And they do this while putting out a doublespeak public statement saying they don't do things like banning subreddits (but reserve the right to), and were not legally required to in this case.
The admins are getting called out in nearly every top-level comment for folding to media attention and celebrity lawyers, when other objectively worse subreddits are actually granted the "hands-off" approach the site claims to use. Presumably because the victims can't afford legal teams or make headlines like celebrities can when their privacy is violated.
The leaks were despicable and I understand any business taking steps to avoid involvement in their distribution, but you can't expect a user-base like reddits to tolerate the administration saying one thing and doing the exact opposite in certain cases where there's bad press involved.
which explains the decision in greater detail. I think the reddit team is being held to an unreasonably high standard here. The subreddits were banned for generating a huge amount of legitimate DMCA takedown requests and not correctly moderating child pornography content, not because the subjects in the posted images were celebrities with money. There is a correlation, but not a causation. It's hard to run a media enterprise with millions of users, and I think reddit's ambition to be as hands-off as possible is almost unique and commendable.
From what I understand, Reddit admins were getting tonnes more takedowns than usual (for underage pics etc), which was becoming a cat-and-mouse game, and took the pragmatic approach of just banning the whole subreddit.
The Reddit communities reaction this whole thing has been pretty sickening - enough for me to block it in my hostsfile. This was just the law straw I guess.
MetaFilter at least has the advantage of being old and respected enough in tech circles to get the attention of Hacker News and Matt Cutts himself when something like this happens. For the vast majority of legitimate websites who see their traffic drop or become non-existent when google pushes an update to their ranking algorithms, there is virtually no recourse. I understand it's a necessary evil and there will always be collateral damage when trying to combat spammy websites, but at the same time it's scary to know that there are people whose sole source of income is web traffic and overnight it can disappear without explanation.
This will come off as a strawman, but the same could be said for every drug ever prescribed. There's absolutely no way to quantify the effects an "unnatural" molecule will have on a human body, since everyone will have physiological differences, and there will be a near infinite number of environmental factors. The best we can do is use the sum of human knowledge as a framework to test that drug to the best of our ability, and try to figure out if it's safe by examining the evidence.
I'm an agricultural geneticist (not in industry, I have never worked on GMOs but I do keep up to date on the literature so I can educate others), so I will be biased here, but GMOs have been very carefully examined for decades with no credible evidence to suggest they pose a threat to human health.
Without going in to a lesson on population genetics, most genes, even if they found their way in to a natural population outside of a farm, would not spread in the population because of selection against them. Empirically the frequency of this kind of spread from crop to natural population has been found to be nearly non-existent, which is why it's not a huge concern.
Humans have been causing artificial selection on plants for thousands of years. Breeding for completely unnatural traits, and even crossing entirely different species to create novel organisms for agriculture. GMOs are far more controlled in this sense, where you know exactly what you're doing to the genome. Combining two genomes separated by millions of years of evolution at random through forced sexual reproduction in plants happens every day in crop breeding but nobody cares because it has this arbitrary label of "natural", presumably because it doesn't involve some sinister figure in a labcoat.
Unfortunately the anti-GMO activists do an excellent job of spreading misinformation and distrust of scientists to the public. The large biotech companies can do very little for the PR of GMOs, leaving academics to try and fight against the tide of hatred for what is actually an incredible tool for solving the worlds food shortages. Sadly most scientists are too busy writing grants to bother.
"most genes" - I think where our food supply is concerned it probably needs to be '100%' - but that's not to dismiss the valid perspective you raise.
I just hope open-minded people are overseeing the processes, and not leaving the chicken coop to the corporations. GMO has a valid place, an important place, in our technological "bag-of-tricks." It's only the apparent short-sightedness of certain members of the scientific community that sets some of us on edge.
I noticed when I uploaded an image a few days ago, the "direct link to image" field was missing entirely. I figured it was meant to curb direct hotlinking.
In addition to the PLOS series of journals, there are also other modern open-access journals popping up like PeerJ (peerj.com) and elife (elife.elifesciences.org). Anyone can go on and download the papers, and usually the datasets used in the papers if you want to replicate their results.
