Seattle-based Classmates.com has agreed to pay up to $9.5 million to its users to settle a lawsuit that accused the social network of sending emails that made people believe their old friends from high school were reaching out to connect — only to discover, after paying for a membership, that their long-lost buddies were nowhere to be found.

The proposed settlement, filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Seattle, would designate $3 in cash for every Classmates.com member (dating back to Jan. 1, 2007) who upgraded to a “gold” membership on the site after receiving an email suggesting that they pay for premium access to see who had signed their online guestbooks. Documents filed in the case estimate that as many as 3.16 million people in the United States would be eligible for the payout.

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He resigned when it finally dawned on him that he was CEO of Myspace.

I was just over at Myspace. What a shitty, filthy neighborhood that has become. Street performers, hookers and runaways everywhere.
— Marc Maron

Someday, I want to go to a site that proclaims a miracle and see a real miracle, like a pie miraculously floating above my keyboard, or a MySpace page that doesn’t look like technicolor vomit.
— PZ Myers

HOUSTON — Astronauts aboard the International Space Station received a special software upgrade this week – personal access to the Internet and the World Wide Web via the ultimate wireless connection.

Expedition 22 Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer made first use of the new system Friday, when he posted the first unassisted update to his Twitter account, @Astro_TJ, from the space station. Previous tweets from space had to be e-mailed to the ground where support personnel posted them to the astronaut’s Twitter account.

“Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

This personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, takes advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and gives astronauts the ability to browse and use the Web. The system will provide astronauts with direct private communications to enhance their quality of life during long-duration missions by helping to ease the isolation associated with life in a closed environment.

During periods when the station is actively communicating with the ground using high-speed Ku-band communications, the crew will have remote access to the Internet via a ground computer. The crew will view the desktop of the ground computer using an onboard laptop and interact remotely with their keyboard touchpad.

Astronauts will be subject to the same computer use guidelines as government employees on Earth. In addition to this new capability, the crew will continue to have official e-mail, Internet Protocol telephone and limited videoconferencing capabilities.

The whole setup seems to be a bit kludgy…

News Corp. will likely pull all of its newspaper content from Google News once its switches from an ad-supported to a subscription-based model, according to Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch on Friday sat down with Sky News, of which News Corp. is a partial owner, to discuss the impact of the Internet on news, among other things.

The Australian media tycoon has been critical of the Google News aggregation model, as well as similar offerings from Microsoft and Ask.com, which he says is tantamount to stealing. When asked why he has not pulled News Corp.-owned material from Google News, Murdoch said that it will likely happen down the road.

“I think we will,” Murdoch said. “But that’s going to be when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal.”

Google has argued that its news aggregator simply points users to content online and actually helps drive traffic to news sites. Murdoch was not impressed by Internet traffic and said he was more interested in finding loyal readers.

If News Corp. and others are so concerned about Google aggregating their news, they can easily put a stop Google by adding an entry to their robots.txt file or through using meta tags. One has to wonder why News Corps. and other news organizations just don’t simply block Google instead of whining about them…

The same could be said for cable news and talk radio…

• Results 1 – 10 of about 194,000,000 for jesus
• Results 1 – 10 of about 76,000,000 for beatles

So Jesus is more popular than the Beatles.

But wait..

• Results 1 – 10 of about 43,600,000 for “jesus christ”

According to Google, the Beatles are more popular than Jesus Christ. Maybe John Lennon was on to something…

Microsoft has put the Richard Feynman Messenger Series of lectures online. Which is definitely a good thing. Unfortunately, Silverlight is required to access the content of this page. Which wouldn’t be so bad, but this page doesn’t work with Moonlight. Apparently, we Linux users can’t access the content of this page.

When a web sight requires a specific browser/OS combination, it can mean one of two things:

1. The web developers are incompetent.
2. Someone is being a dick.

I leave it up to the reader to decide which category Microsoft belongs in…

Should your website have a flash intro?