skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So take the drives or memory cards and return them as soon as full copies have been made, it just seems nuts to take a guy's entire camera when the photographic evidence they want was quite literally seen by millions of people. From what I've heard siezed evidence is often not returned for years (which in the case of technology you use daily means it's worthless when you get it back).

Depriving someone of their way to make a living is a very significant power and shouldn't be taken lightly.
Gawker's COO is arguing on that basis (http://gizmodo.com/5524843/)
Thats a pretty inflammatory statement... "In one program and a couple that emulate it...".

How is it not useful to have a keyboard shortcut to change focus between windows? Windows in vim refer to what I believe are called "splits" in emacs. The vim c-w stuff is analogous to c-x stuff in emacs.

As for close tab shortcuts in firefox -- I use it all the time. Standard work flow for me includes c-t, google.com, <misspelled word>, c-w, <correct spelling from "did you mean">.
The question's not whether or not bloggers count as journalists for the purposes of the shield laws, it's whether or not the shield laws apply when the journalists themselves are under suspicion of committing a crime.
You can renounce your citizenship, as long as you have a citizenship somewhere else. Also, if you renounce your citizenship and have a high networth the US will tax that due as a sort of exit fee.
I think it's more that you need to get a lot of publicity to get justice in this country.

edit: scratch that, publicity only works because it has the potential to bring more powerful groups to your aid.
I wish there was some service that would allow me to send SMS for free, and they could add a 30-char ad along...
Let this possibly be a lesson. Use encryption.

If you're on a mac, go, right now, and tick the FileVault checkbox. Windows users go download TrueCrypt and turn on whole-disc encryption.

The law in this country is so complicated that, increasingly, it doesn't matter if you've broken the law or not. I don't side with Gawker. But I do know that if you have years of browsing history lying around, surely there's something somebody can pin on you if they want to.

Seriously. Go tick the checkbox.
That's a poor comparison. Presumably a small army of white guys pissed off enough by taxation to kamikaze themselves into public buildings does not exist. (Although, see the insurgence of the militia movement, and Palin's "don't retreat, just reload!" rhetoric...)
I just have to republish this tech crunch comment, made me laugh so hard I scared my dog:

From http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/26/the-iphone-leak-gets-ugly-p...

--

Shan - April 26th, 2010 at 1:51 pm UTC

How it’s[sic] stolen property?

If you found a property which is unclaimed what you will do?

Since Gizmodo was unable to find owner of that iPhone.. they published on their blog with various features so the owner would come and get it from them..

--
Pre-meditation has a specific legal meaning that really doesn't apply to typical drunk driving. Something more along the lines of what you're talking about is the Felony murder rule:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder_rule

Unfortunately drunk driving is a misdemeanor and doesn't qualify.

Just to clarify, by nonsense I'm referring specifically to the idea of arbitrarily applying legal terms to situations where they aren't valid for punitive purposes. I disagree with harsher punishment as a crime deterrent, but I don't think harsher punishment itself is 'nonsense'.
This is a prototype for a major release by a company. It's not just a $600 phone, it's a $6Mil (or whatever factor of million) phone. Whether that's a valid amount to attach to it, I'll leave up the lawyers and pundits, but that, I think, is a better way to understand it.
Facebook becomes bigger hit than Google
Hint: set -o vi

That said, if you really believe that vim can't do everything that emacs can do in editing, I have nothing else to say...
I really don't think its "dishonest". No, I am not say 100% cases of killing someone are premeditated. Accidents happen. Bad things go wrong in worse ways.

That being said, I believe if you knowing impair your ability to make judgements and then kill or injure someone, you made a conscious decision.

Now, if you frame this in some "mandatory minimum" debate, I am definitely not going there. I still believe judges need their leeway, but prosecutors need to charge the crime as something more than a simple "he was drinking and an accident happened".
Can't reproduce the behavior anymore/not sure if I accurately caught it the first time.
I would love to see the cumulative cost of this grand mission to California taxpayers.
Well, here's one aspect.

Start with the facts that this is supposed to be a free nation, a republic with representational democracy, putatively making our own laws.

Now consider that a large fraction of the population is in prison for these very crimes, more so than anywhere else in this world.

This should suggest (although not prove) that the government is imposing its own will, overriding the wishes of the people whose right it is to determine the laws (through their representatives).

I'm reminded of the old 55mph speed limit laws. States would be tested by the federal government; if it was found that more than 50% of drivers exceeded 55, the state could lose federal highway funding. It seems to me that if more than half of the drivers exceeded the speed limit, well then, that's pretty much the same thing as having a referendum with a majority of voters saying that the speed limit is too low.
Maxed out: How long could you hold your breath?
I see nothing at all unreasonable about this search and seizure.

