The chairman never indicated that there would or would not be additional hearings, only indicated that there may be additional hearings. No decision has yet been made.

To all the commenters saying "stfu and stop whining": the thing you're missing is the false advertising on Google's part. Google doesn't tell you when you're going through their intense and selective recruiting process that your job is going to be crap.

Google managers like Paul Carff *specifically* make plans to dress up the job descriptions of what are essentially CSR positions, to lure top talent from top universities. Where they do mention CSR-type work, it's often called a "minor" or "infrequent" part of the job.

And regardless of the position, if you're accepting something on the order of 0.01 percent of applicants like Google is, and you're asking the kinds of quantitative+creative interview questions for which they're known, you are GOING to get a lot of intelligent, highly talented people. Lying to these people and putting them in dead-end positions is a recipe for disaster, which is why Google Support has such incredibly quick turnover.

You have to realize that high-caliber recent college grads are probably friends with lots of other high-caliber recent college grads. This means that, when they get lured across the country to the Bay and end up in a crappy CSR job they didn't sign up for, while their friends get much more appropriate roles in companies like Bain, Salesforce, and McKinsey, they aren't happy about it — and they shouldn't be.

I have an announcement to make: Apple corporate called. Somebody from high up the corporate ladder at Apple Computer in California, out in Cupertino, called the office.

He continues:

When did you get the message? When did they call, late yesterday afternoon? All right, they called at nine o'clock this morning, very, very, very nice guy, put my IT guy in touch with them, working — No, it was not Al Gore. Ha! No, Mr. Snerdley [his producer], it was not Al Gore. I'm not going to mention the gentleman's name because the Mac user community that hates me will start bombarding this guy. He's a West Coast guy. He called about six a.m. out there and said, "I'm here now," so our IT guy is working with him. That's cool. Yes, it's official. It's not a hacker. It was official. Don't start gumming up the works. It was really true.

We're going to have a long, serious talk with our service provider (Rackspace). They're supposed to be the best in the business, but in this instance they failed us, so we in turn failed you. We'll do everything we can to make sure that something as simple as a load balancer (or firewall or switch or any other network equipment) going bad does not cause two hours of downtime.

Unfortunately ValleyWag never contacted us for the real facts.

FWIW, we have one site administrator on duty at any given time. Their main responsibility is to monitor and review stories the digg algo/backend has flagged as pornography or SPAM. With 20M+ monthly unique visitors and tremendous traffic implications, gaming Digg is something that is attempted regularly.

So, as we have since the beginning, we'll continue to build tools and maintain staff that detect and remove spam/spammers - but most importantly, we rely upon you, the Digg community, to Digg your favorite stories and bury the ones you don't like.

Could it be that Rose's reality-distortion field is fading? Digg users normally swarm to defend their hero Rose. But his bloom may have faded. "I think we're the ones getting gamed," writes one user in response to Rose's comment. "Could you tell us anything about what criteria the human editors are using to determine whether something is actually spam or not?" asks another. Rose has not yet answered them.

Valleywag commenters have raised another issue: Digg shows which users have voted a story up, but not those who have voted it down, or "buried" the story, in Digg parlance. Conspiracy theories abound about "bury brigades" — but it's equally plausible that Digg's moderators may be abusing their powers to bury a story. Without information on who's burying what, it's impossible for outsiders to know. No surprise that Digg is not forthcoming on this point: If a Digg staffer's vote carries more weight than any numbers of users, then it's hard for Digg's users to believe their votes matter.

Until Rose actually responds to Valleywag's reporting and explains why he describes the position of moderator one way to his users and another way to people he tries to hire for the job, I propose that Digg's homepage carry this disclaimer:

"Warning: The Content in this Website May be Undemocratic."

I'm not involved with Norbum, I don't know what it is, and I would never make fun of homeless people.

• Perez posts the Liza Minelli video on his normal YouTube account.
• YouTube removes the video after a copyright holder complains. YouTube suspends his account.
• Perez posts a different video under a new account protesting YouTube's deletion of Liza and his account:

  I'm going to try not to get angry, or upset or raise my voice because thankfully I've already done enough of that without the camera rolling. My YouTube account was suspended. I've emailed YouTube, but I've yet to hear from any person there. I've just got an automated email from them.

  Apparently, the Liza Minnelli video that I posted on Monday was in violation of someone's copyright which is really confusing to me because the person who took the Liza Minnelli is a reader of my website gave me permission to use the clip and I still have mutliple emails from that person sending me the video and giving me permission to use it.

  The only thing I can think of is someone at Liza Minnelli's record company was upset that this video showing her being drunk or on drugs allegedly is out there and they wanted to get it removed from YouTube. Well, as a result my account was suspended.

