Comment Re:Them's some low standards of difficulty. (Score 1) 490
Apparently Algebra II includes complex numbers. Are you saying complex numbers are not complex?
Comment Re:Buzz off, I'm not interested in another one! (Score 1) 310
If only it were that simple. How do I hide all the "X is now friend with Y" posts? Or the "X likes Y" posts? It would be trivial to implement this function, but for some reason Facebook thinks I have to see them.
Whatever, it just makes me use it less.
Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."
Comment Re:An opinion by a PhD and sustainable farmer (Score 3, Interesting) 766
They say in one part: "The most fundamental point to bear in mind from the outset is that a sample size of 10 for biochemical parameters measured two times in 90 days is largely insufficient to ensure an acceptable degree of power to the statistical analysis performed and presented by Monsanto. " They say that because they think Monsanto shouldn't say the corn is safe - but then they (these researchers) are using that same "Insufficient" data to say it's unsafe. That's the way this whole paper is- it just doesn't jive together.
You might want to re-read your statistics textbook. They say that the power of the Monsanto analysis is low. That implies that if Monsanto does not see a significant result, they cannot conclude that no effect exists. However, the authors of this study see significant results nevertheless. Thus, even though power was low, the effect was large enough to show up.
In a nutshell: To demonstrate that there is a problem, all you have to do is find the problem in some instance. To demonstrate that there is no problem, you have to demonstrate that you looked very hard and yet could not find a problem. What the authors are saying is: "Monsanto didn't look very hard, and yet there is evidence of problems."
Comment Re:so this is like fusion but only 10 years away i (Score 4, Insightful) 134
That comparison is not valid. The problem with fuel from algae is to make it *commercially* viable. The problem with energy from fusion is to make it *viable*, period.
At this moment in time, there is not a single fusion reactor anywhere in the world that produces net energy. By contrast, there are many facilities that obtain fuel from algae. But the fuel that is being produced is not cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels at market prices.
Comment Re:Plants make their bodies from cellulose. (Score 1) 134
As others have pointed out, algae are interesting because they produce oil, not because they produce cellulose. Regardless, the process of turning cellulose into fuel is well understood now and several companies are starting to implement it on an industrial scale. See e.g. http://www.gevo.com./
Comment Re:the challenges of the current policy (Score 3, Interesting) 223
I totally agree. The current policy is broken. It looks good on paper, but creates major headaches for the researchers.
In my view, the NIH is taking the easy way out. Instead of negotiating with journals directly, NIH just puts the burden on the researchers to figure out, for every publication separately, what is the correct way to handle it.
To get a sense of the hoops you have to jump through to do it properly,
read e.g. this blog post by a person whose job it is to take care of pubmed central submissions.
In practice, a highly productive lab would need an extra administrative person just to deal with these issues. That doesn't seem like a good way to spend research money to me.
Fairpoint Pledges To Violate Net Neutrality 249
wytcld writes "Fairpoint Communications, which has taken over Verizon's landline business in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, has announced that on February 6, 'AOL, Yahoo! and MSN subscribers will continue to have access to content but will no longer be able to access their e-mail through the third-party Web site. Instead, Yahoo! and other third-party e-mail will be accessed directly at the MyFairPoint.net portal.' Since Verizon spun off its lines to Fairpoint in a maneuver that got debt off of Verizon's balance sheets by saddling Fairpoint with it, there was concern by the public service boards of the three states about how Fairpoint would deal with that debt. Fairpoint's profit plan: force all Webmail users through Fairpoint's portal, by blocking all direct access to Webmail portals other than its own. Will Fairpoint's own search engine portal be next? What can stop them?"
