skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should probably start with the fairly comprehensive wikipedia article. The basic idea is that one or more plaintiffs go to court, showing both an injury (in the legal sense of being worse off through a tortfeasoer's action or inaction), and the existence of a large class of 'similarly situated' plaintiffs. The class of deaf people would easily fit that description - deafness is something that's easy to define and not very controversial.

If the original plaintiff has standing, a trialable issue exists, and a class of similarly situated plaintiffs can be certified, then a jury trial takes place like it would for any other kind of tort case. If the defendant is found guilty, then economic and/or punitive damages are calculated, the defendant may agree to settle or appeal, and so on. If there is a settlement or award, then lawyers for the plaintiffs make reasonable efforts to contact the other similarly situated plaintiffs (by advertising in newspapers, magazines, or wherever else there's a good chance of reaching those people), who can either opt out of the settlement and preserve an individual right to sue, object to the terms, or do nothing and receive a coupon or some other benefit. Leftover monies that are unclaimed after distribution are usually donated to some charitable organization. Having a plan in place for the distribution and disposal of any settlement or award is one of the necessities for class certification.

Obviously, I am giving you a ridiculously simplified summary here. Entire books can be written on this subject. Class actions can be frivolous or abusive in some cases, but in general they are a good thing because otherwise it would be uneconomical for individual plaintiffs to sue as the cost of going to court would exceed any award they could possibly win, and so tortfeasors would have no incentive to accomodate their requests or settle with them.
Apple & Intel Qualified for Nortel Patent Auction
2 Free iPhone Apps For Mobile Smarts
At 185k a pop? Plus I believe you also have to prove a legitimate claim on the name.
A Truly Deep Reverse Engineering Adventure with FreePhoneLine & Eclipse
Authoritarianism + Campaign Contributions make for a lousy cocktail.
VBS TV rocks
I was thinking of seeing if I could reverse engineer the protocol & create my own API for it. I thought I'd do a quick search first & this is a link I found buried deep in Google. I haven't shared a lot on hacker news but thought you'd all appreciate it. cheers
Notice he's talking about brands - because Apple don't have multiple brands, apple.com is fine.

But for big companies in the food & beverage, homecare sectors etc, they have a lot of sub brands. They want to de-emphasise their company name (because nobody cares about them) and sell the brand.

For example, do you know off the top of your head the brands of P&G?

However, if I told you Old Spice, Gilette, Oral-B, Pantene etc, it starts to make a lot more sense to have .oldspice, .gillette .oralb .pantene and so on.
This reminds me too much about Henry Kissinger's comment on the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s: "Pity they can't both lose." Leaving out the issue of the particular companies and personalities mentioned here, there seems to be considerable suspicion that journalism has deep problems, especially when reporting on the economics or technology base of high-tech companies, and meanwhile the blurring definition of what "journalism" is seems to make it easier than ever for public relations personnel to manipulate the story lines the public reads. Maybe there needs to be some other outcome for this war than one of the two sides identified in the submitted article winning the war.
There is usually a lot of government subsidy involved in things like these.
Switching entirely from Strings to typed arrays would help a great deal imho. Right now the code is hybrid.
Who leads your list?
The economics are true of just about anything that scales -- startups and anything in the arts both come to mind. There's no guaranteed route to six-figure comfort (like there is with, say, dental school), but the potential rewards are enormous.

And, as other responses have pointed out, in all of these fields, people really, really want to do them. The number of writing jobs that are 'comfortable' (pick your number, $60k?) has sharply declined from the glory days of the newspaper industry, but it still has the same non-monetary attractions, and there are the still the same opportunities to become, say, a bestselling nonfiction author.
If large companies have the extra cash to drop extending their online identities in this very small way, then there's really no harm to the broader eco-system of domains.

There will likely be a few "fun" uses of this, say drink.coke, but coke.com will still remain the far more compelling implementation and their own personal TLDs will simply become presences that offer little practical benefits, but were bought simply because they were there -- and the press coverage that the purchase may achieve may in fact just garner equal to or more than the $185,000 they originally spent.

Overall, this will likely just be a small boon for the kind of consultancy firms mentioned in the original article: but it will offer little in the way of actual affects to the rest of us.
http://www.aoltv.com/bloggers/oliver-miller/page/1/ are his articles.
our generation wants everything now and free.
Obviously the role of executive branch of the government is to "play cop", but in context I'm simply stating that I don't like the idea of our government being the security guard for the media companies, and while it is their job to carry out the law, I wish they would enact laws that made a little more sense.
Pi is the wrong constant.

That animation looks great, but it's misleading: the fundamental measurement of the circle is the radius, not the diameter.

Measured with a unit radius, we'd see 2*pi for a full "turn" of the wheel. Twice pi, or tau, is the magic number.

