My basic understand of it is: for when a new auto manufacturer comes around, they don't have to setup a dealership themselves in every city across the country, instead they can just ship their cars to all the existing dealerships. This is a service provided by the dealership to the automaker to help the automaker grow when it is young. Then, to prevent the automaker from cutting off all their shipments to dealerships when they are big enough to setup their own stores, laws were put into place to prevent automakers from setting up their own stores.

Looks like they are going to be keeping their open source products open (ClamAV, Snort, and others).
http://blog.sourcefire.com/Post/2013/07/23/1374581400-cisco--sourcefire--now-bigger-stronger-faster/

Also, it looks like Snort is dual-license: http://www.snort.org/snort/license

It seems like at least a few states us a thing called the "Average Daily Attendance" to track how many kids are actually going to school. Then this is the number that is actually used when allocating funding to the school. Here's a story about how much 1 student being chronically absent costs the school (87 days missed, school lost $2464).

This isn't all the funding a school gets, but it is part of it.

I've been doing a lot of car research recently (shopping for a new car), and I've been reading a ton of different reviews from consumers and professionals.

A lot of people don't like the Ford SYNC stuff as it is just too complicated for them. They want a radio and climate controls in their center stack, not all that other crap that some auto makers are pushing. GM with their Buick brand is having the same issue, their older customers are annoyed with a lot of the center-stack tech that is being added, as they don't understand it or want it.

My other issue is how relevant all these features will be in 10-15 years. Will Pandora still be around? How about BlueTooth? Will iPod support even matter in 10 years? My current car is pushing 17 years old, I'm pretty sure it has outlasted most tech that could have been put into it at the time.

It is much easier for a prosecutor to throw a bunch of charges at someone and hope for some them to stick. The US's double-jeopardy prevents a defendant to be tried for the same crime twice. Where exactly the line is for what is considered double-jeopardy isn't always clear, so the prosecutor has a better chance of getting a conviction if they change someone with all possible crimes they are guilty of from the start.

If you want top stop the state from throwing a bunch of changes at someone, double-jeopardy laws need to be changed. But changing those laws so neither side of the law can easily abuse them is a difficult thing to do.

As others have said, if a lot of the charges were indeed bogus, a defense attorney should have been able to get them thrown out.

You are correct. But they wanted to get Dart out to the world very early so that they could start getting feedback from the community. They actually listen to the community quite a bit and have taken a number of patches and features from external committers as well.

Their goal was to show that they were going to be open about the design of the language, but I think they ended up presenting that wrongly when the language launched, so they caught a lot of flack.

I've been following Dart on and off since it's announcement. I'm still a little skeptical of the language, but I'm a fan of what they want to do. Here are their basic goals:

• Create a class based (OOP) language for doing browser heavy apps (like GMail).
• Allow it to inter-op with today's browsers (hence compiling to Javascript)
• Create a DartVM so the code can run faster than there javascript counter-parts. This also allows for server-side, but this much lower on their priorities.
• Make the language easy for Java/C++/C# developers to learn.
• Only work with "the modern web". meaning IE9 and higher.

There is a lot more to it than this, but it's sort of a beginning. The language still hasn't hit 1.0, so no one is seriously using it (as the language itself was seeing large changes up until recently). Google has not talked about anyone outside of the Dart team itself that is using Dart within Google (they are doing it, it's just not being talked about yet).

Since 1.0 is expected this summer, you probably won't see many people using it until that milestone is hit. Once 1.0 is hit, people will be more willing to create real products with it, so you can expect to see more about Dart after that. As well, once the DartVM makes its way into Chrome (which will happen sometime after 1.0), you'll probably see a lot of press about the first Google App that is written in Dart.

It's still early in Dart's life. The only people really seriously using it are people that like learning new languages. Companies and most developers won't touch an in-progress programming language out of fear that syntax and behavior changes will screw them up.

Scientist also like to be able to continue doing their research, so they make at least some money. Do you expect these scientists work for free. How do you expect them to pay for equipment and other resources needed to do their work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5667391

In the above HN comment, basically it explains the linode hack, saying they got access to linodes registrar and were going to use it to steal passwords from linode customers. But they ended up finding the Coldfusion hole made it possible to break directly into linode, so they used that instead.

Some details that people have been able to find so far.

1) The guy claimed to have hacked ColdFusion using some 0-day exploit. He could have just been going off this recent Adobe bulletin. But this bulletin was before the Linode announcement, so who knows. http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb13-10.html

This hotfix resolves a vulnerability that could be exploited to impersonate an authenticated user (CVE-2013-1387).
This hotfix resolves a vulnerability that could be exploited by an unauthorized user to gain access to the ColdFusion administrator console (CVE-2013-1388).

2) One of the files in the directory list that has a unique name is actually accessible on linode.com: http://www.linode.com/y_key_57284cb2de704e02.html

3) Looks like seclists (nmap people) were targeted by this hack: http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2013/q2/3

4) It is not clear if credit cards were compromised or not. While this "ryan" guy claims they were, we won't know unless the list is published or Linode admits to it.

It is good to point out the Austin has Grande Communications, which actually has pretty good service for the price. The problem is they have limited coverage.

Sure it's fun to knock Google for shutting down services, but I believe most (if not all) of their shutdowns have always been free services they provide to consumers. I'm not aware of any paid Google service that has been shutdown. Though, Google has been known to drastically increase the cost of their services where it drives people away (mapping and AppEngine are 2 more recent examples, though they lowered the price of maps after a lot of people left).

Google is trying to find services to hook people with, so they fund a lot of startup type projects to see what will hook people. When those projects don't produce the results they want, they just shut them down. But from what I've seen, those have mainly been free services.

Now, taking away open standard support, like CalDAV from calendar, is a much more troublesome issue.

Google Reader was free for 8 years. It has definitely by my favorite RSS software out there. We have 4 months to get our data out of reader (they give it to us in an easy to process JSON file).

A lot of people saw the writing on the wall about Reader. No blog posts from them in 1.5 years. Removing functionality so it didn't compete with Google+. Increased aggressiveness in Google Spring Cleaning. This day was coming, it was just a matter of when.

While it sucks that I now have to find a Google Reader replacement, giving me 4 months to find that alternative is nice. It's like iGoogle, but they gave people 16 months to find an alternative there.

It'll require some client hacking as well. All server communication is via HTTPS. MITM (man-in-the-middle) does not work against it as the simcity client may have checks to look for certain certificates built into the client itself. So you'd probably need to hack the client to allow for other certificates to be accepted during the SSL negotiation.

(I've been digging into this some, but sadly I have a day-job that I actually have to do)