why not? there is a big difference b/w someone waving a gun and assaulting people physically and someone who did not directly threaten people's life.

Small nitpick - many bank robberies are initiated and concluded just by passing a note to the teller without any overt threats, and without having any weapons on them. If they're savvy, they'll even ask for the money to be laid on the table to avoid the dye packs.

The popular portrayal of a bank robbery is dramatic but outdated.

I imagine that it's still a very threatening experience for teller. Much worse than logging on to a computer and discovering that there are money missing.

If they robbed a bank physically they'd have to have visited the U.S. and it's clear what country they committed a crime in. It is not as clear-cut when they have never been to the U.S.

If Nokia has innovated in the mobile communication area, why would it be wrong for them to use their intellectual property rights.

A separate question is if intellectual property is a good idea at all. But that is beyond the question at hand.

Patent trolls are just a bad idea, but in this case Nokia may have created a foundation that the Apple is building upon. Companies pay for licensing technology all the time. USB, Firewire, Bluetooth, ...

N900 could be interesting in this regard.

Most of my disappointment with the N800 was in the operating system and UI. There was absolutely no support either. I don't think it even came with a manual. It looked like it had been cobbled together rather than lovingly thought out.

maemo looked interesting, but even the firmware update method was archaic and extremely over complex. From what I remember it only worked if you unplugged the usb cable and plugged it in at exactly the right point or something! (swear to god, this was in the README).

Maybe it's all changed now though.

N900 is interesting in that it is both a tablet PC (or whatever term fits best) and a phone. One less device to carry.

I do not know re. if the UI experience has changed. I can see how N-series tablets can appeal to hackers who like to modify the software that is running on their device. From this POV having a full-fledged Linux on a mobile device is a plus. But N710/N800 was indeed less slick in terms of the user experience than Apple's devices.

One could also use SVN and GIT together. That might solve a part of the problem with not submitting fixes because of being in the middle of other set of changes. Develop using GIT locally and submit to SVN repository when ready.

What is experience of HN readers with using a combination of centralised and distributed VCS together? Have you used it and in what situations, if any, is it useful?

We use git-svn extensively at work. It is pretty good at allowing us to keep our central core dev branch going on SVN with numerous teams not using git-svn, while allowing us to do all our release branching and such in git. I would not be happy to use it in a situation where we had multiple concurrent SVN branches, but then, I wouldn't care to be using SVN there either.

You really do get the bulk of the advantages; it's not perfect, and if you have to coordinate with someone not using git it can be a challenge, but it mostly works. People were briefly annoyed at our "patch bombs" but got over it.

There is no big harm in giving something a name. Giving a name also helps if you find a need to reuse it later. Plus a name can give a hint to what this code is for.

Yet, if you look in functional programming code (e.g. Haskell, Scheme), you'll find many anonymous lambdas (that in python would be > 1 line). Why would good coders bother doing that?

If something is small and enough to be anonymous, it's usually simply enough to be expressed without binding a variable.

(See point-free style.)

Obviously. Show us how to do point-free style in Python. We're talking about Python's lame implementation of anonymous functions, not something that it doesn't have any implementation of.

Oh, I thought you were talking about programmers' habits in Haskell.

a good idea.

but there are some countries/regions still missing from the "Regions" drop-down list which, being a required field, might prevent people from these countries filling out the form.

e.g., Ireland, Greece, ...

"... anything that allows arbitrary devices to pretend to be an iPhone and sync jeopardizes email account information--which can be synced to the iPhone--and is a security flaw."

Since we are talking about USB ids here, pretending to be an iPhone would open a "security flaw" only when they have physical access to the computer iPhone's being synced with.

In which case a person already can do whatever they like with it. E.g., just copy your entire hard drive.