I can't tell if you're being pedantic or stupid. I'm leaning toward pedantic asshole at the moment, as you are hyper-technically correct but not actually answering the question which anybody over the age of 5 understood was being asked.

Yes, CDs are "digital" and they are being sold "online." That's not what UnknowingFool was asking, of course. He is correct that this is the first time the Beatles' catalog will be offered online for downloading, legally.

Very easy. You sign up to buy their insurance on-line. They grab your useragent string when you make the purchase, and they stick that in their database of information about you, nice and associated with your customer number.

Then they run a query on claims made. They filter the result to show only claims made by people who bought insurance on-line. Then they average the claims amount by browser type.

Or, they do a random query to pick 10,000 people who bought their insurance on-line last year. Then they count number of claims by browser type.

Insurance is a game of statistics. Yes, some browsers lie in their user agent string. Yes, sometimes people use other people's browsers. But MOST browsers are what they say they are, MOST people use their own machine pretty regularly, and if the insurance company is really doing this (which I take no position on), then you can bet they have statistics to back up their belief that there's a difference in insurance risk, ON AVERAGE, between users of different browsers.

The insurance company couldn't care less if the correlation holds true for every single instance. They know that it doesn't, in fact. But if it holds true often enough, then they can use that data to offer some people a better price on the insurance, because they're statistically less likely to file a claim.

Exactly. I rather tire of seeing the self-proclaimed geek elite decrying these users as "stupid" and "ignorant." No, they just have different value systems then the uber-security-conscious. Lots of people in rural areas regularly leave their doors unlocked. Just because a hacker COULD get access to their account at a Starbucks doesn't mean that the odds of it happening at any particular Starbucks at any given time is terribly high.

Was it idiocy for the folks at this Starbucks to stay online on Facebook even after being warned by this hacker? Clearly from the warning he provided, he wasn't intending to do harm to them. You're a nice rural family sitting around the coffee table, and a nice man sticks his head in your door and says "just wanted to let you know, your door is unlocked." Do you expect the folks to get up and run around and lock every door in the house?

God, I'm old. This was 5 months after I graduated high school.

I know it's /., but please at least RTFS (read the f'ing SUMMARY), which explains that this is a NEW Facebook feature, which works DIFFERENTLY from the OLD Facebook feature. You've just described the OLD Facebook group feature. This one works differently.

Well, no. I'm FB friends with my younger brothers. The youngest is in high school, and has the sense of humor one expects to find in bright, 16 year old boys... rather juvenile. I'm not going to de-friend my brother. I work at helping to teach him what's appropriate and what's inappropriate, but of course that's not always successful. If he were to add me to some group because of some childish whim of his, that doesn't mean he's not my friend... just that he's exercised some bad judgment.

Do you immediately ditch all your friends the instant they do something against your wishes? If so, I doubt you have many left. Most of us have at least a few friends who on occasion act a bit like an asshole, but are our friends nevertheless.

The REAL problem here is Facebook failing to let its users have control over what other users do to an aspect of our account. I can un-tag myself from pictures. I can turn off the ability of others to tag me in photos. Why can't I turn off the ability of other users to tag me in (i.e., make me a "member" of) groups? I should have complete control over all aspects of where my FB identity is linked in FB.

Fair question. How do you know they're suffering? Have YOU spoken to them?

The green color for asteroids does NOT indicate that the orbit has been "confirmed." It indicates that the orbit never crosses or approaches the Earth's orbit. And the green color for the planets as well as some of the asteroids hardly causes real confusion in watching, as the planets have their orbits permanently displayed with circles.

I think you need to watch the video again, in 1080p resolution. It DOES show plenty of Jupiter trojans, but they don't stand out as much because not as many of those individual objects have been formally observed and catalogued (a requirement to be displayed in this particular video).

If you were reviewing this for publications, I hope you would read (and understand) the caption provided with it a bit more thoroughly, and watch the highest resolution version, before making your evaluation.

Yes, but.... as the (by far) oldest of a family of 7 kids (12 years between me and my closest sibling, 29 years between me and the youngest one), I have some experience in this area myself. The thing with your insight about the anxiety of the new parent being useless is that there are also a fair number of studies which show that birth order DOES make a difference in the personality of children. I think there is plenty of room to wonder whether the lessening anxiety you describe (like the old joke... first kid, the pacifier falls on the floor, you sterilize it before giving it back; 2nd kid, you rinse it off then stick it back in his mouth; 3rd kid's lucky if you wipe it off before you give it back) does have a significant impact in how the child develops.

Huh? An entirely voluntary, on-line program pays so little that nobody in their right mind would do it, and this is evidence about working wages in western countries?

Maybe its evidence that there are some really stupid people out there who volunteer to work in the "sweatshop" of their own house and have deluded themselves into thinking that they'll ever earn any real amount of money with the Mechanical Turk program. OR maybe this money is being earned by folks living in third world countries for whom making $0.60 an hour at home or in a cool computer room is a previously undreamed of luxury.

Seriously... if you can't find better-paying work than this as a JANITOR, then you truly are utterly unemployable and ought to consider yourself grateful to be able to find this kind of work.

ALL iPhone 4s come with a 30-day, no-questions-asked return policy for a full refund. Have for a long time. This is Apple's policy, not something required by U.S. consumer law. The antenna "issue" was discovered and widely reported within about 2 days of the product ship date.

What the fuck more do you want from a return policy? "Keep your iPhone with this issue for a year, and if you decide after that that you don't like it, will give you a full refund on the product you've used for A YEAR"? 30 days is ample time to test out the phone and see if the antenna "issue" bothers YOU in your ordinary use. Me, it doesn't. My reception is about identical to what I got with my iPhone 3G, haven't noticed any significant difference at all. Maybe you think Apple should have MADE me give up the phone and give me my money back, whether I was pleased with their product or not?

If I recall correctly, Civ 4 required 256Mb of VIDEO memory, not of overall RAM.

Yes! I played many, many hours of Balance of Power. As I recall, it was actually a Windows game, and came with a customized version of Windows 1.0 or Windows 2.0 which could be used only to load BoP.

"You have initiated a global thermonuclear war. No, you will not be rewarded by cool graphics of the earth exploding." Or something like that. Wish I could play it again.

Did you by any chance play Sun Tzu's The Ancient Art of War (or its sequel, TAAoW at Sea), which was out around the same time?

Recursive sigh... Yes, under the Kelo decision, a state could take private property for a "business park." This had NOTHING to do with "interstate commerce," as it was the local government, not the federal government, taking the property. The Kelo decision thus does NOT say anything about the "IC Clause" trumping anything.

PLUS, the town government taking the property had to pay JUST COMPENSATION for the property. They couldn't just take it away and not pay for it. Sheesh. The ignorance of the law on /. is simply breathtaking.