The new product line will be focused on a younger, tech savvy generation, and will eventually offer products across the consumer electronics spectrum. B&O describes the brand as “playful,” “outgoing” and “vigorous.” The first device in the B&O Play line is the new Beolit 12, a portable sound system which was floating around the web via some leaked FCC pics last month.

I’ve had a chance to hear the Beolit 12 up close and personal, and it sounds awesome for its size, filling a room with smooth sound and punchy natural bass. The Beolit 12 portable sound looks sort of like a lunch box, with an aluminum case and grille, and a high quality leather carrying handle. It’s wireless, with full AirPlay support, and has its battery and power adapter built in. It’s a true 2.1 system with a 120 watt class D amp – a lot of power for a portable for sure. It’s got two 2″ tweeters, and a 4″ woofer for boom. Battery life is rated at 8 hours via line input, dropping to 4 hours over AirPlay.

So what about pricing? At $799(USD)/€699(EUR), it’s not cheap, but by Bang and Olufsen standards, it’s a bargain, especially when you realize the audio system was designed by the same team who makes $20,000 speakers.

The Beolit 12 is expected in the Bang & Olufsen online store and select Apple Stores sometime in late January/early February, and B&O Play will continue to roll out new gadgets on and ongoing basis.

Lovell apparently signed an affidavit that asserted he owned the title to the ring-bound checklist. However, NASA says that there is no indication that Lovell was ever assigned the title to the document. NASA’s legal eagle noted that only NASA has the right to sell NASA property.

The auction firm, Heritage Auctions, is keeping the document in its vault and has suspended the sale until the legal wrangling is over. Lovell had sold the checklist at the auction house for $380,000. Apollo 13 was the moon mission that had a tank explosion 200,000 miles from Earth, which forced the crew to return home. NASA is also disputing the legal right to several other space items Heritage Auctions has sold in the past.

[via ABCNews]

The trooper then told him to get up, but instead he punched and kicked the trooper, who deployed his Taser. Supposedly the suspects thick jacket prevented the Taser from working, (Our was it the fact that he is more machine than man?), so the trooper used pepper spray to subdue him.

The Light Side always wins.

[via Clickorlando]

I doubt that this will become a common practice, but Martin Reisch managed to get into the US using his iPad. He had a scan of his passport on his iPad, and he had forgotten his real one at home, which was two hours away. He was delivering some gifts for the kids of a friend. After a few minutes of deliberation, the border officer gave him permission to enter the US. He was also allowed to leave the US with the same iPad passport.

I guess if the barcode is scannable, then it could be possible that this might become more a more frequent occurrence, but without the security measures built into a physical passport, it would be pretty easy to doctor a digital image of one. It makes you wonder what might happen if passports someday become entirely digital. Just swipe your phone or tablet, and go through.

[via Ubergizmo]

Other than the fact that the displays will support 802.11 b/g/n, dual-band Wi-Fi, and WMM multimedia standards, there really isn’t any additional info available yet. Both series were certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance on December 30, 2011, so I can only imagine that these are some of the displays we’ll see at next week’s CES show.

While the “X Series” moniker doesn’t sound like anything too mysterious, my curiosity is definitely piqued by the “Echo-P” name. Any guesses as to what might be special about those displays?

They also stated that the 3DS has been a faster seller than the Nintendo Wii was in the first 9 months since its launch. I’d call that a success. Even Nintendo’s old stuff is selling well. A total of 3.4 million units of the Nintendo DS were sold in the US in 2011.

But will they be able to increase the sales of the 3DS in 2012? The PS Vita is coming soon, plus there are the gamers using smartphones and tablets to play games. It will be interesting to see what happens now.

The problem was that when people tried to get into their rooms, they found the keys no longer worked. Huge crowds of people lingered in the lobby and halls since they had nowhere to go. The hotel elevators were also locked out. The police even had to be called as some fights broke out in the hotel. When it was all over, guests were locked out for about four hours. The lockout didn’t end until about 3am, and people were given free rooms as a thank you for not destroying the hotel.

Strangely enough, the problem started at about 11pm, so it’s not clear if the cutover to 2012 was responsible for the failure, since the system clock would have had to have been on Central time for that to have had an impact.

[via 9news]

You can ask Siri to send a message for you, call a contact, set reminders on your calendar, locate a certain place that you might want to go to, or even ask random questions so it can find the answers for you. The latter was what 12-year-old Charlie Le Quesne was up to, when he received quite a shocking and expletive-filled response.

In response to Charlie’s question “How many people are there in the world?”, Siri responded with the answer, followed by: “Shut the f**k up, ugly tw*t.” But this was no fault of Apple’s.

Rather, it was the work of mischievous pranksters who had tinkered around with the displayed iPhone 4S at a Tesco branch in Coventry and re-programmed the phone’s name to the seven-word phrase.

Charlie’s horrified mother, Kim, told press: “I thought I must be hearing things, so we asked again and the same four-letter stuff blared out.” They complained to store staff, who agreed to unplug the phone and remove it from their display.

A Tesco spokesperson said that they were conducting an investigation into the matter, and stated: “The handset will be going back to Apple for diagnostic tests.”

[via Daily Mail]

Glassdoor.com’s annual list of the strangest questions asked in job interviews this year is in, and tech firms are featured a lot with some strange questions. Do you think you could answer these?

