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I’ve seen many mentions of the fact that there were over a million downloads of Suze Orman’s new book Women & Money while it was available free of charge at oprah.com. What I haven’t seen is how that affected sales of the book. Wired editor Chris Anderson has posted a graph showing that since it was available from Oprah’s Web site, it has topped the charts at Amazon.com. Some of that is attributable to the fact that Orman had just gotten the exposure of being featured on Oprah, but the free download certainly didn’t hurt her sales. ...

A federal judge in California has ordered that WikiLeaks be taken offline at the behest of a Swiss bank whose practices in support of white collar crime were leaked. Because WikiLeaks’ servers are located all of the world, the injunction was imposed on their DNS provider. The site is still up but it is now only reachable via its IP address – 88.80.13.160. It seems to me that there are lots of first amendment issues in play here. ...

The horrible animal abuse video that I linked to has resulted in the largest beef recall in US history. If you read Fast Food Nation, you won’t be surprised to learn that a large portion of the recalled meat was sold to the government for use in school cafeterias. That’s the most common destination for the worst meat produced in America.

Turns out the FEMA trailer issued to homeless families after Hurricane Katrina really are toxic.

Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser says that in the future, mobile phone penetration will approach 200% because nobody will be able to find one device that does everything they need it to. I think he’s completely wrong about the reasons, but I do think many people have multiple mobile phones in their future. Most people don’t use any of the features of their mobile phones beyond voice calling, and in the meantime phones are gaining lots of new capabilities. I don’t know anyone who carries multiple mobile phones right now, even in an age where phones are still pretty limited. ...

FP Passport links to an project by Brazilian artist Icaro Doria in which he uses flags as infographics simply by applying a legend to the colors. The United States flag made me chuckle, but some of the African flags hit me right in the gut, the way few other infographics have. If you’re a designer of any kind, don’t skip this link.

Here’s the leader of the free world on attending the summer Olympics this year in Beijing: I’m going to the Olympics. I view the Olympics as a sporting event.[…] There’s a lot of issues that I suspect people are gonna, you know, opine, about during the Olympics. I mean, you got the Dali Lama crowd. You’ve got global warming folks. You’ve got, you know, Darfur and… I am not gonna you know, go and use the Olympics as an opportunity to express my opinions to the Chinese people in a public way ‘cause I do it all the time with the president. ...

Today’s experiment was to get Ubuntu Linux running in a virtual machine on my Mac. It gave me the opportunity to play with two things – Ubuntu Linux and VirtualBox, an open source alternative to VMware and Parallels. First step: download VirtualBox and Ubuntu. Second step: wait four hours. Like all the virtualization tools for the Mac, VirtualBox is an installable package, not just an application you drag to your Applications folder. (It has to install a kernel extension.) Installation is easy, as is creating your virtual machine. You name the VM, indicate which OS you’re going to install on it, and then assign it some memory and a virtual disk image. It supports expandable disk images, so you can start out small and grow the image as needed. ...

Here’s what the bettors on the InTrade prediction market think of Hillary Clinton’s chances to be the Democratic nominee over the past couple of weeks:

Today I read Dr. Z’s annual ratings of football broadcasters and realized that I don’t really have a strong opinion of any of them in particular and that I have a mild distaste for all of them. Fortunately, I’ve come up with a method of watching football that eliminates the announcers almost entirely. The key is not starting to watch the game at game time. Instead I let about 20 or 30 minutes of the games buffer up on the Tivo, and then I start from the beginning, watching the plays at regular speed and fast forwarding on the slowest speed between plays. It’s quick, and even better, silent. I try to stop in time to see the formation before each play. If I missed something, I just watch the play over and over until I figure it out. ...