See http://tauday.com/ for details.
Actually, yes, and the reason is, if the disabled (and being able-bodied is only a temporary situation, for everyone) took their business elsewhere, those companies would lose business to those that of their own free choice did install whatever accessibility.

It's better of society if people do the right things for the right reasons, not because there's a threat of the law hanging over their heads.
So if this passed, who would be in control of a TLD like .london? What about .porn?
My apologies, then. I've seen plenty of nmc/btc announcements here and did not think it out of place.
5 things startups can learn from the Mavs victory.
I'd be looking for the same grammatical errors etc appearing in both documents if your trying to see if it's the same person.
Yeah, the 3 to 1 ration he cites is, when I think about, surprisingly low, considering where the money comes from, and how easy being a PR flack is compared to being a serious journalist who breaks actual news.
LulzSec seems to be just a group of teenagers that have actually nothing special to say. As they want to be like the grown-ups, they try to add a message behind their acts, but there is no message, no morality. If they were real hackers and not only prepubescent teens, they would not justify their action by any manifest, they would just act, no matter what people say or think. Their vocabulary is also proper teen vocabulary : "bitches" "mentally disabled" "evil bastards" "we nom nom nom, we move onto something else that's yummier" "unimpressed zombie""Watching someone's Facebook picture turn into a penis and seeing their sister's shocked response is priceless" "Receiving angry emails from the man you just sent 10 dildos to because he can't secure his Amazon password is priceless.".
They don't know how to write, their sentences are full of repetitiveness, the vocabulary is poor.

LulzSec is just a group of teenagers (or someone alone). And they are really really funny. (This is not a compliment..)
Good point. Vice may not be the best example. Perhaps I'm a bit too enamored with their inversion of the magazine model. I just thought that they were are great new cross platform content creator. Can you think of any other? Good is good too. http://www.good.is/
How did XO/OLPC fail? I'm curious, I quit following the project. I thought it just never really got off the ground. Was that the only failure or something different?
I look forward to the day when I'm not sure if something is a URL or not.
>Online security is poor for the same reason airport security is. Good security would take enough time and money to make the whole thing economically unviable.

Airport security in the US is poor because the policies are a series of politically convenient patches applied to a broken system. In Israel, where the threat of terrorism is far greater, their airport security is both much more effective and much less invasive. Why? Because it was designed to work, from the ground up. They don't hire legions of idiots at minimum wage or close to it to do their security. They hire ex-military and ex-mossad people to surveil travellers. They have highly-trained people who know how to spot potential terrorists, and multiple layers of security (usually just someone saying hi and engaging in light chatter) that catch the vast majority of problem people before they get anywhere close to an airplane.

The US system is expensive, invasive, and ineffective. That doesn't mean airport security in general is doomed to fail, it means the US is incompetent at it.
Honestly, who cares?

(From a consumer's standpoint. Apple, microsoft, et al will care a lot, which I'll explain)

I predict that nobody will use this. People like Apple will probably buy .mac and .apple, windows will buy .windows etc., but as a poster pointed out below, they will probably just redirect to the .com

This really feels like a money grab by ICANN; and is in pretty poor form.

Consider non-technical people. They're just figuring out .com. Most of them don't understand subdomains that aren't www.

I'll see people type things like www.images.google.com or www.mail.yahoo.com or www.mail.yahoo.com etc. etc.

Even if it was .apple, you'd still have huge parts of their customer base typing something.apple.com -- getting the .apple accomplishes nothing but increased revenue for ICANN.

.com is a brand name. .ly is cute, .net is geeky, .org is kindof cool, but at the end, .com is what most people understand.

But I'm sure that ICANN will enjoy the $185k ransom that they're going to effectively be holding over everybody's head when this goes live!

"Pay us $185k or .apple is going to go to somebody other than you. Be a shame if that happened, wouldn't it?"

Disgusting.
I thought it might be presumptuous to assume that South America wanted anything to do with us... if I, personally, was South America I wouldn't, at this point.
Not really. 35k salary for a writing gig, presumably nothing even comparable is out there for the author. Judging by the last sentence, that dread of losing the job was valid.
Eben is a very skilled rhetorician. Anyone trying to sell anything would do well to take notes. If he had a dash more narrative to the story, I think he'd nail it.

"Ok, that's the next 15 years of your life and mine. You're going to try to end anonymity on earth and I'm going to try to keep it. Because without anonymity the human race will not be human anymore."

