The people spreading FUD on youtube are not scientists, they are crackpots. It's easy to recognize the difference, because scientists tend to take account of the difference between what is known and what is not. Scientists don't yell "VACCINES KILL YOU", they say things like "this particular side effect needs to be studied more thoroughly".

Because I'm too lazy for vi :-)

In many European countries, the "age of consent" is something like 14-16. Check Wikipedia.

Try Czech. Where words are written in phonetic spelling, but no foreigner will ever manage to learn the pronounciation :)

The funny part of all that is that people could get tuition for free elsewhere. E.g. in Germany tuition is either free or the fees are very low, for everyone (yes, including foreign students), and several of the major universities offer courses in English for international students.

It's also highly flawed. The radioactivity of bananas comes from potassium. But the human body controls it's potassium content.. if there's too much, it gets flushed out. So eating bananas will not increase the amount of radioactive material in your body.

This is completely different for e.g. radioactive iodine, which adds to the body's inventory of radioactive material.

In all fairness, if you want to make a contribution that is worth co-authorship of a paper, you might need at least a good amateur telescope (maybe on the order of 10 inch aperture) and a CCD camera.

With such equipment, and clear skies, you can do photometric monitoring of stars (e.g. for outbursts, or planet transits). Asronomers always have the problem that big observatories focus on big telescopes, and it's difficult to do things that require small telescopes, but long-term monitoring.

One example would be monitoring of the transits of extrasolar planets, to detect timing anomalies (which could be caused by undetected additional planets). Or monitoring stars with planets detected by radial velocity variations, to discover eventual transits. Or monitoring of ongoing gravitational lens events... there are quite a few oportunities for amateurs.

Ubuntu has apparmor sandboxing of firefox as an option that's turned off by default, and even if you turn it on it's not sandboxed enough IMO (firefox can read and write almost anything in the user's home directory with the exclusion of just a few directories).

It's trivial to simply run Firefox under a different user id. I use about three applications that need to access the net (web, mail, chat), and each of them gets started (via a simple wrapper script) under a different, dedicated UID.

There isn't any useful data to work with that we have about stars - only their light. Yet some people have seen that as a challenge, and have built a whole branch of science on it. There's plenty of obvious structure in that visualisation, meaning there's plenty of information.

I have a separate sandbox user for each application that accesses the net (mail, browser, ...). Each of these sandbox users is in its own group, and thus has access only to their own files and world readable (and eventually writeable, like /tmp) locations. Applications get started from my "real" account with sudo. I wonder why distros don't support that out of the box at least for the browser, because it would be fairly trivial to set up as part of a "create new user" script.

The problem with videoconferencing is that you see half of the audience only through the tiny "keyhole" of the video screen. In a public seminar talk, it's distracting and confusing for the speaker and the part of the audience that is physically present. I've been at seminar talks involving videoconferencing, and I've been in SL seminar talks, and I found the latter a much better, more consistent experience.

Totally wrong. Thanks to the relaxed privacy standards in the US of A, there's tons of readily available personal information in online databases that you can use to pass the age verification.

They measure cumulative size distribution (how many groups of size >= N) and churn (how many people leave the group for another one in a given period).

They are able to come up with a simple mathematical model for the behaviour of players (essentially: recruit people with diverse attributes/skills) that reproduces the observed data extremely well. And they also show that the alternative 'kinship' model (recruit people with similar attributes/skills) fails to reproduce the observed data.

I would say that their model does quite a good job at modeling some rather nontrivial data.

It's a big hit among the people who have the creativity to actually do something, rather than just consuming. It's a big fail with those who expect a game with a set goal, those who need to cling to someone/something telling them what to do.

I'm doing freeform roleplay, and it's great fun. There's plenty of roleplay communities in SL.

Depends on your local jurisdiction. In Germany there was a lawsuit against a government agency because it logged IP addresses of website vistors. The court decided that IP addresses are individual user information, and the agency was ordered to stop logging IP addresses because it was a violation of privacy laws.