If much of your life is meetings, the ability to forward calendar items back and forth, and collaborate on changing them etc. is . . . well, actually, that + phone integration is probably the only reason I actually GET to most of my meetings.
Manning broke his NDA by relaying the information, afaik he didn't "hack" it, he had access to it due to his work area, of course he had to sign an NDA to keep it secret and he broke this NDA. Illegal... well, the US army certainly has a civil case against him, and due to the nature of the information it may even be a criminal one. I cannot see what law Wikileaks broke. I didn't read the Aussie legal code, but it would be the only country I know where publishing the info of foreign governments is a crime.
The wonderful thing about working for the federal government is that things that would be civil actions if you were working for a corporation tend to be criminal actions when you do it to the federal government. I assure you that the NDA for classified information clearly states criminal, not civil, penalties for violating it. This is true whether you are military, civilian, or contractor. That Manning falls under the UCMJ has relatively little impact on the situation.
Oh? The posting of classified government information isn't illegal in the EU? Really now? LOL.
The posting of EU classified government information may be illegal in the EU (EU states do not have as strong press freedom laws as the US, actually -- as one friend put it "about the time the US was publishing the Freedom of Information Act, the UK was updating the Official Secrets Act") but wikileaks hasn't done that. I find it hard to think of any law in the EU wikileaks could have broken. Yet.
In the US the pentagon papers case leaves it carefully ambiguous as to whether one is allowed to publish classified information when one gets it in ALL cases, but certainly in some cases it is legal as that was the point of the precedent. (NOTE: US law has no forgiveness for Manning, nor should it -- he broke a half dozen laws that on several occasions he specifically promised to uphold. Wikileaks, though, is probably okay. It depends on whether Wikileaks is classified as a journalistic or intelligence gathering agency.)
But in this case what is at issue is a.) EU law, and b.) that wikileaks has not so much as been indicted in any court, nor, in truth, is it likely to be. Bravo to wikileaks for taking this action, and I hope they win, it will be a win for free speech and freedom of the press around the world.
If someone can hold an entire city to ransom, they are clearly not "just another disposable grunt admin".
I don't think you understand the concept of "disposable". It means when you're gone, they don't miss you. If you're gone and they want passwords that only you have, you weren't disposable.
No, it means you weren't doing your job right and deserved to be fired. Any IT admin who doesn't put all the key admin passwords written down in a secure vault should be fired even if you can't get the passwords out of him and have to re-do your servers.
In the end what I think is gonna have to happen is to have a clear standard for making a bit for bit copy of VMs and other electronic data, so that it can be verified and work for the chain of evidence without taking down entire colos just to serve a warrant. It would have to be FOSS because even though I see nothing wrong with proprietary per se, when someone's life is on the line we are gonna want to be able to see the source and ensure it is doing what they claim.
That's more or less what I was trying (badly) to advocate in my post, yes.
The theory is that people are more likely to file if they think they'll succeed in getting a patent at the end. After all filing a patent is basically an investment, and the risk is that you'll pay for the filing and not get the patent. The higher the risk, the less likely you are to want to invest in a patent.
Also, I get tired of no eye candy for me, the eye candy always *is* me.
Would you play completely through a game that had half naked men and only men that were half naked in it?
But so many male characters ARE beefy hunky shirtless guys (In Western-made games at least). The God of War series has Kratos in nothing but a loincloth for the entire thing. Conan, same thing, just off the top of my head.
And if beefy dudes isn't your thing, there are plenty of shirtless feminine men in Asian-made games.
True, but, in your average RPG nearly EVERY female NPC shows cleavage and/or are otherwise customized to some extent for attractiveness, whereas a lot of the male NPCs are much more 'plain'. I'd argue that this isn't, as some suggest, so much about the target demographic as about most of the avatar artists being heterosexual males;)
So the closest vehicle to comparison would seem, from the description, to be the JSF. I agree though, without video its kind of hard to imagine this thing.
