If you read the settlement carefully, it says that 1/3 of the settlement goes to the lawyers. Our legal system is such a fucking scam.

Over the past decade I've been a member of the class in about 10 class action lawsuits. The majority of the time I don't even bother to collect - filling out the paperwork isn't worth it to get a 5 dollar coupon. I guess I've sure made a lot of lawyers rich, though.

My smartphone already does this - it's called google translate, and was a huge boon while I was overseas last month.

Except often times in technology and business, timing is everything. Back in 1995 there was no way the "browser is the OS" model could work, for lots of reasons, the most obvious being that almost all consumers were on dialup. Now it's the norm to have always-on broadband.

Paypal has owned the x.com domain since before they were paypal (check wikipedia), so while x.com probably wasn't super cheap back in 1999, it's not like they just purchased it.

This weekend I moved, and I always have a hard time throwing out old stuff. You know, an old palm pilot I haven't used in years, CRT monitors, close I don't wear anymore (or never really wore much in the first place), etc. I just feel guilty dumping stuff when there's nothing really wrong with it.

Then I though about how we spent tens of billions on the space station, only to throw it away a couple of years after it was finished, so subsequently I felt fine about throwing 3/4 of my closet in the dumpster.

If you look at a lot of the astroturfing comments on the openinternet site, you'll see how ridiculously ignorant most of them are. A huge percentage of them are of the form "keep the government from taking over the internet!", which makes about as much sense as "keep your government hands off my Medicare!"

The Internet was FOUNDED by the US government, with most of the vital underlying technologies coming from ARPANET and NSFNET (though I should give credit to those European governments responsible for funding CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP and the web). This nonsense about how the wonders of the free market and private enterprise created the Internet is a willful and gross rewriting of history.

By saying "or so" I'm assuming that 0 is included in this estimate? Seriously, do you have any reference at all for this number? How the hell was this modded interesting?

Why, actually, yes. But in truth, I could care less.

Mod parent up. If you're going to commit a felony that will result in significant jail time, at least rob a bank or a high end jewelery store. Instead they steal an easily tracked, serial-numbered product with a ridiculously low fence-to-retail value. Furthermore, their crime is newsworthy enough ("Look at those shiny macbooks disappear!") that they manage to get coverage on major websites and news outlets.

Finally, they incur the wrath of apple fanboys everywhere now determined to track them down: "Did you see how they handled those MacBooks! They might even have scratched the case!!!"

They're pretty much unrelated. Savana doesn't aim to provide all of the functionality of git. What it DOES do is make it really easy to work "the right way" with SVN, with "the right way" defined as:

1. Every time I'm going to code a new feature/bug fix, I do it in a private branch.
2. I checkin normally on this branch.
3. When I'm ready to promote my changes, I first sync down any more recent changes from the trunk.
4. Optionally, I can have someone else look at my branch to do a code read.
5. I promote (merge my changes back to trunk) and drop my private branch.

It's currently possible to work like this now with subversion, but it's pretty ugly and a pain requiring long commands, and developers generally don't like it because it is such a pain to set up the private branches and merge them, so they end up just doing everything in trunk. Savana is essentially just syntactic sugar on top of (potentially multiple) underlying uglier svn commands. Savana aims to make it easy to set up and merge private branches, lowering developer resistance to using them.

Friends of mine have open-sourced savana, http://savana.codehaus.org/ a thin layer on top of Subversion that makes it easy to do all work in private branches before promoting to the trunk. A common workflow is:

sav createuserbranch mybranch --calls svn copy under the covers to create user branch named mybranch ... normal checkins using svn commit go to YOUR private branch ... when you are ready to promote your changes back to the trunk:
sav sync -- pulls in any changes made to trunk since your private branch was created so you can test locally
sav promote -- merges your changes back into the trunk

The thing I like about this thin "workspace managing" layer on top of Subversion is that for the most part you can take advantage of existing tool support for subversion (like integrated IntelliJ Idea and Eclipse support), as all of the savana commands just call svn commands under the covers.

This is somewhat off-topic, but I found the details of the article very interesting. Of 299 US government loans to Micronesians, over 200 were not paid up!! That makes subprime loans look like gold. Basically, the Micronesians are treating these as gifts, not loans. And why not - it's obvious the lender (that would be you, the American taxpayer) doesn't have any real recourse to collect. It's not like the Micronesians have anything to fear from US credit bureaus, who can't even track them adequately.

In other words, the US government tries to pretend these are loans by putting SSNs on the accounts, which ends up screwing over some hapless US citizen, when they should just treat them as gifts, because in reality it looks like they are.

Ugg, how is it that the parent is modded down but the GP is modded insightful? The GP is basically just saying "well, that doesn't feel like enough to me", while the parent points out accurately that it very easy to determine what the probability is that the results are due to chance. Since the article states that the researchers obtained "significantly" more cigarettes, I'm assuming that this is at least based on the common level of 5%. You can have a small sample size that is highly statistically significant if the skew is large enough. Unfortunately, even on slashdot, most people don't understand statistics.

That said, hypothesis testing just determines the probability that the results are NOT due to chance. Thus, it's totally possible that the results are due to something different that what the researchers propose - maybe they were just friendlier when asking from the right side.

Actually, the big news to me that seems to be somewhat lost on the slashdot crowd is how Apple is really gunning for the business market that RIM has previously owned. Remote wipe, hardware encryption, and Exchange support in Snow Leopard are HUGE for businesses. I think that lots of businesses (or at least many of the employees of those businesses) would have preferred to use iPhones and Macs in the past, but the lack of those features were deal breakers from the IT department perspective. Now there seems to be much less of a reason for IT depts. to be against Apple products.

I bought one of the original iPhones when it came out, and I would stay it is still by far the best consumer electronics device I've owned. A big reason I like it so much is that for the past two years I've been able to get the vast majority of useful new features for free due to the OS updates. I think of all the features that I actually USE on a regular basis that didn't exist when I first bought the phone, like the music store, the app store, cell triangulation, and all the functionality provided by the apps, and I'd say this is the first phone I've owned that didn't start to feel outdated right after I bought it.

In fact, I've never even really felt that compelled to upgrade because, for me, the majority of the functionality in the new phones is in the OS vs. the hardware.