• His protest video gets removed along with his second YouTube account.
• 
  
• Hilton writes bitchy post complaining about YouTube and censorship.

This is not the video that got Perez banned, but it is footage from the same event, found on YouTube.

Rackspace is falling apart again. To my understanding, the whole infrastructure has failed and they now have emergency generators and chillers for the past two or three weeks in the parking lot. This must be vary bad for the remaining customers to go through this again and again, not to mention that Rackspace is not a true redundancy A-B side as they advertise to the public. This company is a bad investment!

(Photo by kylemac)

The most likely explanation: Facebook's $15 billion valuation has sparked a round of fear and greed inside the company. Early employees, themselves large shareholders, are agitating to have Zuckerberg let them take money off the table and sell some of their shares. Exploiting the rumor mill is a way for them to gain leverage with Zuckerberg, whose 27 percent stake in the company is worth $4 billion.

Indeed, one variation of the rumor I'd heard said CTO Adam D'Angelo, cofounder Dustin Moskowitz, and vice president Matt Cohler — Zuckerberg's 20something inner circle — selling shares alongside Zuckerberg, bringing the insider-sale total to $100 million. Also not true. But telling in its detail. If Zuckerberg's braintrust is seen to be selling, then others eager to cash out can argue they should, too.

So it seems I've been played by overeager Facebookers. Patience, young ones. Your turn will come soon enough. Facebook's employee rolls are growing so fast that it will soon cross the 500-employee mark — a milestone that, by next year, should force it to start filing financial reports like a public company. At that point, not going for an IPO would be foolish. At some point, Facebook's investors will demand an IPO. And then everyone will be able to sell.

This isn't the first rumor I got wrong. It won't be the last. All I can promise is that when I hear something, you'll hear about it. Isn't that the point of running a gossip rag?

As the sole reviewer puts it:

This is a rather embarrassing electronic version of Time Magazine. There are NO pictures, no charts, no illustrations. Instead whenever you run into an article that has these in any decent amount, they've inserted an entry telling you to go get a PDF or print version. The salvation here is that their MOBILE web site at least has some images (even if impossibly small) and seems better formatted and organized. It looks and feels like some cheap RSS reader collected this rather than being an electronic version of the magazine. To fix it they should include all major article pictures, along with a full-screen copy of the cover. Time without pictures, is like the Braille-edition of Playboy. No wonder it is just $1.49 a month.

Kindle supporters may be willing to overlook this flaw, but Amazon cannot afford to. Amazon is depending on subscription revenues derived mostly from newspapers, magazines, and blogs to subsidize its free Internet connectivity. If image-rich content, including most magazines, fail to catch on, it could be a serious blow to Amazon's plans to make Kindle profitable.

Of course, all Kindle subscription content comes with a free 14-day trial, so we may soon see the text-heavy Times falling next week as well, since the free Web version is also accessible from the device. (The Journal, whose website still charges for now, may hold out longer.) Can books, a one-time purchase, keep Kindle lit? Jeff Bezos must hope so. The modern day Charles Dickens has yet to make an appearance.

At approximately 12:30 p.m. PT today, local law enforcement authorities here determined that a suspicious package delivered to eBay's mailroom on the Hamilton Avenue campus was determined to be harmless. Beginning at approximately 8:55 a.m. today, more than 200 employees had been evacuated from one of the buildings on the eBay campus. The affected areas of campus have since been reopened. As before, our eBay, PayPal and Skype services remain unaffected.

MVA- a man driving a ford truck ran a stop sign and went into a parking lot hitting a power transformer. Prior to our arrival the Southlake FD was on scene. They had made contact with the PT and found that he had low blood sugar. When we arrived we cleared the seen [sic] of all personell [sic] because of the possibility that the transformers may still have power to them. The PT was still in the truck. He was conscious and talking. Once the power company arrived and informed use [sic] that the power was off. We removed the pt to a back board and then to the cot. he was treated in the Mobile Intensive Care Unit and transported to BRMCG by M561 with consent. Management informed IC that a clean up company was contacted to respond to clean the mineral oil spill from the transformer. The scene was released back to management and electric company on scene.

Dear [redacted],

It has been a long day and hard day here at Rackspace. We know it's been a long day for you. We are deeply sorry for the events that have taken place at our Dallas/Fort Worth data center. Your satisfaction is what every Racker works towards every day, especially today.

To those affected by the outage, I apologize. We all apologize. We understand the frustration and uncertainty you have gone through. We take full responsibility for what happened and we will work with you to reach a remedy that satisfies you.

We have made the latest status update to the myrackspace.com customer portal. Please continue to visit it regularly for our most recent updates.

As always, your Account Manager and Support Team are available to help in any way. Likewise, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or needs.

Sincerely,

Lanham Napier
CEO
Rackspace