"They [governments, business] are not going to be left to their devices... They are going to be left to our devices. And our devices are going to be about Freedom!"
every other day there's a major news story about the security state

It's a great topic from the media point of view, because most people don't understand computer security or legislative process, and the people who understand one of those things often don't understand the other, so everyone is unhappy with everyone else. Conflict is an essential element of a dramatic story, and dramatic stories attract readers and sell advertising.
I just flipped on a clip from Hulu.com and was served a Lowes DR pre-roll spot driving to the vanity URL Lowesracing.com/SummerSalute

This is what I'm talking about. Apple doesn't do that sort of thing, making them a silly example for a TLD.
The thing about unintended consequences is that law enforcement will often use them to get what they otherwise cannot get. If you're investigating a group of people on Offense A but can't gather enough evidence to make an arrest and charge, you can arrest them on anything else you can stick them with, and suddenly they're in your control and potentially more pliable.
The war over the internet is intensifying. Now, why should you care? Do you think Google is going to "not be evil" for the rest of eternity? You're already seeing politicians going down for doing stupid things...the global elite fears the power of the internet, as well they should.

The internet will know what you are thinking, and it will use that against you. At some point, a tipping point, those who control the internet will be able to control the rest of society.

The internet can survive a nuclear war. Whoever controls the internet will control the future.
A related, but more poetic, clock was done by the artist Tim Hawkinson in the early 2000s. It's a 24-foot long series of gears, driven by a toy motor. The last wheel rotates once every ~100 years.

http://fromthefloor.blogspot.com/2005/04/style-beyond-fashio...

This has been shown in several places, including in retrospectives at LACMA and the Whitney.

Tim's work has a homemade aesthetic.

To me, the piece is about the inspiration and the folly of engineering. We build these systems which have design elements that can last for 100 years. We plan for it as if it will really happen. But because we have such a tenuous understanding of made objects at such time scales, there's an element of hubris, folly, fore-ordained failure.

Another, quite different piece of Tim's is this minute bird sculpted from his own fingernail clippings:

http://flyingoutofthisworld.blogspot.com/2008/01/tim-hawkins...
Couldn't they sandbox Nitro processes?
A masterclass. Be sure to read until the end.

Well played, anonymous poster.
HackerNews :)
Couldn't get it to load in Firefox 4.x, it just says loading. Looks like a neat idea though, I'll give it a second look once the Slashdot load clears off.
Netflix IS working on it. There isn't any magic faerie dust to make it happen. 30% of their content has it now with a projected 80% by years end. That is pretty darn good. This is a cash grab pure and simple. I don't think the law applies to them as written anyway. Netflix isn't a "PLACE of entertainment" and you would be hard pressed to prove that in court.
It certainly don't help that Zuckerberg is a sleazy businessman.
I agree, although this particular thing has nothing to do with the security state, and everything to do with the gradual co-opting of Congress and the legislatures by the content industry.
In a free society all of those things WOULD be allowed. And most of us sane, rational people would opt not to give those discriminatory companies money. That's what freedom actually is. Its having the freedom to be an asshole, bigot or racist, and its my freedom not to support that kind of behavior with my wallet.

But yes, I agree, there isn't a big difference there, and personally I'm of the opinion that the government shouldn't be in the business of regulating any of it.
With anonymity, I can risk being who I want to be. I can say what I want to say and do what I want to do regardless of what anybody else wants.

Without anonymity, I can't risk being who I want to be, saying what I want to say, doing what I want to do, because someone else might find out and give me trouble.

Encryption should be declared a munition, and get a slot right next to the right to bear arms. Governments shall not infringe on the right of the people to encrypt any data that they use between two parties. This is not a trivial matter, this is the future of the human collective taking form here. Will everything we do be tracked, or will some of it be private?

Here is Eben talking about what he's doing on CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7358702n
If it's a painful as cucumber, I would stay far away.
Anyone else notice how good of a writer this guy actually is? Throughout the article he takes you through an emotional journey that very effectively portrays AOL as a soulless monster. (The third-to-last paragraph is a very good example of this.)

His words may or may not have merit, but his writing style is extremely persuasive. He got his message across and certainly made an impact. If only AOL took advantage of this, we might be reading an entirely different article.
I couldn't help but notice the irony of TC's "Tonight We Dine in Hell" (which you just knew was an MG Siegler post before clicking through) right below the "AOL Hell" link.

MG is one of the stars of the "AOL Way" but at least in this case and with the Project Spartan break, he's committed some real and quality journalism.
In other news today, giant social networking site wishes to own your data and the applications you might use to create even more of it.

