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UK's FSA Finds No Health Benefits To Organic Food
blackbeak writes "The UK Food Standards Agency's 'Independant Organic Review' results were just released, and the BBC rushed to publish the findings in the shockingly titled article, 'No Health Benefits to Organic Food.' From the article, 'There is little difference in nutritional value and no evidence of any extra health benefits from eating organic produce, UK researchers found.' A peek into the research at Postpeakpublishing provides a slightly deeper look."
"I hereby sentence you to a term of no less than 6 years and not exceeding 12 years" bellowed the Judge at my court case. You could tell in the sterness of his voice and his general demeanor that he took delight in sending scum like me up the river. A fucking DUI that ended up killing some black kid in Detroit was all it took to sealed my fate for the next decade. I had thoughts of appeal but I figured it wouldn't be worth the little savings I had left and my sentence would probably stand. To this day I still believe had the kid been white, my life would have been much easier, inside and outside of prison.
Now, don't believe what you see on Televison about prison, it is a far worse place than any 32" screen could every conjure up. Imagine watching an MSNBC special on jail or an episode of OZ and take that experience and double it. That's about the wretched hell I have come to know for the past 3 1/2 years. Sometimes I don't know who is worse and my already fazed and battered mind, the prison guards or the inmates. It really takes a certain type of psychopath to want to work around this place, 8 hours a day or longer and that's exactly the type of labor pool this place picks from.
I can't say my first week was the worst week of my life, but I can certainly say it was the scariest, most horrifying change change in lifestyle I can remember. The dynamic between my old life as a software developer with a modest 1 bedroom downtime, to sharing a tiny cell with a sexual deviant is enough to make anyone go insane. But anyway let me talk about my first day of 12 long years here.
As I was escorted on to the prison bound bus with the day's newly convicted felons, it was already starting. I was chained next to this black man named Napps. I am sure this wasn't his real name but you can't tell these days with the way these people are named. Now Napps was a pretty built man, and I could tell by the excess amount of tattos and his attitude, that this wasn't the first time he was getting bussed off to a stint in the State Penetentary. Napps upon being forced to sit next to me had given me a look that you would imagine a wolf would give towards their defenseless prey. That was what I officially was now, defensless prey for Napps and God knows who else now. Napps, with a smug and deviously look in his eye asked me "What's a white boy like yourself doing going to the shit?". "Pardon?", I said uneasily almost choking on my words. "This white boy dinks we at da country club.", he said to the rest of the bus, while the bus started roaring in laughter. Now all eyes and ears on the bus were tuned in to me. "I says, wat a tender cracka like you doing here wit the rest of us?", he said in a more pointed fashion. "I'm here...for drunk driving. I killed someone in Brightmore", I shamefully admitted. "So you the motherfucka who killed dat black kid!", now furious with me. The rest of the bus, still focused on me began roaring again loudly as if my crime is more terrible than raping and killing a white woman in the suburbs (I eventually find this out later on). "You lucky da guards are here bitch, you hear me? When we get down to the shit, your ass belongs to the blacks, you got it cracker?". My heart jumped, not even in prison yet, and I am already targeted for what I am sure is to be a stabbing. Shit.
The bus finally turned into the outer gate, which seemed to stretch on for ever, Napps was still from time to time threatening me. I didn't think I would even make it into prison alive. "So you kill one of ours, huh?", he uttered with extreme hatred. "Well, I took one of yours too bitch ass. 4 of my boys went to your white part of town and and took a bitch. We ran a train on dat fo 8 hours, den we pours acid on that cunt", he must have enjoyed the thought as he laughed sadisticly while telling me his crime. As we got manhandled off of the bus one by one, Napps turned around and said "watch yo ass, lit'ry!", before being forced face first by the guard.
By now I was too much in shock from being scared to even be scared. I
A giant customized Starbucks in Cupertino California where lattes and no soy skim macchiatos are given out free to all employees. The background music involves a playlist of Nora Jones, David Matthews, John Mayer, and Bono on loop from an Ipod docked somewhere in the Apple/Starbucks facility. Hours are long but morale is surprising high as developers, hardware and software, are given 30 minute breaks to masturbate to the new itunes interface.
All developers sit at cafe type tables with a Mac Book Pro while their lord and master Steve Jobs stands deskless in his predictable attire of a turtleneck and jeans. In fact, this is the preferred (mandatory) dress code at Apple. Jobs walks around to each and every department, separated by latte and vegan preferences, and checks on the performance and efficiency of his developers. At any given point in the day one may see Mr Jobs yelling at a programmer for not implementing a button in the perfect shade of corn flower blue (#6495ED) and immediately sends him to the apple punitive chamber, consisting of a HP Compaq running Vista Basic.
There are 2 software development departments and 2 hardware development sections in Apple. For software there is the Apple core team, Apple Open Source team. In hardware there is the Apple systems and management team and the iDevice team. Since the OSX kernel consists of a BSD darwin kernel there is no real need for low level programmers and as such the entirety of the Apple core team consists of UI designers and photoshop junkies. All software churned out from the core team is designed in a program strikingly similar to Visual Studio's form designer but with Cocoa Objective C generated instead. The 16 hour day (Jobs demands 16 hour days since he himself never sleeps) of a core dev involves lining up the right shade of chrome with the latest photoshopped graphite button and maintaining the correct color scheme, not an easy job at all.
The Apple open source team involves a little bit more coding, which is mandated to be done in TextEdit or the option of a $80 third party mac text editor. The Apple open source team doesn't actually create much code but searches the internet for interesting BSD licensed software and modifies it as it's own through obfuscation and conversion to objective C. Many of the items a mac user sees comes from the open source world stamped by apple such as the ability to play music taken from 67 different originally linux based players, CD burning, and the overall ability to click a mouse. Apple's legal department has no qualms about this practice and has assured many that since most of the code is BSD and if any is GPLed many Linux hippies should be grateful that Apple fostered WebKit by using KHTML and adding some Gecko bloat. Perhaps one of the most important items that the open source team has done to date is use parts of the FreeBSD to keep the kernel up to date.
There's not much to say about the Apple systems and management team. I suppose they can be classified in to desktop and laptop systems. Because hardware work is beneath Apple in general and thought of being only worthy of Windows Users and as such can be found working on these beauties in the starbucks bathroom. Desktops are currently made by buying dell machines and putting them in Lian Li cases, where the majority of the costs goes to buying titanium Apple emblems to paste on the sides. Laptops consists of the rebranding of only the most silver and black Sony Viaos but talk has been going around about rebranding Asus EeePCs for a new Apple netbook but you didn't hear that from me, for fear of my life.
The iDevice team's job is to develop for the ipod, iphone, itouch, and many other portable electronics apple may release in the future. Their jobs are very interconnected with the open source team as well as the core dev team. Using firmware from random samsung devices and giving it an OSX
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