IANAL. I agree with your first sentence, the laws were written back when server models were different. That said:
Basically the issue here is that a warrant is issued for the FBI to be able to take a piece of hardware which was probably used for criminal activity back to their lab. This makes a lot of sense, in some ways. If the server isn't offline and in the FBI's possession, how do they establish chain-of-custody?? Several techniques for restoring deleted data more or less require physical access, (and certainly require that other servers not write to them) etc. etc. Just cloning a VM may not establish evidentiary custody, and also may not allow full forensic analysis.
On the other hand, as you point out, modern data centers don't work that way. As we move to the cloud, load-balanced data centers, multiple-client hosting services etc. this can cause unreasonable impact. Not sure what the solution would be. My gut feel is that in some cases seizing hardware merely isn't practical . . . their warrant sweeps up more that isn't relevant than is etc. OR they need to furnish replacement hardware, OR . . . but really, an entirely new area of law needs to be developed. This is one case where "on a computer" or "on the internet" actually DOES change the rules. The FBI doesn't have any CHOICE but to seize hardware, because otherwise the evidence is not, currently, usable in court... this isn't just about seizure rules, but about evidentiary standards for digital data, etc. etc. etc.
Its publicized because its pretty much illegal to arrest someone secretly -- one of those things in place to prevent police abuse of power. Arrest reports are public records. At that point you can try to slip it in to the daily feed, but its generally easier to just issue a press release in a high profile case. In this case, however, it looks like they didn't do that. They just arrested the guy and haven't talked yet about the details.
I just have to say that I use very few plugins, and I'm not sure I've ever actually SEEN firefox come in at under 500 mb. Ever. Now granted, usually I'm up to more than ten tabs by the time a task manager pops up where I might check this, but still....
See, but I remember being a five news paper town. The two local-local papers: The Mariner and The Journal for my town. Then you had the Ledger, a regional paper for my town and the others in the area, and then the Globe and Herald. Between them there really wasn't anything that's covered on the 'net today with any real degree of reliability that wasn't in the paper.
I kinda haveta agree with GP. I have no objection to posting this as a matter of fact, but it kinda feels like its posted as if the US set out to smear China. That's not what happened. Yes, many people's understanding of what happened in Tianamen is highly garbled (in no small part, I feel obliged to point out, because China went to a GREAT DEAL of effort to prevent accurate reporting, which not only reduced the number of facts but is also precisely the wrong way to handle the sensationalist western media) but there's nothing in this cable that's a particularly stunning revelation . . . I think what bothers people about much of the reporting surrounding wikileaks is that people act like we're getting all these stunning revelations of facts that were, for the most part, public already, and nobody paid much attention to them (and the important policy implications) until wikileaks came along. What's worse, the attention being paid seems to focus on the presumption that these facts WEREN'T publicly available information in some form before, which distorts the argument from a rational discussion of what impact the facts should have on policy, to "OMG coverup!". (and I'm not denying that the US Government certainly hasn't gone out of its way to clear up the misconceptions its citizens have on this subject.) Finally, on those occasions when wikileaks truly DOES reveal something new or surprising, that gets lost in all the noise. Come to think of it, conspiracy theorists, you might want to think about that last point...
In British English, a public school is type of fee paying private school,
No it isn't. Private and public schools are both forms of independent schools, neither is a subcategory of the other. Private schools are businesses run to make money and typically accept pupils based on their parents' ability to pay. Public schools are non-profit entities (typically registered charities), which exist to provide education. They typically do charge fees, but also provide financial assistance to a significant number (often over 20%) of students who are academically able, but not from families that are able to pay.
Which, more or less, makes a British 'public' school what Americans think of when they say 'private school'. Well, excepting that most american private schools are in some fashion religious, but our notable secular private schools are things pretty much directly modeled on British public schools. In some cases explicitly so.
So basically you're saying that the current situation on the internet amounts to a job security program for web developers. What I"m having difficulty understanding is where the problem is with this? Actually when I put it that way, it explains a lot....
I'm not a Gates fan, or a Microsoft fan, but I don't think you have to admire someone to admit their strengths, and Bill Gates clearly has an almost unsurpassed ability to judge the merits of an idea, and turn a vision into reality. It's the same kind of ability that Jobs, and even Linus and RMS have. None of them is perfect, none of them always picks right, but all of them have combination of vision, follow through, and a certain kind of charisma that gets other people nodding their heads and reaching for their wallets (Obviously with RMS and Linus it's more of a figurative wallet).
