This guy is entitled to use the word "plant" as he will, but it doesn't agree with modern systematics. For example he calls "kelp" a plant, but it is taxonomically closer to the parasite that causes malaria than it is to land plants.

"Macroalgae" is a multi-phyletic category, including eukaryotes of the Archaeplastida group that includes red algae and green algae and the land plants that evolved from green algae, and of the super-group Chromalveolata that includes red tides, brown algae (such as kelp or Plasmodium). Green algae and land plants are grouped together under the kingdom "Plantae" in modern taxonomies.

So "seaweed" as a category includes organisms which are (cladistically speaking) closely related to land plants (green algae like sea grapes or sea lettuce), middling-related (red algae like nori or carageenan) and not very closely related at all (brown algae like kombu/kelp). Of course all organisms are presumably related to some degree.

The seaweed in question is a kind of dulse, a red algae. It's more closely related to land plants than a brown algae like kelp would be, but less related than sea lettuce. Red algae are specifically not included in the Kingdom Plantae. However, layman are free to call whatever they want a plant, even if it's in fact something else entirely, the way they call any small arthropod a "bug", even through true bugs are one of the 75,000 species in the order Hemiptera (out of over a million insect species).

You can charge that cost (in whatever form it comes) to spammers only; if you apply it to everyone equally, you'll run into another phenomenon called "market failure". And identifying spam and spammers is something that many researchers and developers have tried solving already. That's the real problem: it is hard to distinguish spam sources, usage patterns and content from legitimate emailers, especially bulk emailers. How do you propose to "track an undesired effect" in email?

So FB does have a use: as a honeypot. Thanks Mark!

Spam has been moving towards web based services for a while now. Almost all message boards have antispam measures now; every now and then you may run into an orphaned board without such measures, and it'll be wall to wall spam. The ratio of spam and legitimate posts on my Wordpress site used to be over 10/1 until I added some (premium) spam control, but a few spams still make it through. I see the same on a Drupal site I administer. Those spammers are really making the effort in getting through.

Technically it's not a plant. Its a macroalgae and thus belongs to an entirely distinct taxonomic kingdom from plants and animals. Of course halakhically it probably counts as a plant because Jewish law isn't based on modern scientific concepts.

Many years ago some of my wife's friends inhabited a kosher apartment near her engineering school that had been passed down through generations of orthodox students. A dispute arose over whether a particular bowl was glass or pottery. Finally they called in their buddy the material science major for a scientific ruling. "It's neither," he said. "It's ceramic." Which was technically accurate, but irrelevant to the question of whether it could be kashered.

And most often the compression is in the master, not added by the streaming server, though I have no idea if that is the case with Young's music. By the way, that in most cases is the difference between "warm" vinyl and "cold" CDs: they are mastered differently. Record an LP using quality equipment and store it in a 320kbps MP3, and no one will be able to tell the difference.

The Netherlands. The rule was introduced a few years ago because "terrorists". And to make it easier to identify people getting stopped or arrested (but before the new rule, the police already had that power: no ID=get taken to the station, if they doubted you are who you say you are). The rule hasn't generated any additional security or even convenience for the police, but of course they'll never consider repealing that rule.

Maybe... the real question is: will rides be anywhere near affordable?

Suppose they make this thing a little less luxurious, cram in 30-40 small-ish business class style seats, and operate this thing at around the same per-seat price as business/first class on a regular aircraft. They would still sell tickets at 3-4x the price, because there will always be a few people who are willing to pay a lot extra for the prestige and reduced flight time. Concorde proved that. So even if it's economically viable, it'll not be for you and me.

Interesting: they pick you up on a silly charge and let you go, but they can still do you for being upset about that? Depends a bit on how upset the guy was of course, but still... Oh well, it seems to work like that in most places in the world. Over here they'll invariably ask you for your ID, which you are obliged to carry but many people don't, so they get to slap on an extra fine.
In any case he is lucky he wasn't asked to "help the police with their inquiries", i.e. locked in a room and beaten with a rubber hose. Gotta love British euphemisms.

You're going straight to hell for that one... ;)

Public opinion is one thing, regulation and oversight are another matter entirely. Shit happened, it got cleaned up more or less, and the company responsible for the mess paid for it and them some. But you'd think that regulators would at least ask a few questions, llike "what happened" and "what can we do to make sure the same thing doesn't happen again".

If anything, medical students, and indeed everyone, should approach these controversial topics with a scientific "lens". Keep an open mind, certainly, but keep it open to alternative avenues of scientific exploration, and apply the same rigour as you would to your regular research.

That does sound pretty stupid... SpaceX are doing some amazing, exiting and innovative things, and if they continue on this path without too many rockets blowing up, I am sure they will have a bright future ahead of them, and I sincerely hope they will do well. But they have yet to prove that they are capable of applying rigorous quality control to every part of their spacecraft. So far, they have had one rocket blow up in flight for unknown reasons. The first stage landings they attempted failed due to running out of hydraulic fluid, and due to a stuck valve. Those two attempts were successful in showing that such landings are at least feasible in principle, but those failures do kind of sound like avoidable ones. I don't haveany detailed insight in those failures, but it does mean that I for one will not blindly trust them to put me safely in orbit.

Depends. If you are a manager responsible for a service that relies on the TF1 project, there are two scenarios.
Close source TF1 goes bust: "Unfortunately this happens sometimes, but at least we get to sue the company for damages"
Open source RF1 goes bust: "You used FOSS for this project? How could you have been so irresponsible?!"

To be fair, that was 5 years ago, and my last few clients (large corporations) are wising up to this particular risk. When they buy software, they do assess the risk of the vendor going out of business and weigh that against the impact of losing the software. When they use open source, they implement a strategy to mitigate that risk, by identifying alternatives, or by assessing the feasibility to provide continued support of the software with in-house resources or external consultants.

I'd pay for that in a heartbeat, but I've never seen that option on other airlines (KLMs "Comfort Class" is a few extra inches of leg room and nothing else) I've been tempted a few times to buy the middle seat by getting 3 tickets when travelling with my girlfriend, it could be a relatively cheap way to buy a lot of extra comfort. However I think the airline would somehow still screw it up: "I am sorry, we've had to reshuffle some crying infants around to spread te noise evenly across the cabin, and now your empty spare seat is somewhere 2 rows behind you", or "I am sorry but we are overbooked and we are commandeering your empty seat. Enjoy your massively overweight smelly neighbour".

Sure there are: the legs of the passenger facing the other way.

No kidding though, that seems to be the point of this configuration. Not to decrease seat pitch (distance between rows), but to decrease even further the width of the already narrow economy seats, to go 3-3-3 instead of 2-3-2 perhaps. And the only way to do it without having to rub shoulders with your neighbour (already an issue on certain flights with certain passengers) is to have the middle person sit the other way, and have no armrests. If they'd add those, they would get in the way of the legs of your neighbour.

Screw this. I've always said that I would happily pay 50-75% extra for a 50-75% increase in space (both width and pitch), but someone told me once that the airlines are afraid to make "comfort class" so comfortable as to have business class travellers choose that instead of flying business class, where the real money is made.

Mass surveillance is when they listen in on everyone, including you, me and Amnesty. If they just tap into Amnesty, it's targeted surveillance. It might still be wrong, but it's not the same. I'm not against targeted surveillance, provided that there are clear rules in place that get independently verified and rigorously enforced (which of course is never the case).