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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

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…

• 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?