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Happy Saturday everyone and I hope those who celebrate Christmas are having a glorious time. I know I am.

A few observations I would like to share with everyone today.

It appears the disinterest, or whatever you want to call it, has now hit me full force and I find myself not logging into ALP everyday like I used to do like clockwork. I used to go through the post history at least once a day and most times more often but there is so little to catch my interest now I've for the most part quit doing that.

In my opinion there are several reasons people have quit posting and one of them is because the site is too complicated to navigate with all the changes and I say that as a long time member, who has a very difficult time and can only imagine how frustrated a new person can be.

I can no longer log in through my profile page as I always did in the past and I have yet to find out where to find the list of forums and events I've been invited to, to see if I want to accept or reject the offer.

I can appreciate some of the privacy rules put into place but since they were, member participation in the community seems to have dropped like a brick.

From discussions with some of my friends that is probably one of the reasons very few friend invitations are being sent because they do not want to invite people to be friends if they can not access their profile, which makes sense. It has always been my opinion that in order to set up an account a new member must provide at least a full name and what city and state or region they're from and fill out their about me.

People join but then never accept friend invitations or participate in the community and I can't help but wonder if that is because they can't navigate the site. This is just another observation from my many years of going through the new members list. There are dozens of new people joining everyday but no one stays, my guess is probably less than 1% stay after setting up their account and I can't help but wonder why.

I'm certainly no expert but it appears to me that the wall is probably a bigger detriment and contributes very little to community participation. To be honest, I find it very boring for the most part and from talking with some of my friends, I am not the only one that feels that way, but the only way I can access my profile is by going through that link.

Soooo, I find myself losing interest in my own forums and don't really have much of a desire to keep them active. I still get around a 100 views a day so I know someone is reading them but for me I've lost interest and it would appear many others have lost interest in theirs too or at least that is what I gather as I read down through the post history. No one seems interested in doing forums anymore.

So if I don't get back for a few days I want to take this time to wish everyone a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

:)

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Evelyn, you can't throw in the towel just yet. That's an order! You have to go until you are at least to 1000 pages ...or else!

People haven't posted because they see that our posts, yours and mine, are so good maybe they feel they could not do better. :)) Well, dear people, you can do better. Now it's the time to show us what you can do.

Helen

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Happy Saturday everyone and I hope those who celebrate Christmas are having a glorious time. I know I am.

A few observations I would like to share with everyone today.

It appears the disinterest, or whatever you want to call it, has now hit me full force and I find myself not logging into ALP everyday like I used to do like clockwork. I used to go through the post history at least once a day and most times more often but there is so little to catch my interest now I've for the most part quit doing that.

In my opinion there are several reasons people have quit posting and one of them is because the site is too complicated to navigate with all the changes and I say that as a long time member, who has a very difficult time and can only imagine how frustrated a new person can be.

I can no longer log in through my profile page as I always did in the past and I have yet to find out where to find the list of forums and events I've been invited to, to see if I want to accept or reject the offer.

I can appreciate some of the privacy rules put into place but since they were, member participation in the community seems to have dropped like a brick.

From discussions with some of my friends that is probably one of the reasons very few friend invitations are being sent because they do not want to invite people to be friends if they can not access their profile, which makes sense. It has always been my opinion that in order to set up an account a new member must provide at least a full name and what city and state or region they're from and fill out their about me.

People join but then never accept friend invitations or participate in the community and I can't help but wonder if that is because they can't navigate the site. This is just another observation from my many years of going through the new members list. There are dozens of new people joining everyday but no one stays, my guess is probably less than 1% stay after setting up their account and I can't help but wonder why.

I'm certainly no expert but it appears to me that the wall is probably a bigger detriment and contributes very little to community participation. To be honest, I find it very boring for the most part and from talking with some of my friends, I am not the only one that feels that way, but the only way I can access my profile is by going through that link.

Soooo, I find myself losing interest in my own forums and don't really have much of a desire to keep them active. I still get around a 100 views a day so I know someone is reading them but for me I've lost interest and it would appear many others have lost interest in theirs too or at least that is what I gather as I read down through the post history. No one seems interested in doing forums anymore.

So if I don't get back for a few days I want to take this time to wish everyone a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

:)

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Government Scientists Created Crude Oil from Algae in Mere Minutes

Adam Clark Estes on Gizmodo

Energy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs0QZJ0rea0

Algae to Bio-Crude in Less Than 60 Minutes

Be excited, Earthlings, because science has a surprise for you. Engineers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have devised a way to turn algae into crude oil in less than an hour. That oil can then be refined into gasoline that can run engines.

Excited yet? Try wrapping your head around the implications of a breakthrough like this. As one of the most plentiful lifeforms on the planet, algae is a perfect candidate for conversion to biofuel. It's especially good because the energy is packed pretty tightly into that green sludge. To replace all of the petroleum in the United States with algae fuel, you'd need a farm that took up just 0.42 percent of the country's landmass. By comparison, it would take up half of the United States to grow enough soybeans to replace petroleum with biodiesel.

What Biofuel Is (And Where It Comes From)

Cars didn't always run on gasoline. Henry Ford envisioned his Model T's puttering along with tanks fully of ethanol. Early diesel engines… Read…

Algae fuel is not a new idea, of course, and this is not the first time scientists have turned algae into fossil fuel. It is the first time they've done it so effortlessly and so quickly, however. Other methods require too much time and energy for the conversion to make sense as a petroleum replacement. The new process solves that problem. "It's a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher," said Douglas Elliott, who led the research. "In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We're just doing it much, much faster."

This magic gas could be coming to your local gas station sooner than you think. The Department of Energy already has a partner, Genifuel, working on commercializing the process and making the algae fuel competitive with what's already on the market. But, boy, is it going to be futuristic when you pull up to a gas station and pump your tank full of algae. Talk about going green.

have never traveled to the west or south, cattle guards are horizontal steel rails placed at fence openings, in dug-out places in the roads adjacent to highways (sometimes across highways), to prevent cattle from crossing over that area.

Before the Secretary of the Interior could respond and presumably try to straighten President Obama out on the matter, Vice-President Joe Biden, intervened with a request that...before any "cattle guards" were fired, they be given six months of retraining.

'Times are hard,' said Joe Biden, 'it's only fair to the cattle guards and their families that they be given six months of retraining! '

And these two guys are running their country.