<edit>oops, didn't mean to downvote you. Can someone fix that for me?</edit>
Alternatively, don't buy stolen property and then publicly announce that you've done so.

Once you've committed a crime though, definitely be smart about asserting your civil rights, using encryption, etc. And even if you haven't committed a crime, assert your civil rights and use encryption. But probably the #1 thing you can do to not get harassed by police is to obey the law.
WOW. That is really impressive. Serious kudos for efficiency.

It's weird to think that at any given moment, you're subject to a search and seizure (or any other kind of law enforcement ...enforcing) which will interrupt your life for sometime around one month to (in most cases) a year or so. Really kind of makes you want to hustle and get to work when you're not being served a warrant :P
I wouldn't. Showing an image stored in a repository (using their raw URLs) is unbearably slow in most cases. If you've ever seen their post-update hook page, the help text always loads slow for me because it's just doing an AJAX request to the raw URL for the documentation that is stored in a repo.
How do you practice a restore on a backup that you don't quite know for sure is a usable backup?

That's a big fear of mine. I'm not about to wipe my system clean and hope the test works 100%.
Sometimes it feels like pretty much every entrepreneur has ADHD.
> should there be exemptions made for doing it for journalism?

No. That would mean that journalists could steal anything, write a story about it, and not face justice.

Suppose that you became famous for fifteen minutes (this happens to people from time to time: see Susan Boyle, etc.) The exemption you propose would allow the press to enter your home, steal things, and plaster images of you and those things everywhere, without any regard for your rights.
I'm not sure it's so productive to get caught up into the rat-race to get into a good school. After all, there is a tremendous amount of emotional energy and effort expended by a great many people to this end. What if the lion's share of that energy could be devoted to substantive work? Ok, so many will claim that a lot of the things that they did in High School to pad their resumes were also "substantive work." Let's be real about this, though. By "substantive work" I don't mean educational opportunities, or some sort of scale model preparation or role-playing for what you might do in the future, I mean actual value-added, getting paid for it in the market work. What if even half of that which is just "preparation" could be harvested as real work?

I'm sure that this would result not only in increased productivity of the economy as a whole, but it would also result in superior educational experiences.

Also, there is no reason at all why this has to be structured in a way that gets in the way of "figuring out what I want to do." In fact, I'll bet that actually doing work will provide better information on which to make those decisions.
Avatar DVD and Blu-Ray Sales Numbers Sets Record For Both Formats Full Chart.
"The problem with extremism is that punishing the perpetrators is pretty irrelevant as a solution to the issue because, for the most part, they don't care"

Surprisingly false, and that's the key. The evidence quite strongly suggests that the extremists on the whole really do make rather calculated decisions about what to push, even if only subconsciously. We can tell, because when we change the incentives, behavior changes.

You are basically arguing that the perfect should be the enemy of the good. If there is an extremist that attacks us no matter what, then frankly our policy doesn't matter for that extremist. We need to be concerned about the ones that are calculating though, because there are far more of them.

(Hostages was not a comparison, it was an observation that most terrorism is in one form or another about hostages.)

Your arguments are contradictory; you invoke extremists so extreme that it doesn't matter what we do, then you say we shouldn't incite them. But by definition, you've created a set of people that are unincitable, they're already permanently incited to the max. Yup, they exist. I'm actually pretty comfortable saying "Kill them". Anybody who truly, honestly wants to make it "Either your civilization dies or I die" must be taken up on their offer. However, these people do not numerically amount to all that much, even in the part of the world that has been deliberately cultivating a large group of people who are supposed to make that demand, making the horror of my suggestion MUCH less than it seems; the damage these people can do to civilization is far greater than the loss. (I can not underscore this enough; the evidence is that my approach is by far the more peaceable, because it produces a situation where civilization is to people's advantage. It is the production of a situation where attacking the civilization is advantageous that produces chaos and death! Second order effects utterly dominate this discussion.)

Your approach is a recipe for increasing the number of terrorists, not decreasing them.
The iPad – A New Future in Business Begins…
Ironic that Myspace created nowhere near the privacy crisis that Facebook has simply by offering no privacy settings at all.

Unlike Facebook, Myspace offered no illusion of privacy.
(Posted on the article too, but might be more use here) Nice set of articles, but a teensy bit one-sided in places.

What about the programmer who comes across as being a prima-donna about introducing some flavour-of-the-month practise, but who isn’t able to justify it in terms of measurable impact on the bottom line to (say) a small business owner. Often they’ll be right, but frequently they’ll be wrong too. I’ve often been guilty of this as a programmer–I want to change some code to make the design more elegant, add more tests etc, but if pressed it’s hard for me to say whether the improvement adds any value for the business. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t. Sometimes despite its value the opportunity cost may be too high. Either way as a ‘good programmer’ I will feel strongly about the matter, and it’s my boss’s job to try and temper that programmer “I only want to work with good code!” gut feel with a bit of business-oriented practicality.

