skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My untutored impression is that their business model is more about licensing than litigation, though of course the threat of the latter affects the price negotiable for the former.

But it might not be a negative; one thing that really impressed me about the FTC report was in chapter 7 where they take an example case and examine different approaches to calculating damages. Although I'm not a lawyer or economist, I am very interested in this branch of legal theory and this seems to reflect many of the ideas that have influenced the law of antitrust and property damages in recent years.

Up to now the prevailing approach to estimating damages has been set by a case known as Georgia Pacific, where the plaintiff offers evidence about 15 different economic and legal factors of economic loss. That's fair on one level, but the problem is that the jury gets overwhelmed and tends to award enough damages to compensate for multiple injuries, not all of which necessarily happened - thus huge awards followed by expensive appeals and so on and on. The FTC report seems to favor a much more methodical approach to calculating the true economic costs of patent infringement, without worrying so much about questions of fault during this process. An economic idea known as the Coase theorem (basically) says that whether A pays B not to do something, or B does something and has to pay damages to A afterwards, the total economic costs tend to be the same in both cases, and suggests objective methods for working out what those costs are. Then the verdict is just a matter of apportioning them appropriately.

Of course I am drastically oversimplifying here. But the basic idea is to make patent litigation less of a morality play and more of a problem-solving exercise, in which the public's interest is considered along with those of the parties at suit. Although this may seem cold and mechanical, 'justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society.' Addressing these problems systematically usually leads fairer results, and more predictable ones too - a big plus for any business.

The recommendations in this report are just recommendations, but they're so comprehensive and well-presented that they may be adopted and refined into a standard very quickly. Everyone is sick of the current situation and patents don't mix well with politics, so a consensus is distinctly possible.
Chromium Browser Gets A New Logo
Specifics:

- Navajo: http://www.everyculture.com/North-America/Navajo-Sociopoliti...

- Mapuches, in South America. (sorry, couldn't find an english article): http://www.cholchol.org/es_mapuche.php

How do you implement it? Well, the problem with that, and the rest of your arguments lies in a specific point: Capitalism is about the freedom of an individual to get as rich as possible, disregarding anything else. It's not about your freedom to work with whomever you please, that's what democracy and work freedom are for. Oh, and in my previous comment I was not talking about banning private property, but about a culture of sharing. Most of the things we can think about today are in the realm of the "mine-theirs"...how about we bring back the "ours"?

In a nutshell, capitalism is about money. And whenever money occupies the place of humankind and their rights, shit will hit the fan sooner than later. You can adorn capitalism with good will through religion, with generosity toward poor people, with the theory of adam smith about the cup of the rich that pours over everyone.. but will still be about money.

And I'm not advocating for a communist-russian-cold-war state. That's as bad as this. What I'm advocating for is for policies that are centered not in allowing people to get as rich as they can be in the name of free market and illusionary progress, but on stablishing a minimum level of well being for everyone. You can't get that through capitalism, but I think perhaps it's so hard for people in the states to understand that because for years and years they've been brainwashed into thinking otherwise.. They still believe there's only one option.

PS: Sorry for my english, it's not my native language.
Accessing a deceased person's mail - Gmail
EU to the internet: You shall store no state!
Hidden Music Sync Feature Discovered In Android
True tho
Win 7 @ work and home, OS X @ home, various *nix (mostly BSD flavoured) in VMs at both.
Java isn't cross platform
I don't use cookies myself for my web site, but Apache logs a good deal of data. I think this alone warrants a "privacy policy" page. I plan to set up one soon.
Yep, it's very bulletproof. AppMakr has been used to make thousands of iPhone apps over the past year. Give it a shot and let me know what you think!
Sounds good James
This game is even better on firefox with vimperator.
My guess: $80mm
http://bitbucket.org
Currently my main OS is Gentoo Linux, I also have Mandriva Linux and openSUSE Linux on desktops. On laptop I also have PC-BSD. All of them with KDE Plasma desktop of course :) I also used to have OpenSolaris but I'm waiting now what will happen with the projects that came after Oracle made Solaris un-free again.
I know this is "just a joke", it's obviously harmless and no malice was intended (probably). I would be the last person to suggest that any topic is off-limits for humour, and firmly believe we should be able to joke about anything and everything.

