Buzz Out Loud 851: Boxcar Jack is looking for you at HoboBook.com!

Social networking finally reaches its most underserved niche: the hobos. Look for Tom to officially join the Hobo Nation any day now. In other news of the day, Caroline McCarthy joins us for a rollicking discussion of The Washington Post's war on spam, and Molly most likely gets herself fired from CBS and kicked off TWiT in one fell swoop. So, learn to love Caroline. She might be sticking around.

Episode 851

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 makes date with U.S.: Black Friday for $799.99
http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/12/sony-ericsson-xperia-x1-makes-date-with-us-black-friday-for-79/

Qualcomm floats 'PC alternative' 3G device
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10805
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122646599469620261.html

Microsoft close to blowing another $1 billion on Verizon search And mobile deal
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/microsoft-close-to-blowing-another-1-billion-on-verizon-search-and-mobile-deal
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10094749-94.html

'Washington Post' blog shuts down 75% of online spam
http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/11/12/1253230.shtml

More Google catch-up: Gmail Adds video IM
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/more-google-catch-up-gmail-adds-video-im-goog-
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10093175-2.html

Google meets the CDC: Flu tracking by search trends
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081111-google-meets-the-cdc-flu-tracking-by-search-trends.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10094798-71.html

First Trek film footage unveiled
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7722407.stm

Contact with extraterrestrial life by 2025?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10094740-52.html

Identifying people by odor as effective as fingerprinting
http://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/11/2223205

Classmates.com user sues; schoolmates weren’t really looking for him
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2008/11/classmates

Voice mail
Shalin loves space
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/science/f_analyzer.html

Karen hates space

Ken: a Netbook in the wild?

E-mail
Hi JaMoTo,

I am a little peeved today. Tuesday nights are a great night for TV so I decided to skip some shows and watch them online. But nooooo, CBS decided pull the rug out from under the viewing public and not post any full episodes of “The Mentalist” on their site. So I decided to go to Hulu and watch “Law & Order SVU.” Again another network decided to pull the full episodes. I thought this was their idea. Fox and NBC, didn’t they start Hulu? I’m convinced only ABC and to some degree Fox wants people to see their shows. I guess I could buy episodes on iTunes or Amazon. I just wish there was some consistency. Thanks, I needed to vent. Love the show!

Tina in Omaha.

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Hey Super Cool Buzz Crew,

The reason for the gimmicky gift card is profit. The speaker gift card at BestBuy can only be acquired in $50 intervals. Studies have shown that people spend between 15 and 25% more than the gift card is worth when they take it redeem it at the store. Offering a cool, (any of my 6 kids would love a speaker the size of a credit card) yet gimmicky item starting at $50 may encourage the gift card buyer to increase the gift from $30 or $40 to get the gimmick will, in the end be more money at the store. This is because the extra money spent with a gift card is not a hard dollar amount, it is a percentage of the card value.

BTW, I won a Zune through the PepsiStuff promotion and have subscribed to your podcast, along with 4 others from CNET. I love the way the Zune software deletes my listened to podcasts off of the device and replaces it with fresh ones automatically. Do iPods do that ? I have never used one, I'm kind of against apple as I explain here:
http://tsabonis.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!C4372C2C55C1E241!142.entry

Always, love the show.

Anthony

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I was very surprise to here your report about the windows 7 article on infoworld.com . Not surprise that you reported it but that the article was so negitive and contridictory to everything that I have heard mainly TWIT podcast episode 167. So I made my way to the article in questioned and realised a “developer” from this website was band from the MIcrosoft pdc conference. So I start to question how they got the windows 7 pre-beta build…maybe bitorrent? Finally there is another thing I realised…who runs bench marks on a pre beta version of software that is ment for develpers? There is nothing obligating you from making a comment about this on your show. I was just informing you, since you guys usually do a good job of reporting good solid tech news. I know you guys frequent TWIT but i put a link below anyway. I was going to link other articles but I think TWIT is respectable enough.

http://twit.tv/167
Mark