Perhaps in a sign of how the plague of social media has numbed us all to the value of legitimate human connections, the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked the verb “unfriend,” or “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook,” as its 2009 Word of the Year.

At the very least, it’s a testament to the ubiquity of Facebook, which now has well over 300 million members around the world.

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Painting the Golden Gate Bridge yellow might cause less fuss than trying to install a wind farm off Cape Cod’s historic coast.

But when you’re trying to build where the wind is strongest or the sun is brightest, you never know what obstacles you may run into.

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It’s the most expensive single thing ever built (£92bn and counting), the quickest manned vehicle in existence (17,300mph) and the staging point for future Moon and Mars missions. But when computers on board the International Space Station go down, the astronauts living there do the same as any office drone in Slough–they call IT. We were lucky enough to meet Tyson Tucker and Joey Crawford, the NASA flight controllers responsible for maintaining uptime in mankind’s first permanent space colony.

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During a visit to Hollywood last week, I wanted to talk to people who knew a thing or two about the film industry’s burgeoning meltdown. One of the people I sought out was Eric Garland, CEO and co-founder of Big Champagne.

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John Lilly wants it both ways.

Working at Mozilla Corporation since 2005 and as chief executive since early 2008, he helped oversee a remarkable achievement. Mozilla has built the Firefox browser from a largely unsuccessful remnant of the Netscape era of the 1990s into the browser that nearly a quarter of people on the Web use. Now the challenges are different.

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The six largest Hollywood film studios are apparently dissatisfied with the way their trade group has waged war on illegal file sharing. CNET News has learned that at least three leaders of its antipiracy operations have been fired.

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The more time I spend with my Zune HD, the more I like it. Sound quality aside–and I know opinions differ dramatically here, but I’m stuck with my ears and my preferences–there are a bunch of features that make Apple’s (AAPL) products seem like they’ve fallen behind the curve. Here are five things in particular that I miss when I use my iPhone or one of my iPods:

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Three weeks ago, I got a call on a friend’s iPhone while in the middle of a desert; cell phone coverage had come to Burning Man. By contrast, several calls I made last night to my parents from my San Francisco apartment were dropped and a subsequent connection became garbled.

That happens daily when I try to converse on my first-generation iPhone in my apartment and in certain other neighborhoods. I’ve come to anticipate that if I can even make a call it’s likely to be short-lived or poor quality.

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Few could imagine a more chilling tale of depravity than the story that has emerged over the last few days concerning the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard.

While her alleged kidnapper, Phillip Garrido, has now been revealed to have penned a disturbing blog, some commenters on Boing Boing have uncovered visuals from Google Street View that they believe show him in pursuit of a Google (GOOG) car.

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You might think that starting a brand-new, high-quality, full-glossy magazine in one of the worst publishing environments in years would be a suicidal business idea. After all, take a look at just about any magazine you can think of, and, thanks to the veritable collapse of advertising, odds are it’s about as thin as can be.

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Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that some New York coffee shops were pulling the plug on customers that park themselves at tables, open their laptops, and hang out for hours, buying perhaps only a single latte as their cafe rental fee.

While independent coffee shops that are struggling to make ends meet may see the need to flush out the low-revenue laptop users, the major chains are not so strapped.

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Gentlemen of Philadelphia, don’t let this great girl pass you by.

No, those aren’t my words. Well, not the last seven. These are the words of Britney, who is advertising in the new adult services section on Craigslist.

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A security hole in Internet Explorer that opened the browser to hackers since early July was caused by a single typo in Microsoft’s (MSFT) code.

An errant ampersand (“&”) took the blame for the exploit, admitted Microsoft in a blog published Tuesday at its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Web site.

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I’m not sure “spell check this” has the same ring as “I’ll be back,” but I have enjoyed the series of promo videos for Office 2010 that try to cast the software as the plot of an action movie.

The latest installment shows the grave of Clippy, the oft-mocked help tool that has been absent from recent versions of the productivity software.

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