That said: Imagine you're Nigerian. Every time this comes up on the web, someone cracks a joke about 419 scams. For this person they maybe make a joke like that say, once a year. No big deal, they're not racist or anything. But Nigerians are vastly outnumbered by people that aren't Nigerian (obviously), so if each of these people makes a once-in-a-blue-moon joke when you mention that you're Nigerian, that means for you it happens every. Damn. Time.

I imagine that gets pretty old.
Eyeopening.

I was planning on using mt for a project I'm working on.

has anyone got any pointers on how to get the best out of mechanical turk? Advice much appreciated.
.. and it's down right now.
So don't track - and sell that to your customers and visitors as an advantage.
If they continue to make small changes spaced out over longer periods of time they'll be fine. No matter what they do a good number of people are going to declare their hatred for it but these type of people tend to burn themselves out pretty quickly because there's always something new and exciting to declare hatred for. Ironically Twitter is a great outlet for Internet hatred so of course these folks aren't going anywhere. Not their opinions don't matter just that they are a poor barometer of how normal people react to change. If it's gradual most people just accept it and move on with their lives. You just can't overwhelm people with too much change at once.
So you are doing your best to supersize yourself [1]? I highly doubt that you would ever get away with too few protein in a fast food restaurant.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me
Totals as of about 4:20 AM EST on Wed, Mar 9:

Mac OS: 440
Linux: 380
Windows: 273
BSD: 40
I use a minimal Debian install with X and the stumpwm windowmanager. No desktop environment or login manager. Stumpwm basically acts as a placeholder for a terminal with multiple nested screen sessions and a web browser (conkeror). I basically live my life inside Emacs (the non-gui version of course), but must come crawling out once and a while to browse the net, or communicate via irssi (where I have everything: msn, facebook, jabber, irc, etc. through bitlbee). Used to have that inside Emacs too (using erc) but remotely accessing erc from a touch phone was not feasable, so I switched to irssi.

Why I live my life like this? Well, efficiency. I can do just about anything I like with a couple of keystrokes, I don't have to spend time being distracted by fancy graphics and animations, and every single pixel on my screen is used well. No wasting screen real estate on decoration.
IBM’s Reference Architecture for Creating Cloud Environments
Guido's thoughts on reduce, map, filter and lambda (2005)
I tried this exercise once, asked myself what I'd want to accomplish if I knew I had a month to live. The answer was, I'd finish the latest draft of the novel I'd been working on for what seemed like forever.

So, I took out a calendar, kept track of days left. 30...29....

30 days later, I'd finished the novel.
Is this about tracking via cookies only, or cookies in general ? Does it mean I have to ask for consent to use ganalytics as well ?
Builds coming from the snapshot tree appear to have this new logo. I first noticed it this morning with an update to Chromium 11.0.697.0 (Developer Build 77308).

As of this comment build 77443 is the latest on OS X:

http://build.chromium.org/f/chromium/snapshots/chromium-rel-...
Very honest comment, liked it.
Well, I'm against internet regulation in general, but I don't agree this is 'stupid' or a big disadvantage.

Sites could simply stop tracking users with long-term cookies. In this case, no warnings and popups need to be added. And everyone is happy...
While a great cause, I don't think Peter will receive these donations. I'm sure PayPal will find a way to classify Peter as a terrorist/threat/<insert absurd reason> and suspend his account, like they've done with many before him.
If you don't want to be tracked with a long-term cookie just configure your browser to not accept long-term cookies or to delete all cookies on shutdown. Problem solved.
At about -0:40, the balloon pops. It looks like a tentacly space alien for a few frames.