My personal favorite is one said to be from a Google interviewer who asked “A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?” This question sounds like something plausible if you forget to fill up in Vegas. Here are some other winners…

“How many people are using Facebook in San Francisco at 2:30 p.m. on a Friday?” — Asked at Google, Vendor Relations Manager candidate

“If Germans were the tallest people in the world, how would you prove it?” — Asked at Hewlett-Packard, Product Marketing Manager candidate

“Given 20 ‘destructible’ light bulbs (which break at a certain height), and a building with 100 floors, how do you determine the height that the light bulbs break?” — Asked at Qualcomm, Engineering candidate

“How would you cure world hunger?” — Asked at Amazon.com, Software Developer candidate

“You’re in a row boat, which is in a large tank filled with water. You have an anchor on board, which you throw overboard (the chain is long enough so the anchor rests completely on the bottom of the tank). Does the water level in the tank rise or fall?” — Asked at Tesla Motors, Mechanical Engineer candidate

“Please spell ‘diverticulitis’.” — Asked at EMSI Engineering, Account Manager candidate

“You have a bouquet of flowers. All but two are roses, all but two are daisies, and all but two are tulips. How many flowers do you have?” — Asked at Epic Systems, Corporation Project Manager/Implementation Consultant candidate

“How do you feel about those jokers at Congress?” — Asked at Consolidated Electrical, Management Trainee candidate

“If you were a Microsoft Office program, which one would you be?” — Asked at Summit Racing Equipment, E-commerce candidate

I guess the idea is to get the potential hires to think out of the box and see how they react to the strange and unexpected. I’ll paste in some of the questions from other tech firms below for you to answer in the comments.

[Glassdoor.com via Mashable]

Each of the Kindle Fire tablets is sold at an estimated $3 loss. This is just one reason why some analysts are not smiling when they look at the end of Q4 for Amazon. In fact, one Goldman Sachs analyst is saying even with the brisk Kindle sales, Amazon won’t hit its revenue estimate for the quarter. And with each one eating into the bottom line, market fears are enough that Amazon’s stock price is seeing some volatility.

Amazon stock dropped 4% yesterday before recovering most of that loss by the close of the trading day. Overall sales for the quarter are still expected to have grown 38% over 2010, which is still pretty impressive. Amazon hopes that taking a loss on the tablet will spur sales of digital content to make up the hardware losses, which isn’t an uncommon business model for gadgets. Hopefully, this strategy will pay off in 2012 and beyond.

[via AllThingsD]

The madness didn’t stop there: other items auctioned off by Snail Games “included a sheath for Hook of Departure which was sold for $1,600 whilst a a Lordly Spear Sheath fetched $2,500. Other relatively modest purchases were made with pre-paid time cards amounting to just $15 whilst enhancement materials went for a mere $30.Meanwhile, rare mount that characters can take advantage of in the game cost an estimated $70 during the sale.” Suddenly that Diablo 3 Auction House makes a lot more sense.

…

Seriously though, how did we get to this? Are we that bored and sheltered that our priorities are now so skewed and misplaced? Or does that sword deal one-hit kills while leaving a trail of unicorn-riding strips of bacon in its wake?

[via Daily Mail via Slash Gear]

That’s not the only bad news. The 3DS, Wii, and PS3 sold more units in the run up to Christmas. The launch weekend saw the PS Vita sell 324,859 units, then there was a surprising drop between December 19-25 where it only sold 72,479.

To give you an idea, the PSP sold 101,121 units for the same period. Some drop is typical after the initial offering, but not like this. The 3DS sold 482,200 units during the PS Vita launch week and then only dropped to 357,691 sales last week. Things are not looking great for Sony so far, but only time will tell if the PS Vita can compete, especially with the impact that smartphones and tablets are having on the handheld gaming market.

[Andriasang via Geek]

The satellite fell back into the atmosphere and was destroyed, adding to the already hundreds of millions of dollars of lost space investments this year. The satellite aboard the unmanned rocket was called the Meridian military communications satellite. The failed launch took off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. There are other rockets set to launch from the same location in the coming weeks, but these recent failures definitely call into question the Russian’s ability to launch rockets successfully.

[via Space.com]

Not only that but players are also putting in an average of five hours a day in the game, totaling 28 million hours logged. Here are still more crazy numbers. 3.8 million characters have been created, over 1 million of which are famous light saber users.

And in case you are wondering about the Light Side versus Dark Side stats, as it stands now, Sith Warriors outnumber Jedi Knights; 550,000 to 510,000. Plus, over 2 billion NPCs have already died in The Old Republic. Yes, I think it’s safe to say that they have a hit on their hands.

[via Shacknews via Geek]

Hasbro filed the superfluous lawsuit last week, saying that the tablet’s name is too similar to its Transformers brand. It wants damages and a temporary injunction on the device, while sane and level-headed people just want Hasbro to shut up and churn out toys for the holidays.

Forget the fact that Transformers toys these days are pretty low quality and unimaginative too. I guess they would rather spend their time suing over something silly than offering a quality product, or insisting on a decent movie from their licensees. Merry Christmas from the folks at Hasbro.

I’m not really a big Transformers fan, but I think this is just stupid. What do you guys think? Is Asus really in the wrong here?

[via Geek.com]

Apparently, the ball is a pressure vessel of some sort that is used in spacecraft, so it’s simply space junk that didn’t burn up in the atmosphere. I wonder if the Meteor Men would want to sell the thing on eBay.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this was that 80′s comedy called The Gods Must Be Crazy where the tribesman that has never seen modern society gets hit in the head by a bottle dropped form an airplane. I think if this metal orb had hit someone it would have been a bigger issue, at least for the person nailed in the head by something weighing over six kilograms having a 43.3-inch circumference falling at terminal velocity.

[via Gizmodo]