Not a study, but an interesting data point: http://hostjury.com/blog/view/195/the-great-zero-challenge-remains-unaccepted.

Agreed. I think the shift has occurred because of increasing corporate interest in open source. BSD is seen as more corporate-friendly than GPL, when in fact it should be the other way around--BSD allows your competitors to reap the fruit of your labor without giving you anything in return. Start-ups, however, are lured by the idea of being able to close-source everything once their product becomes a smash hit, while established companies face genuine legal issues preventing them from linking GPL'ed code with closed-source code from vendors.

So, start-ups really need to ditch the bait-and-switch fantasy that's driving them towards the BSD. Back in the real world, most such start-ups will fail long before they ever create a popular enough product to pull this trick, and it will partially be due to the fact that they brilliantly gave away all their work to their closed-source competitors for absolutely nothing in return.

Moffet Field is a 10 minute drive to Google HQ; SJC is a whopping 7 minutes more. More importantly, however, I guess they get to skip the airport security lines, etc. Flying from Moffet is all about convenience and (conspicuously) living it large. What they did to get access to Moffet is a bit of a mystery, but it probably involved deals such as this.

Actually, there is a product like this for retailers which basically involves a robot modeling clothes. An interesting idea that I hope catches on.

Why hire a model, photographer, etc., every time you change product lines, when you can just mass-produce images on a computer? I'd guess that the motivation here is more cost cutting than aesthetics. Still sounds like a terrible idea, but I'm sure we'll be seeing more of this in the near future.

Still seems like specious logic, since the extra sale generated by the theft is (arguably) cancelled by the sale lost to the person who bought the stolen phone instead. True, the who bought the stolen phone might have bought a used phone instead, but that decreases the number of used phones for sale, which is also good for the carriers. So I doubt the carriers are conspiring to not brick stolen phones. Also, Australian carriers are presumably just as greedy as American carriers, which puts another hole in the argument.

While you were out whining about the bankers, this happened. Thanks.

Dammit, is nobody else interested in the giant antenna array?

If you look at 4439'17.17" N 9334'24.30" E in Google Earth, at the historical image from 6/16/2009, you can see the things in action! Hard to tell whether they're autonomous, but they do seem to be laying down a grid of square tracks, with each square's side lengths almost exactly equal to 200 m. On the same date, at 4446'55.21" N 9333'57.41" E you can see work vehicles on the tracks running NE-SW. In contrast to the NW-SE tracks, these seem to be composed of something actually laid on the ground. This stuff looks like it actually could be metallic, judging from the many evident specular reflections off the material. Here we see the same 200x200 m squares, though the NW-SE lines composing this grid are themselves composed of repeated, faint groups of 24 dots arranged in 4x6 grids. In this picture, the stuff actually looks a lot like aluminum foil. Also, the thing is pointed right at the Mongolian border, which is about 7 miles away at closest approach. Maybe the NE-SW grid was a dry run for laying the NW-SE grid?

It seems to me easier to stack 3000 sheets of lab meat than it is to first fold 3000 sheets of lab meat 12 times, then glue together the resulting 3000 hamburger-thick columns of meat into a patty of normal thickness and diameter... or alternatively, to grow a 100 sq. foot sheet and carefully fold it over 12 times to create a single hamburger.

From the wikipedia article on white privilege:

Other research shows that there is a correlation between a person's name and his or her likelihood of receiving a call back for a job interview. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan found in field experiment in Boston and Chicago that people with "white-sounding" names are 50% more likely to receive a call back than people with "black-sounding" names, despite equal résumé quality between the two racial groups.[31]

and

Black and Latino college graduates are less likely than white graduates to end up in a management position even when other factors such as age, experience, and academic records are similar. [33][34][35]

(emphasis mine).

Also, for all you Spanish-speaking geeks reading this, help now by translating Tor documentation.

Subject says it all. Even among CS grads, I'd bet that only small minority have ever heard of Tor. What's worse is that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing--I'd hate to go to Nuevo Laredo Online and spam it with links to Tor, only to have someone download it and get beheaded because they used it incorrectly. So, there needs to be a push to educate the bloggers about the basics, benefits, and pitfalls of anonymizing tools. This means that we nerds actually have the power to help Mexicans defeat the cartels. How cool is that?

Learn an ML (OCaml, F#, etc.) or Haskell (GHC) variant. Python is nice, but it's just another passable imperative language at the end of the day. Learning a modern functional language will really challenge you and probably change the way to think about programming. To whet your appetite, first look up the wikipedia articles on type inference, currying, pattern matching, parametric polymorphism, lazy evaluation, and my personal favorite, pointless programming.

I've heard Scala is also gaining popularity, but it's really just baby ML running on the JVM. Oh, and bonus: OCaml and GHC compile to native code. I can usually get performance nearly at C++ levels in OCaml with prudent optimization.

Oh, this is rich. I think they mean, their head of MARKETING stepped down as a blatant MARKETING PLOY to sell more iPhones after his wildly successful STEALTH MARKETING campaign involving fake engineers accidentally-on-purpose forgetting their MARKETING iPhones in MARKETING bars. Well done, sir, well done.