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 Judicial Conference of the United States determines the PACER fees and appears to draw a distinction between the quarterly "fee waiver" available to all accounts and a "fee exemption" granted by a court after making the requisite findings (e.g., exemption is necessary to avoid unreasonable burdens and to promote public access to information, research is for academic/non-commercial use, etc.).
March 14, 2001: "no fee … [will] be owed until an individual … accrue[s] charges of more than $10 in a calendar year. … providing a basic level of public access consistent with the services historically provided by the courts."
March 16, 2010: "In order to encourage use of … PACER … by the public, … users [will] not be billed until their accounts total[] at least $10 in a one-year period. To increase the amount of data available without charge … users [will] be allowed to accrue $10 in free usage quarterly, instead of yearly, before they would be charged."
September 13, 2011: "… the current waiver of fees of $10 or less in a quarterly billing cycle be changed to $15 or less per quarter so that 75 to 80 percent of all users would still receive fee waivers"
September 23, 2003: "exemptions to the fee are only to be given upon a showing of cause, are limited to specific categories of users, may be granted for a specific period of time, may be revoked at the discretion of the court, and are only for access related to the purpose for which the exemption was given."
March 15, 2011: The Electronic Public Access (EPA) Fee Schedule provides for exemptions … upon a showing that an exemption is necessary to avoid unreasonable burdens and to promote public access to information. … [T]he Conference approved, a modification of the EPA fee schedule to include the following sentence: “For individual researchers, courts must also find that the defined research project is intended for academic research purposes, and not for commercial purposes or internet redistribution.”
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.
These laws came into existence to protect dealers from predatory actions taken by manufacturers against the public interest. They have their roots in the Great Depression era when Henry Ford dumped inventory on dealers with "offers they couldn't refuse."
There is a huge imbalance of power in this relationship. Since their creation the statutes have been captured by special interest just like every other regulation.
> 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.
Thanks for the suggestion. I've added your benchmark suggestion (along with a bunch of other fixes and new data like a 2008 RMSE benchmark along the lines of your Brier suggestion) into the R document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rnmx8UZAe25YdxkVQbIVwBI0...
(I don't know when the new numbers will go live on the blog; Luke handles that.)
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."
I don't really know much about the movie business, but my understanding is that new companies are incorporated for each individual movie project. The investors (of cash, franchise IP, or time) receive shares in that movie's corporation. Presumably the profits are then paid out as dividends, or the company is dissolved, and assets are distributed. That would explain why George Lucas never suffered any dilution on Lucasfilm, which presumably is just a shell whose main purpose is ownership of the various franchises and holding shares in the various sub-companies.
The whole shebang is owned by GWL. I once heard George say that he had no interest in going public. He wanted his companies to work on his projects before anything else, which cause a lot of grief at ILM some years ago.
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.