stopcodon

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.

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...

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.

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.

>tried

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.

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.

Exactly, I'm not sure why this suddenly became news. Did nobody bother to tap a name in their friends list in the last 6 months?

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.

The "consumers hate us because of homosexuality in our games" is a PR move from EA to cover the fact they were voted worst company in America for reasons that have nothing to do with sexuality.

They were voted worst company because of their spyware distribution service, anti-consumer DLC practices, and ruining otherwise great developers by buying them and forcing out lackluster sequels designed for profit over all other considerations. I'm not saying that's wrong for a company to do, I'm just saying that's why online communities are upset.

But as long as they keep claiming the people who don't like their company are homophobic, they draw attention from these things in the media.

I was just having a conversation with my supervisor yesterday about how amazing the PLINK project is, and how much easier it makes my work. I use it every day and I can't count the number of times it's saved me from writing embarrassingly messy R scripts to accomplish something.