Blog Posts by Tecca

This time social media is getting people hired, instead of fired

After Curt Schilling's game company, 38 Studios, failed to make a payment on its business loan to Rhode Island on May 1, today's announcement that the entire 350+ person staff had been let go didn't come as much of a surprise. What has the industry talking today is how Twitter is being used to quickly snap up the suddenly available talent from the studio.

Social media sites from Facebook to LinkedIn have been instrumental in helping people land jobs, but Twitter is now stepping up with its real time stream to give job seekers and job providers quicker access to each other. Ex-employees are tweeting out links to their resumes while game studios looking to beef up their ranks are tweeting contact information as well as open positions. The hashtag #38jobs is being used in every tweet to easily follow all the Twitter activity and is currently trending on the official site.

Not only jobs are being exchanged, but support, too. "I'm never let down by the massive family that we call the

Ironically, the mayor did more to further his own recall than any website ever could

When a political rival sets up a website demanding your recall as mayor, what do you do? Well, if you're Felix Roque, the 55-year-old mayor of West New York, New Jersey, you have your son Joseph hack the recall site and then threaten the creator. That, at least, is what U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman is alleging today following the arrest of both the mayor and his son.

In February of 2012, one of Roque's fellow Hudson County government officials registered and began running recallroque.com, a site calling for the ousting of Roque via recall election. Shortly after, it is alleged that the mayor's son attempted to learn the identity of the site's owner by emailing an address listed on the site, offering to meet up to offer some "very good leads." When that didn't work, Joseph Roque allegedly conducted Google searches for "hacking a Go Daddy site," "recallroque log-in," and "html hacking tutorial." Joseph Roque was able to gain control of the account, and on February 8, he cancelled the

If the bill passes, get ready to hand over your full name and home address

Anonymity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the United States was founded, in part, thanks to Thomas Paine's anonymously written, pro-revolution pamphlet Common Sense. On the other hand, 12-year-olds who post anonymously on the internet can be rather unpleasant and cause real problems by cyberbullying. Whether you think the good outweighs the bad, this news is troubling indeed: A far-reaching bill introduced in the New York State Senate could end the practice of posting online once and for all.

Sen. Thomas F. O'Mara / NY SenateIntroduced by New York State Sen. Thomas F. O'Mara (R—Big Flats), S6779 would require that any anonymous post online is subject to removal if the poster refuses to post — and verify — their legal name, their IP address, and their home address. From the (likely well intentioned) bill:

"A web site administrator upon request shall remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms

In Berkeley, California, you get preferential treatment if you know somebody

There's nothing worse than having your iPhone stolen — the idea of a complete stranger having full access to all your contacts and data is enough to make you sick, not to mention the expense of having to buy a replacement. Typically, though, authorities aren't able to do much to find a stolen phone beyond taking a report. But that's because we're not the son of a police chief. When someone stole the iPhone of Berkeley, California police chief Michael Meehan's son, a full manhunt was launched that cost taxpayers thousands.

Michael Meehan / City of BerkeleyOn January 11, 2012, an iPhone was stolen from the school locker of Meehan's son. Because the phone had tracking capabilities, an investigation was launched that involved up to ten officers, some from the city's drug task force. Four detectives were paid overtime as part of the search.

According to police department spokeswoman Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, "it is common for BPD officers to actively investigate an in-progress tracking signal from a stolen electronic device."

Thanks to Kinect for Windows, motion-controlled computing isn't confined to science fiction anymore. But not everyone who wants to navigate their computers à la Tom Cruise in Minority Report can afford Kinect's usual going price of $200 to $250. Enter the Leap: a $70 smartphone-size device that adds gesture control to your laptop or desktop computer. The downside? It's not exactly available yet.

The Leap works with any Mac or Windows computer — just plug it into a USB port, install the software, and calibrate it the first time you use it by waving your hand. Unlike the more expensive Kinect that can track the movements of your whole body, though, the Leap can only recognize hand gestures.

Leap Motion, the company manufacturing the device, claims it's "200 times more accurate than anything else on the market." You still have some waiting to do before you can see for yourselves whether the Leap is actually better than Kinect — the sensor won't be released until the end of the year or in

Israeli scientists transform skin cells into heart cells for the first time ever

There may come a time when doctors can patch up your damaged heart not with fancy futuristic materials, but with your own skin. A paper recently published in the European Heart Journal details the work of a team of Israeli scientists who took sample skin cells from two patients — aged 51 and 61 — with heart problems. For the first time ever, they were able to transform the skin cells into healthy, beating heart cells.

According to team leader, Lior Gepstein, the resulting cells were "equivalent to the stage of [the patient's] heart cells when he was just born." After forming heart tissue out of the erstwhile skin cells, the scientists cultivated it in a petri dish with real heart tissue.

The researchers found that after 24 to 48 hours, the man-made heart tissue merged with the real sample — the whole thing was even beating. They then implanted the hybrid tissue into healthy rats whose little rodent hearts accepted and formed connections with it.

While the results sound extremely

Films and TV shows from several studios are being manufactured to order, never go out of stock

You've heard of video on demand, now Amazon is offering DVD on demand. Through a new shop called Never Before on DVD, the online retailer is making more than 2,000 films and TV series from the likes of 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, Disney, and Warner Bros. available on DVD for the first time ever. Here's the twist: The DVDs aren't actually made until you order them.

Using a service called CreateSpace, Amazon manufactures the discs and packaging once an order is placed. No extra inventory of the films or shows is kept, so studios don't have to be concerned with unsold copies. This benefits customers as well, since studios don't have to base their decision to make certain titles available on actual demand. Most of the discs being offered through the service — like the Vanilla Ice masterwork Cool as Ice — are actually in too little demand to make manufacturing them en masse commercially unviable.

In addition to offering them on disc, Amazon is going to be adding many of the titles for

By replacing existing barcodes with his own, one SAP exec made off with $30,000 in goods

Was it compulsion, a desire to beat the system, or just pure greed? Authorities — and indeed, the public at large — are struggling to understand the "why" behind a complicated theft scheme where wealthy Silicon Valley executive Thomas Langenbach stands accused of stealing Lego sets from Target locations in Northern California.

Langenbach, a top executive with global software company SAP, is facing four felony counts of burglary after replacing the existing barcodes on Lego sets with new ones that would allow him to purchase the building blocks at a huge discount. According to Liz Wylie, a spokesperson for the Mountain View Police, Langenbach "sold 2,100 items in just over a year on eBay, and made $30,000. The motive was clearly money. Why does he want the money? I don't know. I can think of a million different scenarios." Langenbach clearly was not hurting for money — he lives in a $2 million San Carlos home.

According to authorities, Langenbach was printing his own barcodes — he was