So yes, the extent to which you indulge the 'great programmer' is always going to be a tricky call, especially for the non-technical, or even the technical-but-non-specialist. On the one hand you don’t want to piss off the talent–and let’s face it, some (not all!) of this stuff really is just that, in the same way a hollywood producer lays on whatever perks the best actors demand. On the other hand you need to have confidence that there’s real business value in activities that are being proposed. Or if not immediately demonstrable value, a way to measure reasonably objectively over time what impact they’re having. For example, Google (from what I hear) have an amazing system to measure (in some reasonably useful sense) the value of every test that gets written.

On top of that, sad truth is that a lot of companies don’t actually need great programmers. Sure, all else held equal they’d like them, but they’re expensive, they often want to spend your money bringing you into line with the latest and greatest–and sometimes it really is sufficient just to keep some old ball of code ticking along. I wouldn’t really want to work for one of these places, and doubtless neither would you, but it’s an acceptable deal for some programmers and some companies, and there’s a more nuanced perspective available than just to patronise them.

The other thing with great programmers is that if you don’t give us a sufficiently interesting problem to work on, we’ll often go and invent our own (whether consciously or not).

That might be a plus for someone like Google, or sometimes for some kinds of start-ups, but not so much for some more pedestrian smaller businesses.

Or perhaps behaving like this makes one not a great programmer, depending how you define it. It's not a one-dimensional quality I suppose.
I feel for his wife. But I have to wonder whether Jason Chen is the guy who chose to wreck Powell's life to cram one more factoid into a big story, and what just consequences from that would look like.
Think about who would use/buy your program. Then find the sites they read. Then reach out to those sites/bloggers and give them a sneak peak, free license, beta invites for their users, etc.

It might help to be an active member of some of those sites first before soliciting feedback.
Again I can only speak for the UK but.. the chances of you having a search warrant issued on you is pretty low if you are not doing anything illegal.
Why are high-tech firms hoarding cash?
Five bucks says there's a post on Gizmodo referencing the Pentagon Papers in the next 12 hours.

I don't agree with what Gizmodo did, but I definitely support strong shield laws for online journalists. I really hope they don't end becoming poster children for a free online press.
It's not simply about drawing pictures. In Islam, certain people are considered holy and revered.

Before Islam, notable people in society would be drawn or portrayed after they die, and that would sometimes lead people to worship them or raise their level to holy, which is not right.

Thus, Islam has a very firm policy against depicting anyone who is important in our religious tradition. That will include God, Muhammad, the Angels (Gabriel, etc). Interestingly, portrayal of the people we consider were prophets before Muhammed - Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Noah, Adam, etc - is also very strictly prohibited.

That being said, since Islam's base of followers is oh so diverse, certain cultures (some in India and some in Turkey) have at some points drawn picture stories of Muhammad and other prophets but to the base of the religion that was considered taboo.

It's more or less a huge sign of respect...
Also, create a screencast of using your app then upload it to youtube and tag it with appropriate keywords. You'll be surprised at the number of other videos that will end up auto-linking to it on their youtube sidebar and at the end of their videos.
I think the biggest problem here is that the source of the leak (the guy who found the phone) is also suspect of selling stolen property (the said phone).

BTW, was it really stolen? It's obviously wrong to sell something you found before doing a reasonable effort to return it to its owner, but where is the line between finding and stealing?
What happened to the DVDs?
That's what I have observed. The smart kids weren't popular in the sit-com or movie way, but people came to them with questions or to settle some debates.
It ruled that the lady in question "exhibited none of the recognized qualities or characteristics traditionally associated with the news process, nor has she demonstrated an established connection or affiliation with any news entity".

Ie, this lady wasn't considered a journalist.

Chen is an employee of a media organization. That the organization has a blog doesn't make it different to, say, AA Gill writing for The Times, which also has a blog. The main difference is The Times is a more recognized media outlet than Gawker media.

Interesting question: what if it were Engadget? AOL is a recognized media name (sad this was used by the judge in his definition). Or Reddit (owned by Conde Nast) started paying people to write about gadgets?
Mabrouk :-)
If you don't know who Sikhs are, check wikipedia, visit sikhswim.com / sikhnet.com / sikhs.org or watch the official US-DOJ introduction on Sikhs for the TSA and law enforcement: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6224218468847681650#

I don't know the details of the situation you mention, but severely underrepresented minorities are understandably unhappy when the only TV & Film portrayals they get are negative and one-sided. Efforts like the Sikh American film festival http://www.sikhlens.org/ are proactive solutions to this problem.