I played Diablo 1 and 2 for many years, and pre-ordered Diablo 3 like you. I ended up playing for a few weeks and haven't touched it since for the following reasons:
The auction systems - didn't like them for the exact reason the linked article states. There was no "fun" in trying to get gear in the actual game anymore. I used to enjoy "Magic Finding" to gear new characters.
Only 4 people per game (versus 8 in Diablo 2) -
At launch, myself and the 5-6 people I played D2 with all wanted to play together and simply couldn't. I suspect this to be related to the fact they planned to release it on consoles from the start. Unrelated to this complaint, but I also found the interface to be suspiciously optimized for console controls instead of keyboard and mouse.
"Matchmaking" -
Part of the fun of D1 and D2 (in my opinion) was joining player created games (with names specified by the players). PvP games, trade games, chat games, hide and seek, specific quests, magic finding, levelling, boss runs etc. In Diablo 3 this was taken away. You were just thrown into a game with people on the same quest as you. To me this destroyed a significant part of the community that kept people playing D2 as long as they did. In the time I played after launch it was difficult to get in a game with anyone willing to communicate, or who actually spoke the same language.
Fewer skills/choices in placing attributes -
Self-explanatory. D3 dumbed down the process of "building" your character to the point where no matter what you do you'll have a viable build. No more creating a character around a specific skill or item you like just to see if you could optimize it despite the disadvantage of it not being a mainstream build.
No PvP at launch -
Again, self-explanatory. No idea if this was patched in at some point.
I waited 2 hours for an email yesterday only to find it hidden in a new "Promotions" tab instead of my inbox, which meant it didn't get pushed to my phone for some reason.
Man, waiting on Steam Guard to send me an email with a confirmation code got pretty hairy during some of the recent sales. When there's 15 minutes left to say 75% on a game I really want and the confirmation email gets sent to Promotions and therefore never seen... thanks Gmail.
Spam made me give up running my own mail server and start using Gmail.
Gmail is slowly making me give up email altogether.
I am not saying that email perfect and doesn't need innovation, but there should be greater sensitivity towards complexity and friction on Google's part. It is bad enough already that various functions are spread semi-randomly around in different buttons, drop-downs and links so you have to click around to get things done. There's really no need to try to get too clever about things.
I'd like more predictable behavior ("where did that email I looked at just 5 minutes ago end up?") and I would really like a better filtering system. They should have a look at the scoring system in Gnus and then think long and hard about how you build a sensible UI atop that kind of expressive power.
For the iOS gmail app you can choose to be notified for all new mail or "primary" only. I'm not sure about using a built-in client like the Mail app though.
This is probably one of my largest complaints about a google product at the moment. It feels like they're trying to trick me in to doing it with that invasive pop-up I get every week.
I don't even use YouTube for uploading or commenting, but I also don't want my real name and a photo of me on that site in any form. There's always the small chance they'll do something stupid like roll an update that makes my "previously viewed videos" available to my "social connections" by default without notifying me.
That's why ab initio protein structure prediction is such a sought-after tool in bioinformatics. You can have an incredibly high degree of nucleotide/amino acid substitution between two proteins with the same structure, function and evolutionary history, but current methods of detecting these relationships still largely rely on sequence comparison alone.
I saw Rhiju Das speak last week (really fantastic talk). He's working on some very cool deterministic ab initio folding approaches. http://www.stanford.edu/~rhiju/research.html
The last time I read into this subject, there were neural network models that achieved around 80% accuracy. There's a research group at my uni dedicated to this research area.
I think you're referring to the prediction of "secondary structure" of proteins, which was attempted using neural network models as early as 1989. [1] Predicting secondary structure is child's play compared to predicting the folded tertiary structure of a protein, hence the continued use of insanely computationally expensive ab initio folding efforts like Folding@Home.
Read it here: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-f...
Here's the comments from their blog post: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_re...
The admins are getting called out in nearly every top-level comment for folding to media attention and celebrity lawyers, when other objectively worse subreddits are actually granted the "hands-off" approach the site claims to use. Presumably because the victims can't afford legal teams or make headlines like celebrities can when their privacy is violated.
The leaks were despicable and I understand any business taking steps to avoid involvement in their distribution, but you can't expect a user-base like reddits to tolerate the administration saying one thing and doing the exact opposite in certain cases where there's bad press involved.
Edit: Here's a follow-up post from the sysadmin alienth in response to the backlash from their decision: http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_t...