Links for 02-03-2011

• 'Death by GPS' in desert - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee - "In Death Valley, many roads shown on some GPS systems are no longer passable. Some have been officially closed. Others are simply too rough for most vehicles and pose serious danger. "People are so reliant on their GPS that they fail to look out the windshield and make wise decisions based on what they're seeing," said Alley."
• Data Center Dialog: A cloudy look forward at 2011 - Good trends summary.
• 1948 Mayor to MIT: Use Flamethrowers to Melt Snow? « Slice of MIT by the Alumni Association
• Photo of Cars Abandoned In The Snow on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive
• Quora Backlash Slams Head First Into Quora Backlash Backlash - Seems like a pretty balanced look at the whole thing. Personally, I consider it an open question how effectively Quora will deal with a broader set of users, many of whom will do their best to pervert it for self-promotion or otherwise personal agendas.
• A tale of two qubits: how quantum computers work
• Why Bacon Is A Gateway To Meat For Vegetarians : Shots - Health News Blog : NPR - "Recently, an old friend who's been a vegetarian for more than 15 years shocked us with a story: Last weekend, she ate bacon. Several strips. Straight out of the frying pan where her boyfriend was cooking it. This wasn't the first time she'd encountered it sizzling there, in all its glistening glory. But for some reason, this time it overpowered her. She was guilty yet gleeful when she told us that she'd allowed bacon back into her life."
• LinkedIn to Offer Free Business Card Scanning With CardMunch Acquisition - "CardMunch, the iPhone app that helps import business cards into a digital format, has announced that it has been bought by LinkedIn. While that's good news for CardMunch, its even better news for you, its potential users. "Starting today," writes the company, "the current version of the CardMunch app will be completely free!"
• 25 Years of Digital Vandalism - NYTimes.com - "In short, the road to our present universe teeming with viruses, worms and Trojan horses was paved, a quarter-century ago this month, with the Alvi brothers’ good intentions of securing their intellectual property."
• Review: My Amazon Kindle Single publishing experiment | ZDNet
• Why the Long Lost Google Book Pact Still Matters - Peter Osnos - Technology - The Atlantic - "In certain respects, however, technology and commerce have overtaken the original dispute. Digitized books can be programmed so that they cannot be copied or printed more than once, which limits the notion of a free-for-all in which authors and publishers lose control of the material. Many books in the public domain (the vast majority of works that have been digitized) are increasingly available from a variety of sources, which reduces Google's omnipotence. Given the extraordinary growth in the use of eBook reading devices (which were barely a factor when the lawsuits against Google were originally filed), the interests of authors and publishers have shifted to getting a fair share of revenues rather than the prospect of receiving no revenues at all."