I took a course titled "The Asian American Experience" in college. In that course, we learned about how all minority groups start out negatively portrayed, get mad, and find that the only way to earn a seat at the table is to be positive and churn out actors, writers, and directors. :)
Economic Data: Beware One Time Adjustments
Given how well it marries with VS intellisense, it seems almost unfathomable to write C# in a more general text editor.

Of course for C++, VS intellisense is a lot weaker and probably not that much of a draw.
Can a gyroscope in this situation prevent tipping, or does it merely slow it down? Honest question. Possibly even just slowing it down a lot would be sufficient since other forces could be brought into play to stabilize the boat.
You could also weigh on geo-detecting using google analytic api
Does the NJ decision have any bearing on the CA shield law? My understanding is that they don't have much in common.
confiscation of server is still beyond me
I did follow up with emails and even a phone call. When there was no response to my follow ups I assumed the problem had been resolved.

As for not taking the time to find a reader, according to the file type, it is a Word HTML file. I am a Mac user and Word for the Mac will not open the file. And yes, I could probably spent more time searching for a reader, but come on, an invoice from Microsoft should be in a more common format. Heck the Word standard doc format would have been helpful. And there is no excuse for not responding to my request to re-send the invoice. The collection agency had no problems sending the invoice to me in a PDF.

-KIRBY
> chances of you having a search warrant issued on you is pretty low if you are not doing anything illegal.

It's the definition of "illegal" that worries me.
ah, i just saw that this was from the REACT team, which appears to be independent. I was under the assumption that this was pursuant of civil action by apple.
No doubt. But I think dschobel meant the theory that Apple planted this phone to be found.
The article you linked to says bloggers are not journalists by default. However, it does seem to indicate that "online news reporters" are protected. I suspect Gizmodo would be viewed as an online news source.
+1 smart comment cglee, and what I was going for too.
It's certainly traumatic. What's worse is that Brian Lam, Gizmodo's editor-in-chief, apparently chose to leave Chen holding the bag; in their flippant response to Bruce Sewell, they directed him to recover the device from Chen, rather than at their editorial offices in San Francisco - I presume the REACT unit don't have jurisdiction in SF and a separate warrant will need to be issued.
The trade secrets at stake here are probably worth WAY more than $5000 to Apple. Just because Gizmodo hasn't published any more details about the phone, or left out specific things, doesn't mean they don't know them. That information could be damaging to Apple and it's business relationships (say, if for example, it was shown that it's an LTE phone on VZW, and AT&T didn't know Apple was going to do that).
You have to go through at least one company like that.

It is often the only way to find out what type of "employee" you want to be. (environments, coworkers, projects, schedule etc.)

Or, it will motivate you to become self-employed or launch your startup and do things differently :-)
The warrant states that the search and seizure was to acquire evidence of a felony. It seems like there are worse things that could happen to him than having his computers seized. (Like getting convicted of a felony)
The treatment of your case was underkill.
Let me get this straight. If someone offers to sell you a cellphone (any cellphone) that they "found", you're going to buy it and keep it until the owner of said property tracks you down and asks for it? And this is "good faith"?

I call bullshit.

Especially since it was an iPhone prototype. You know it's Apple's property, you know they want it, and you know how to contact them. You also know that the person selling it to you knows the same thing -- they're selling it, after all. You are participating in breaking the law by buying it from them unless you're buying it with the intent of immediately returning it and reporting the offender to the police.

Really, that's the end of the story. The rest is bullshit.
gokhan,

First, thank you for taking the time to investigate one of our sites and do some research. Which site did you look at?

Beyond that, I'm not sure I follow your math...how did you calculate that "Even if [I] updates all the content in a single day, his non-primed data will be 22K"?
The Flash Store - Newest Micro SD, SDHC, CF Memory, Batteries & More
You're getting downvoted, but I chuckled :)
Here's a follow up post with some data: http://www.scottporad.com/2010/04/26/data-illustrating-the-b...
I was actually talking about the chemical mixes that are actually toxic / poison that are being brewed in trailers in the rural areas or kitchens in apartment complexes. I wasn't writing about addictiveness.

I wasn't contradicting your historical analysis.
> The exemption you propose would allow the press to enter your home, steal things, and plaster images of you and those things everywhere, without any regard for your rights.

It was a rhetorical question, I actually mostly agree with you and see it the same way, just some minor lingering doubt about letting authorities search and seize from people doing journalism. While I think stolen property probably outweights it, I'm still of two minds about it and will think about it over the next couple days as more discussion and commentary comes out.
Wait a minute -- even when no charges are brought, you keep other people's computer gear, ON AVERAGE, for two and a half months? Like hell that's "pretty good" turnaround.