talk about deceptive titles.
i know this much: protein folding is to many the holy grail of biotech. because most(?) of the most successful biologics have been large proteins. because protein folding is so obscure, manufacturing large, complex proteins is non-trivial, difficult to scale up and to troubleshoot. (using computer buzzwords since this is hn.) there are a limited number of facilities in the world that can do it right. a delicate process to say the least.
a more accurate headline might be: patent granted to ornl for work on protein folding.
can we please stop picking on facebook? it's not fair to all the people who rely on personal data mining and serving up ads for a living. it might make them uncomfortable.
so do you think mark zuckerberg will mind if i scrape some fb profile photos and personal info and throw up a facemash-styled site like he did with his classmates' photos and info at harvard? do you think he would mind? it's ok, right?
facebook still isn't cool enough to support my browser.
it's been years.
this is a poor excuse since it's ultra-trivial to do so.
it's RFC-compliant.
no coolness required.
so if someone introduced a way to be on a small local area network with just you and your friends/family, without involving any third party servers (no xmpp or whatever else), would you guys be interested? encrypted of course, but based on "real world" trust (you already know each other in real life, you share a passphrase in person, the old fashioned way, no online pki conundrums).
is there a demand for this?
are people annoyed enough with facebook that they're ready for this?
ha. this is smart by fb. if they follow the yahoo model, access to that data is sold to the agencies that want it. they don't get access for free. so fb has an interest in having a nice store of data on offer. it's a nice business unit on its own in addition to their ad selling pursuits.
a more accurate headline might be: patent granted to ornl for work on protein folding.