ccera's comments

Yes.

Whoever bailed the kid out did not pay $500,000 -- they paid either 10% or 15% (i.e., $50,000 or $75,000) to a bail bondsman as a non-refundable bond, and the bail bondsman then paid the $500,000 to the state.

It's still a nice gesture.

My guess is it was Johnny Depp.

The unemployment benefits available in the US aren't comparable.

The most significant difference is that in the US unemployment benefits are generally limited to a maximum of 26 weeks, while in Australia you can collect benefits for decades.

The "greater benefits" available in some states (e.g., Massachusetts) are only available to people who have been recently working in a high-income job. Your unemployment benefit in MA = 50% of the bi-weekly pay rate you had when you were working, up to a certain maximum. And, again, you can only draw unemployment for a maximum of 26 weeks.

Aside from the catchy title and the mention of recent planet-finding successes, this article doesn't say anything that hasn't been said by literally hundreds of other people. (And actually, I'd be amazed if this author is the first to come up with the clever "When are..." formulation.)

Warning to other impatient users:

I didn't read the instructions too well, so the half hour I spent carefully deleting gigantic/uninteresting feeds out of my subscriptions.xml file was all for naught. Because I didn't know I needed to specify the opml_file on the command line, the script just logged into my Reader account (i.e., it walked me through the browser-based authorization process) and downloaded my subscriptions from there -- including all the gigantic/uninteresting subscriptions that I did NOT care to download.

So now I've gone and downloaded 2,592,159 items, consuming 13 GB of space.

I'm NOT complaining -- I actually think it's AWESOME that this is possible -- but if you don't want to download millions of items, be sure to read the instructions and use the opml_file directive.

In addition to the above methods, you can copy the base folder and paste it into the same folder as reader_archive.py -- that's what I did and it worked fine.

In point of fact, my grandma drives a Mercedes coupe. So the answer to your question is yes.

I looked through a bit of your comment history. You are a freak of nature. You easily rank somewhere in the top 1/10,000th of teenagers, probably in the top 1/10,000th of all people of any age. Your abilities are not generalizable.

>"Imagine ... The iPhone, when connected to the computer, can be accessed like any other filesystem. You move files in and out of a folder called iPhone/Music."

This is exactly how Android works. I plug my Galaxy into my computer and it appears just like any other USB drive. I drag mp3 files, or folders of mp3 files, into my Music folder, and I'm done. Same goes for mp4 videos I might want to watch, or PDF files I might want to read, etc.

Is that not the way iOS devices work?

The book's ridiculous claim is that you commit three felonies per day? So to rephrase your question, you should have asked "how many times per day do you travel back in time to commit statutory rape?"

Your examples aren't very strong anyway.

Having sex before the age of 18 is usually not statutory rape, if the person you're having sex with is also under 18.

Very few copyright violations meet the standard for criminal charges. Casual copyright violation is not a felony.

You don't have to report anything on your tax return when you sell personal items for less than you originally paid for them. And not all tax code violations are felonies anyway.

Etc.

I read that book when it came out. The title is sensationalist garbage -- the book shows how some people get snared by some fairly stupid federal laws and have their lives messed up by willfully malicious prosecution, which isn't good, of course, but nowhere does the author demonstrate how an average person commits three felonies in a YEAR, or in a LIFETIME, let alone in a day.

PCIe SSDs are available from a number of vendors. Fusion-IO is probably the most well-known.

Apple's app store review "process" is complete bullshit, but this kind of weather app already exists for iOS and Android, and has for a couple years or more.

I've installed probably 4 or 5 of them between the two platforms, all with beautiful high-def animations, etc. (and uninstalled all of them, since I find the simpler WeatherBug to be more than adequate for me).

Those statements are probably true. The NSA has probably subcontracted the operation out to a private corporation. So Facebook, Google, et al, don't deal directly with the government, they deal with the private company.

Applied Semantics had nothing to do with the creation of AdWords. AdWords was created in-house by Google years before they acquired Applied Semantics. It was an extremely successful and lucrative operation long before Applied Semantics ever entered the picture.

Google also developed and launched AdSense prior to acquiring Applied Semantics.

They acquired Applied Semantics because it was complementary to what Google had already developed.

I am thoroughly familiar with Nelson. I've read probably a majority of everything he's ever written. He's a smart man and a visionary. As I stated.

Doesn't change the fact that he hasn't been very successful at turning his ideas into anything actually useful to people, and doesn't change the fact that he shits all over the amazing accomplishments of thousands of other people who have.

TL;DR: Grumpy, bitter man is grumpy and bitter.

I suppose Nelson deserves some credit for being a visionary, but there are two definitions for visionary in the dictionary: (1) A person with unusual powers of foresight; (2) A person given to fanciful speculations and enthusiasms with little regard for what is actually possible.

Nelson is obviously much more the second than the first.

He's no more visionary than at least a thousand other people who ACTUALLY DID STUFF.

Some really smart individuals, like Nelson, get lost in their own private jungles. Here's an example of what I mean. Nelson inserted a note in this document in 2012 wherein he points to the rise of XPointer and XPath as validating something he said back in 1999. XPointer and XPath?! XPointer and XPath have had barely any impact on anything that's happened in computing since 1999.

Nelson is apparently in such a deep fog of irrelevance that he somehow perceives XPointer and XPath as being important in some way? It's bizarre. I think it illustrates why he never managed to accomplish anything or make any actual contributions beyond his "visionary" grenade-throwing.

Google Groups is used by such a tiny number of people, and has such a poverty of functionality, that I'm fairly certain it has no measurable effect in suppressing innovation in this area.

Whatever reasons there might be for why forums/discussions aren't getting any better, the existence of Google Groups is not one of them.

I found this helpful in understanding how to use directives:

http://thesmithfam.org/blog/2012/12/17/communicating-between...

Yes, so did I, especially given that the author of SQLite said he was working on a new database with exactly this name, UnQLite.

This UnQLite developer is a first-class tool.