Facebook's PR people have an even harder time of it after their privacy settings fiasco. More people take what they say with a larger salt pill than other companies because they have earned a reputation of saying X but doing Y. Not surprised that the TC article implies they are doing the same here.
How can you possibly be surprised by a company PR-spinning things that make them look weak?
I believe that at a minimum you must be given the opportunity to opt out. I've been a "member" of a class action suit on a couple of occasions. I only knew I was a member because mail showed up informing me that I was, and giving instructions on how to opt out. (which I did because I was entirely unaffected by the circumstances outlined in the suit)
Zalgo Text (example generator: http://www.eeemo.net/ - page contains minor profanity).
No you don't have to apologize for anything.
Though I think MG's writing style etc. dates back before the acquisition by AOL. Overall this acquisition did not go particularly badly IMO. The AOL-Huffington Post acquisition was a lot worse.
For the record: this was a thought experiment that I made on the plane home from TXJS last week and was just something I wondered if I could do.

The reference to cucumber is really only a nod to inspiration for the given / when / then syntax, and the emphasis of speccing behavior in plane English.

I've also been fascinated by the idea of writing executable English as implementation logic, and since JS allows object labels to be strings, why not make full descriptive sentences.

I haven't used this for anything useful or practical (it's days old) ... but I'm hoping it will be a neat way to spec and as someone mentioned document the behaviour of my app and to try and try to separate the intent of what I'm writing from the implementation.
I think this is a little of the pot calling the kettle black. They are one of the biggest tech blogs out there, and Michael Arrington is an active investor in the same companies they cover or lack of cover. Integrity is questionable.
That requires people who are (temporarily) able-bodied to be sufficiently foresighted and activist-y - I'm not sure consumer boycotts frequently work (either due to lack of information or coordination or it being too much effort).

I agree I'd like the market to sort it out instead of law, but I don't think it's realistic. Consider access ramps/elevator requirements for example - if a fairly significant chunk of key businesses (say supermarket, banks, workplaces, transport) in an area don't all have them, the area becomes practically uninhabitable by people in wheelchairs.
You're right that entertainment news is much more accessible. However there's also much more pre-existing "content" related to $mainStreamTopic at our disposal for training our future pulitzer-prize-winning markov-chain-based authors :-p
At the risk of seeming rude, can I ask what the logic was on the changes?

Visually, the screenshot you link to exhibits much better typography, spacing and color choices. I'm curious as to what compelled you to change the things you did?
Real Racing 2 HD wireless, dual-screen gaming with iOS 5 on iPad 2 hands-on
A Lisp through the looking glass
When it comes to security, you run into IT departments being the red headed step children of the corporation and NIMBY (not in my backyard). It's a lot easier and cheaper to stick your head in the sand and pretend nothing is happening or you have some mitigating factor that discourages people from going after you be it size (miniscule for instance), participating in a niche market, etc. It's a lot easier and cheaper to do an ostrich than actually spend the money on decent security.
Segmentation for Digital Analytics Done Right
Didn't you prove him right ...?
I am not sure. Especially if that $185k is a one-off expense and not a yearly fee, I do not rule out that some good salesman will make a good living owning .cloud. Risky? Yes, but impossible? IMO: no.

In the sleazy department, a browser vendor could try to sway the issue by changing the way their browser does lookups if users enter incomplete URLs. 'ebay' does not have to go to http://eBay.com, it could go to 'eBay.whatever', where .whatever is owned by the vendor, instead. I doubt anybody could get away with that, though.
All processes (at least, ones in the App Store) are already sandboxed, as are Safari and Web.app (although the latter two are sandboxed more heavily than ones from the App Store, since Apple knows exactly what things they might want to access). However, since Nitro is run in-process (as is WebKit as a whole), it can't be too sandboxed, or the app that's using it wouldn't be able to do a lot of the things that a native app can do.

It's a tradeoff between functionality and security with the sandboxes, and right now (for native third party apps) Apple has gone with functionality (address book access, camera access, etc).
it pushes a lot of work on consumers - you need a lot of information/research to know who you can buy from (and if you're being strict you'd have to follow their supplier chain also for your opinion to affect all the B2B companies).

I feel like that already with sweatshops/child labour already - you hear a couple big companies when it hits mass media, but it's no doubt widely spread, so boycotting scandalised company of the day might not be effective (and just incentivise better PR/press control).
Maybe a stupid way of putting it, but given the fact that only a small percentage of the US are physically disabled, will their boycott have any impact at all?
Enjoy the biggest regexp breakage since Y2K in 3 ... 2 ... 1
Software Businesses In 5 Hours A Week
Pretty much HN reminds me of Reddit before Digg imploded.
Why Microsoft and IE need WebGL
When I think about all the issues being addressed in many talks such as this, one thought comes to mind:

"This is why we can’t have nice things."

We have the technology, the skill and the knowledge to do so much we couldn't even dream about a decade ago, but everything we do seems to raise so many new issues of possible abuse. Always the same dual-use dilemma [1].

With every step forward, we need to make an additional step in every other direction just to make sure we aren't walking the plank.

[] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_use_technology