Cool project :)
For the WTF kind of operation, 'while' loops are much more idiomatic - generally, you'd want to use a for loop for things that are minimally recursive (i.e., where you can see, before starting the loop, that the loop body will be executed N, or len(L), or whateverNumberItIs times).
I can't figure out how this will hit EU startups. Actually, this is promoting transparency and I really like it. I won't be suspicious if the site is gathering some data from me or not; if it is, it'll just display a friendly warning.

This is actually beneficial for users; and the ones who refuse are probably not the users you are looking for.
That "fanatical dedication to backwards compatibility" works even harder towards glacial development for the OS than for applications. Or do you think OS developers will ship a new, faster scheduler, tweak the memory allocator and the thread scheduler every month?
Trumpet was a fantastic piece of software. Strangely, I was only talking about it a couple of days ago. Happy to donate for the hundreds of hours I spent online with it, and the fun I had creating dialup scripts in it.
Delhi VBS Optical Shoppee Punjabi Bagh Delhi - Grotal.com
Why You Should Stop Using CAPTCHAs
You're right. The comments are a lot more intelligent than the posturing article they are appended to.
how is google analytics not a form of tracking?
There are some lawyers in Germany that already now presume that Google Analytics is illegal: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/24/google-analytics-illegal.... And due to the German "Abmahnung" law (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung) it's rather easy for them to "fine" you if you use it anyway: "One German lawyer that gets cited in the article says the penalties could amount up to €50,000 (about $75,000) per website that uses Google Analytics to keep track of its visitors’ usage patterns."
Isn't it clear from the article?

"It clearly makes UK companies less competitive because sites we build will need to be plastered with warnings – and our competitors will not. It is a well known fact that at each stage of a signup process you lose customers – if you have to have a big warning sign just for a cookie that will remember you for purely convenience so that it keeps you logged in. The user wont read that detail – they will just think your a privacy nightmare and wont sign up."
I don't think most people would know how to do that, or even that you could.
Indeed, I see Besthesda as a not-so-shining example of the case that squidsoup is making. Morrowind was brilliant - it had great freatures, great gameplay, a great storyline etc.

Then Oblivion came along and they switched their development focus (or at least a fair amount of it) onto the graphics. And the result? Poor gameplay with a cop-out 'auto levelling' system, a 'fast travel' system which was 'click this button to travel anywhere in the game World', etc.

Sure it might have looked pretty and thus sold well, but it was a step backwards in terms of gameplay.

Crysis 1 is another example of this. Amazing graphics, amazing physics. But the storyline was non-existant and at times the gameplay was poor.
This is being blown out of all proportions.

http://www.edps.europa.eu/EDPSWEB/webdav/site/mySite/shared/...

Read point 50.

The general gist seems to be, that if you use a cookie to track the communications between you and the user (à la sessions), no problem. But if you are using a cookies to track where and/or what the user has been doing across sites then you need to make said user aware.

Please correct me if I am wrong.
I believe filesystem alone aren't enough. There must be a means to browse it.

For pictures that's simple, but let's consider a Facebook wall (with replies). A bunch of text files would be hard to browse, a single big mailbox-like file would be hard to edit properly.

Considering that there're multiple OSes, tools and workflow preferences, I doubt there is some universal representation, which would satisfy users.
i am just curious about the "Project Planner" and "Client Worksheet" you have mentioned in the comment. that's a good way to collect prospect's idea of the project. Any pointers that'd guide us build such questionnaire ? thanks.
And stupid enviromental laws don't allow excessive mining and require costly procedures when handling waste. It hands the advantage to China, and other less restrictive countries.

