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Submission + - Facebook Did Have Permission to Use Your Data for Research

An anonymous reader writes: In light of the media frenzy regarding Facebook's use of user data to conduct a psychology experiment, it's worth noting that Facebook's terms of service gives Facebook the right to utilize user data for 'data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.' To use Facebook at all, users would have had to agree to this provision. Bottom line: if you don't want to be the subject of psychology experiments, read your social media terms of service.

Submission + - All big animals take the same amount of time to pee (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: An elephant’s bladder is more than 3000 times the size of a cat’s, yet the two animals take the same amount of time to urinate. Videos shot of a range of different mammals reveal that, as long as the animals are larger than 3 kilograms, they take approximately 21 seconds to empty their bladders. As an animal’s body size increases, so does the length of its urethra. Because an elephant’s urethra is longer than a cat’s, for example, gravity creates more pressure in the elephant’s urethra, pushing the urine through faster. The rule doesn’t hold for small animals like rats and bats, which take only 0.1 to 2 seconds to urinate. Their urethras are so thin that gravity doesn’t affect the flow of urine. Instead, surface tension pulls the urine through the urethra until it emerges in droplets . The researchers hope that their findings will help engineers build larger systems of pipes and reservoirs that don’t take as long to drain.

Submission + - Match.com, Mensa create dating site for geniuses (cnn.com) 2

mpicpp writes: For one, the elite society only takes individuals with IQ scores in the 98th percentile, meaning just 1 in 50 Americans is eligible.

  Flirting is big business in Big Apple Matchmaker: New York women are 'dumb' Gitmo detainee has Match.com profile
This exclusivity — some might say snobbery — is part of Mensa's lore. Early Mensans in Britain walked around with yellow buttons, organizational publications once referred to non-Mensa members as "Densans," and last year, a top Mensa member and tester called anyone with an IQ of 60 a "carrot."

In short, you don't always join Mensa because you think you're smart. You join to be set apart from most people, who are, as one member put it: "mundane."

But a new partnership between American Mensa and online dating giant Match.com offers a new, enticing reason to join the society of geniuses: true love.

Beginning this week, members of the brainiac group can connect through a separate, exclusive dating service called Mensa Match. In addition, Match.com members can add a special Mensa badge to their profiles, signaling a specific interest in connecting with a single person with a confirmed genius-level IQ score.

Comment Re:Thanks for pointing out the "briefly" part. (Score 1) 461

To be fair, that also depends on your longitude within your time zone. Just going from one end to the other of a typical time zone is an hour's difference on any day of the year, and can be worse if time zones are extended too far from their central longitude. I've lived mostly at the same longitude most of my life, in the center of a time zone. The one year when I lived half a time zone east, I was surprised how early the sun came up, even with it only being a half hour difference.

Comment Re:Remind my why they are being sued (Score 1) 484

Because for one thing, the "transmission range" is how their local ads are based. If you watched a local NYC station via Aereo from LA, those used car dealer ads wouldn't be very useful. Also, you'd be in the range of another local station on the same network, which pays the network for the right to be exclusive in their area. And they didn't even get into all the content black-out rules.

Not only that, but there are even fringe-area stations that rebroadcast on very weak transmitters located in the transmitter antenna farm (weak as in 75 watts, yes, as in a light bulb) for the sole purpose of being received by the local cable company(s), cha-ching! I have a pretty good antenna, but at 15 miles I have no chance to pick up one of those baby translator signals, as long as I refuse to support the cable-industrial complex. Or maybe eventually those stations will finally clue in to the new trend of declining cable subscribers, and add a few watts. (In comparison, I can pick up the local university's student-run low power TV station, ten miles farther away, quite easily with a good antenna.)

Comment Re:Bloody Content Providers (Score 1) 484

Except that TWC and Comcast have to pay to rebroadcast local TV signals. Yes, the same ones you can receive freely with an antenna. Every now and again when the contracts are up for renegotiation, they start spamming TV and radio ads about how YOU COULD LOSE YOUR FOX TV!, but somehow it always gets resolved in time. (or maybe after 2 or 3 days of a cable channel gone black)

Comment Re:DAR.fm vs Aereo (Score 1) 484

That's because this is based on a law specifically targeted at cable TV companies, created at the request of the TV networks. In the US, at least, local TV stations have a sort of limited monopoly over the right to broadcast their network's signal. Otherwise cable companies (and especially satellite TV companies!) might just pull down the network feed without inserts or news, or even a channel from the next big city over, leaving the local station blowing in the wind. Not that all or even many of the cable companies would do stuff like this, but there were probably enough problems starting to happen that the law was pushed through.

It's not entirely unlike the problems Tesla has been having with dealership laws. The local dealers want the laws that keep the manufacturers from competing with them, whether or not it would actually be a problem. The manufacturers are likely to just decide it's not worth the trouble when there's already a good dealer around. But if there's a bad dealer, too bad. And also with Uber/Lyft vs. cab companies... there are so many bad cabbies who have no motivation to get better because they already have the limited monopoly licenses that keep good competition out.

Comment Re:Zediva all over again. (Score 2) 484

As someone else analogized it, Aereo was "operating an antenna for other people", which is what a cable company does. (it used to be all they did, before there were cable-only networks) Nobody else is providing you with the antenna to record broadcast TV. (Unless you're recording off of cable/sat, in which case the networks have already been paid off by your cable/sat company.)

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