esurc's comments

For the Adobe breach specifically, you might try the site set up by Last Pass, which checks your email against the breached data: https://lastpass.com/adobe/

The added feature is that, if your email is in the list, Last Pass will share with you how many others had your same password -- and the list of all password hints associated with that password. If more than a handful of others used the same password, that should jog your memory about which you used.

P.S. I'm not associated with Last Pass and actually use a different product. But I found this site very helpful.

Setting aside syncing and caching (which are not trivial with hundreds of feeds), that solution doesn't address the problem of your readers. Google Reader was a social product, connecting readers to sources.

Basically, Google is canceling the direct RSS blog subscriptions that countless blog readers have accumulated over the years. To be sure, it's a fairly low barrier for them to export and thus renew through another provider (be it Twitter or another RSS reader or Google Plus). But even though this seems to readers of Hacker News like a fairly low barrier, some casual or less tech-savvy readers will be left behind.

At least that's what I expect to happen to my blog, which is followed by a very non-technical audience -- the bulk of whom subscribe through some Google Reader-powered source.

The devil is in the details (the last bullet point on your first link):

> You may have to pay taxes on any loan amount that is forgiven after 20 years.

Roughly: the more student loan payments are reduced now, the more the borrower will pay in federal income taxes later.

The unpaid portion of the loans will be accumulating at least some interest until forgiven. Forgiveness of that remaining balance would (under today's law) trigger a significant tax event for the borrower.

Just a comment about "slip opinions" posted on federal court websites and state court websites. Slip opinions are not always identical in text to what is eventually printed in the official reporters (and that lawyers, and those representing themselves in court, need to cite). It's not just page numbers that are inserted. The back-and-forth editing can change words in the opinion.

So, unfortunately, until the courts themselves publish the final versions of their opinions online -- something they may need to negotiate into the next round of their publishing contracts -- the opinons swept into the RECAP project are just rough drafts of the law.

To be clear: I have done a fair amount of scraping state court websites for my own projects, and I'd love to see the federal PACER system opened up. I can think of some great cross-docket research projects that could expand our understanding of how the legal system really works. But even opening 100% of PACER would not achieve the goal of public access to the official appellate opinions that actually serve as controlling precedent (or even to reported district court opinions, which also are edited by the official reporters).

I read that to apply to a "fee exempt user" -- one of a very narrow class of persons exempt from fees, no matter how much they download.

A regular user who happens to download less than $15.00 per month is not a fee-exempt user. They are someone for whom, in the words of the website, "fees are waived for that quarter."

[See this page and look at the questions "How much does PACER cost?" and "Can the user fee be waived?": http://www.pacer.gov/psc/faq.html ]

The rationale I've heard is that consumers benefit from having a local service location for the brand. Based on that logic, the state limits the franchises to avoid "ruinous competition" (not my phrase) that would threaten that consumer benefit.

The first time I heard the phrase "ruinous competition" used this way, I nearly jumped out of my chair.

But this is why the OP mentions the challenge that Tesla will have in providing local repair service. If it can crack that problem, it may open the door to manufacturer shops of other car models as well.

> real differences exist between law and programming, although they are remarkably similar.

As someone who (perhaps like you) practices law and does some programming, I wanted to agree with this statement. The fields are remarkably similar. If you gathered a list of "best practices" for writing good code and a second list of prescriptions for writing good legal briefs, it's striking how much advice overlaps. That's because clear thinking about complex systems is the heart of both worlds, and both sets of professionals have to (working within a set of constraints and syntax) work out an elegant solution that can be readily understood by their peers.

As for the OP, the first year of law school has a habit of shattering whatever hazy dreams people bring with them. If he now wants to hone his programming skills instead --- and in this economic climate for lawyers, that seems like the safer bet --- then I wish him well.

Thanks. I've been trying to find a good way to understand the accuracy of Silver's predictions.

What's a fair benchmark? This article offers up a "coin flip" for each state, computing that such a coin flip would have a Brier score of 0.25. (The Brier score is a mean-squared error between outcome (1 or 0) and the percent certainty of the prediction in that outcome. If a coin flip is the model, each state's result of 1 or 0 would be in error by 0.5. The mean squared error would be 1/51 * 0.25 * 51 = 0.25.)

But... that seems like too generous a benchmark. Take the simple model: "assume 100% likelihood that state X will vote for the same party as it did in 2008." That guarantees that deeply red or blue states will vote the same way, so it takes the non-battlegrounds out of the equation.

With this model, there would only have been 2/51 errors. This simple lazy model achieves a Brier score of 0.039, beating Intrade and the poll average computed in this article quite badly.

After working through this, I'm still impressed by Silver and the other quant predictions. But I'm more concerned about media that rely too much on reporting a single polls result as "news" rather than as part of a larger tapestry.

Then again, it's the maligned media polls that are the raw input to Silver and the other models. Unless the media keeps funding the polls, the quality of these more advanced models will suffer.

I suppose that, in theory, he could have given away non-voting shares to some of his employees over time. But then I would have expected the press release to specify that he was the sole voting shareholder, rather than "the sole shareholder."

The 100% ownership is literal. From the press release: "The agreement has been approved by the sole shareholder of Lucasfilm."

Sounds like the patent examiner was test-driving this invention himself.

Would explain quite a bit about PTO.

There's a subtle difference between "sharing" (which I was talking about) and "syncing." The examples in the previous comment focused on sharing (music sharing, photo sharing) and thus were really about the magic of cloud storage like S3, not anything unique added by Dropbox.

You're absolutely right that syncing is a classically hard problem that Dropbox has addressed impressively well for consumers.

You're describing S3, not their customer Dropbox. Adding a sharing layer on top is something easily replicable.