'This is how its always been done' is not reason enough. Many sites require you to accept terms&conditions. Another checkbox really won't matter.
Today's Downtime - GitHub
He was paying something like $500/month for the servers, right? Were the two hosted projects worth that monthly spend? In retrospect, of course it was, but maybe not on a month-to-month basis.
I know for a fact that Google employes hundreds/thousands of technical people in Ireland. Amazon also employes technical people in Irealdn
How Can I Make This More Testable?
I think most people would perfectly be able to do this, they just don't care. So why force privacy on them if they don't care about privacy? Even with this warning message I guess that 99% of the users will just click it away without reading it.
How To Upgrade Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0) To Squeeze (Debian 6.0) On Xen VPS
Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1
Did you know that Mirror's Edge is built using the current version of Unreal Engine? Tech demos are built to showcase as many features as possible, in a very limited time. In order to show shadows/lighting they are often dark.
"Procedural generation doesn't automatically mean that the artist has no control" - It means they have less control, and they always bitch and moan about that.
No, I've suffered VSS, but that is quite rightly positioned at the bottom of the love/hate scale (IIRC. They've taken the image down).

Perforce had just under 4 hearts out of 5, with Mercurial and Git being just over 4 out of 5.
About fogcreek
Mturk manuals are junk and very hard to follow. HIT data cleansing is the biggest issue. Instead of using the command line tool, use their API to integrate into your app, as it will save plenty of time down the road...

To "weed out" ineligible workers, try this approach:
1. Post a bunch (1000-5000) of cheap multiple-choice HITs.
2. Allow no more than 10 hits per worker.
3. Each hit to get 3 responses from different workers.
4. Review answers, compile the list of "good" workers, blacklist the "bad" ones.
5. Post another bunch of HITS, make them available for eligible workers only (found in step 4), this time the HITs might be more demanding, individually review results for each worker -> the best ones go on your "preferred worker" list.
6. Repeat steps 1-5 as necessary.

From then on it's fairly safe to rely on mturk workers from your preferred list.
PPK's HTML5 tests - inputs mobile matrix
Seems like yet more evidence that Apple's supply chain is less "magical" than people would like to believe.

Leaving things out, or using the bare minimum specs necessary for adequate functionality is a smart thing to do if you're trying to hit a price point or keep your device thin. But it falls far short of "magic", nor does it create an unbreachable defence against competition (which I believe is the subtext for people believing this somewhat far-fetched myth in the face of evidence like the Nook Color).
Probably #3. Much like game consoles have competed against each other for several decades. Seems to be a very good comparison. Most of the big titles will be cross platform, some tiles will be paid exclusives, with lots of smaller games targeting one or the other until they reach some critical mass of success that justifies going cross platform. It's going to be a Columns/Tetris -- Mario/Sonic sort of world but not just for games -- applications too.
What if Hewlett-Packard Bought Red Hat?
What "silly quantity of math" did you do to reach your conclusion?

I would have assumed that this sort of thing was simply an unquantifiable aesthetic preference (as long as you're below the char width of the screen, of course). I'm very interested in learning more about how you can come up with a 'right' answer to this sort of question, since I struggle with similar problems all the time (website layouts, etc).
In a civil trial, sure, but when the evidence unveiled in discovery could result in criminal charges, I'd think the 5th Amendment would come into play. In any case, it'd get complicated quickly.
This is not about storing state, but using cookies to track users across domains in order to build up a profile about the user. It is only the latter that needs explicit permission under the new law.
I work with TFS (migrating to it and some things on it already) and I hate working with it.

Every single thing it does is a little bit worse then the tools its replacing in my case.

The out of the box diff sucks, its slow, buggy, get latest dosn't, commits sometimes just fail to commit, the CI builds fail for random reasons, the ticketing system only lets you remove time from tasks (not track them).

Its stupid you have to use Visual Studio, Shell Extensions AND command line just to make it work correctly.

Anyone considering moving to TFS better seriously consider their needs before doing it. If you are purely a MS shop, are prepared to spend days fighting the tool, or are happy to go with the defaults, and have big beefy servers sitting around doing nothing then consider TFS.

