Tim O’Reilly:

Tim O’Reilly:

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.


It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work.


If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you.

As it turns out, it wasn’t just links imported from Twitter. All outbound links were temporarily disabled, unless users explicitly added them as links via an “attach” dialogue. I went to Facebook, and tried posting a link to this blog directly in my status feed, and saw the same behavior: links were no longer automatically made clickable. You can see that in the image that is the destination of the first link in this piece.



The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again. The consensus was that it was in fact a bug, but it’s little surprise that people suspected otherwise, given the increasing amount of effort Facebook puts into warning people that they are leaving Facebook for the big bad unsafe Internet:

More photos later.

From Mali.

South China Morning Post

uwbadgers.com:

As part of a campuswide commitment to reducing our environmental footprint, the Badgers’ Homecoming game against the University of Illinois on Saturday, Oct. 25, has been designated a “carbon-neutral” game.

The game, the first of its kind in the Big Ten and one of the first in the nation, will offer a chance to raise awareness of environmental issues, such as the damaging effects of carbon dioxide and the benefits of conservation and recycling. The event will also provide information on ways fans can take action in their daily lives to become more environmentally friendly.

The game is also a way to highlight the Athletic Department’s plans to implement a recycling and sustainability plan during the next five years.

“We’re hoping this game will stimulate more awareness of environmental issues on the part of Badger fans everywhere and demonstrate the many ways in which athletics and the rest of our campus are making meaningful commitments to sustainability,” says Chancellor Carolyn “Biddy” Martin.

The project has two aims: to offset carbon dioxide emissions generated directly by activities surrounding the game, and to make a continuing investment in a healthy environment by planting trees.

Milwaukee

I recently phoned the Streets Department to ask that they move a mountain of snow blocking a highly travelled sidewalk crossing, one that is frequently used by students (and local walkers along with pets). 24 hours later, said snow had been somewhat moved to make a useful walkspace through the mountain. While we still have glaciers on some roads, I’d say the Street Department has done a decent job with the present endless winter.

“Sudden Debt”:

Have you noticed how even Presidential races have now been reduced to dollar figures? I don’t mean the effect that money has on shaping political agendas and voter perceptions – this has been going on since at least the time of Pericles. I am referring instead to the assessment of candidates’ appeal to voters based on how much money they have raised in their election “war chests”. Hillary is deemed to be the frontrunner because she has raised X million dollars more than Barack, who is ahead of John Edwards and so on and so forth. This is so much like the order book of an IPO (initial public offering), for chrissakes. The more orders that flow in during the book-building period the better the chances that the issue will be “hot” and open for trading at an immediate premium. Hillarydotcom and Barrackdotcom.

Tom Ashbrook:

ight across the planet, good fresh water supplies are under pressure. In America’s West and Southwest, the combination of drought and booming population growth have made that pressure intense.
As the Colorado River and its giant reservoirs have shrunk, Arizona’s population has grown by 40 percent since 1990, and Las Vegas-area water use has doubled. California’s thirst for water is huge.
The trend lines show real trouble for desert cities. Global warming doesn’t help. And the West may be a lesson for us all.

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