Otherwise go SVN Jira Fisheye and Crucible. Trust me it will be better and cheaper.
I can't help but feel there'd be something ironic about trying to resolve www.nullpointer.com.
For what it's worth, I've never seen an accusation that the banking system in Nigeria is itself materially involved with advance-fee scams or otherwise corrupt, and I don't have the impression that people believe that. I took "into a Nigerian bank account" as shorthand for "unexpectedly into the custody of Nigerian internet users", and the unfortunate stereotype persists around the guys hanging around internet cafes, not the bankers. Just as "into a Swiss bank account" connotes money that is being made more difficult to trace, not a criticism of people in Switzerland who actually operate the banks.
It seems to me that the main difference between the two is the ISO setting.
The iPad2 photo is rather grainy, but rather clear.
The iPhone4 photo is less grainy, but instead it's blurred because of shaking hands.

You can imitate this by setting your camera at a low and then a high ISO setting - same result.
It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the hardware.
Just do it. I quited even when i had no product to launch next.

the motivation :

working on your own and with your nearest developer circle is the only thing that you won't ever get at Google, Yahoo or Microsoft (GYM).

You probably ain't quiting any one of the GYM, right ?

You probably ain't interested in competing with GYM, right ?

You are going to launch your startup, right ?

Just do it.

[edit : added some line]
What's New in Chrome 10?
I think it's the responsibility of the website to do the best that it can to protect the user's privacy, especially for those that don't know what a cookie is or does. On the contrary, most websites do the minimum they can get away with and try to squeeze every bit of data for profit.

Those companies can cry all they want but they get ZERO sympathy from me. I'm sick of having to install three extensions to counter their hostile behaviour towards my privacy.
مسلسل الأوراق المتساقطة 2 الحلقة 59
>It clearly makes UK companies less competitive because sites we build will need to be plastered with warnings – and our competitors will not.

An American startup doing business globally and with citizens of the UK would have to abide by this law too, though, right?
It seems like unique online-identities that belong to real people, just like Facebook offers them, seem to be the only way to prevent rating-spam.

Or are they?

What if "mechanical turks" continue to use their FB-account to do the same?

This makes any rating-system almost useless.

And since I will be publishing an Android-App soon: Wouldn't it be wise to hire people to rate it with 5 stars, say a few hundred times? It seems like my competition will do it.
What's this!? Fast food is unhealthy, you say??

monocle flies out of eye into glass of sherry
Google's Data Viz Challenge
Other person knows One Must Fall! I played that for months with friends on a 386.

It is easy to grouch about how gameplay rules over shiny effects, but I am quite impressed and uplifted that the company that made those games is still around and on the cutting edge of games.
That's not a fair example. There are languages that have lambda expressions but not the lexical scope that requires closures, whereas there are no languages that have class definition expressions but not classes.

Given there is a meaningful distinction to be made, insistence on accurate terminology becomes a lot more reasonable.
How much is your signature worth?
Thanks, but I got a little update: it won't work on strings.

The help says as much, in fact. Actually, what it says is, "Returns the sum of a sequence of numbers (NOT strings)," which I think is meant to imply it won't parse numbers out of strings, but in theory, sum should be able to concatenate strings as easily as it does lists, with the right start argument. Instead:

>>> sum([['room315'], ['room2']], [])
['room315', 'room2']

but:

>>> sum(['room315', 'room2'], '')
TypeError: sum() can't sum strings [use ''.join(seq) instead]

Say, what???

I'm not sure, but I think sum is specifically watching for strings, and throwing a TypeError if it finds one. Otherwise, if it's simply using the + operator internally, as its list-handling behabior seems to imply, it should mash strings together just as happily! Oh, well. The join function is the right one for that job. It just seems a bit of wasted effort, to me.
Good. User tracking is antisocial and Google is one of the worst offenders.
Not having the technical expertise does not mean not caring about privacy. A lot of technical people make that mistake. The users click it away without reading it because they don't understand it.

Hence, people might feel that a level of privacy should be provided by law, not by optional technical doodads.
Usability 101: every other checkbox matters and lowers conversions
Even if they didn't care, it doesn't mean that it's socially desirable to have websites track users.

It's certainly desirable for website owners though...
London Startup seeking Sys Admin
They will need member states to actually enforce this law. Until then it's a dead letter like so many other EU laws that get ignored.