I feel obliged to point out that, at least in the case of Linus (and even to some extent RMS), the wallet isn't that figurative, even if its not necessarily as large as that Microsoft reaches for. IIRC Linus makes a salary that I certainly wouldn't turn down, and Linux in general is big business with major investments from some very serious companies. As RMS says, we need to not confuse 'free software' with 'free as in beer' especially these days...
Funny, I never heard the spread of Roundup-resistant weeds being blamed on farmers using only Roundup.
I read that it was due to the marketing of Roundup to suburban home-owners, as an easy one-step way to keep their lawns free of dandelions and crabgrass.
BTW, suburban lawns (and lawns in general) are TERRIBLE for the environment in multiple ways.
I don't disagree on the lawns. One of the most upsetting things of moving back east is that there are places where you are actually REQUIRED to have a lawn. I think this is an abomination. On the other hand, of course, they more or less have the water to support it. When water falls from the sky, i guess you can waste it on frivolity -- which is not to say you should.
As to the roundup resistant ragweed, that's probably due to farmers. For evidence I cite the recent scientific american article on the very topic. But really, it doesn't surprise me. Very few home owners use roundup in the quantity, and in the scope of area large enough to truly create large numbers of resistant plants.
If you don't think there aren't fanboys who want to see older plants replaced by newer, more efficient, safer designs, please, come to Illinois. The lobby against this has been raging for a decade.
So, I don't know the Illinois case specifically, but most of the time when I hear about arguments against plant upgrades, the people doing the argument tend to be of the theory that if you don't upgrade the plant eventually it will get shut down.... very occasionally this is confused with a power company who wants to build a totally new plant instead of upgrade an old one, but . . . in general its not nuclear power 'fanboys' in the anti-upgrade lobby....
I find it highly amusing that half the anti-GMO respondents on this thread are complaining about Monsanto making GMO crops that are sterile, and the other half are complaining that Monsanto didn't do a good enough job making GMO crops that are sterile....
Well, the main difference is that GMOs can and do incorporate genetic material from completely different species, like the GM tomato that incorporated genes from a species of salmon, creating organisms that NEVER could have arisen naturally or through traditional agricultural techniques like crossbreeding and artificial selection.
And perhaps that's a fair argument. But...
1.) In the 5000 or so years humans have been working to modify crops and livestock to their own needs, there have been numerous technical advantages which supply significant qualitative leaps to their ability to do so. "Traditional agricultural techniques" also include things like grafting, and cross-pollinations which are impossible in the natural world by hand pollination. Grafting, one notes, specifically allows one to generate the properties of two breeding-incompatible species into one plant. Your argument is that all the technologies which went before are 'good' and this newest technique is 'bad'. I note that things like monoculture etc. were becoming prevalent before this newest technique came around.
2.) With enough time and determination you can artificially select for almost anything. Round-up-ready crops are one of our oldest GMOs, and, unsurprisingly, various weeds like ragweed are increasingly starting to have round-up-resistant strains. Note that round-up resistant ragweed is NOT a cross-species jump, but an entirely different mechanism to accomplish the same thing. I note that this is also a good reason to be careful about not misusing our GMO organisms: scientists note that this happened so quickly because farmers went to using just round-up to suppress weeds, rather than more traditional combination of methods, which made it much easier to breed round-up resistant rag weed (which is definitely not a good thing.)
3.) Finally, yes it wasn't 'natural' in some indefinable magical sense to use a salmon gene in a tomato. That said . . . I am reminded long ago of listening to someone from the food chemical industry talk about strawberry flavoring. Artificial strawberry flavoring, he noted, was something created in the lab to be as close to chemically identical to the chemical(s) which produce strawberry flavor in an actual strawberry as was possible. "All natural" strawberry flavoring, on the other hand, included about a dozen different plants none of which, one notes, was related to an actual strawberry and was chemically a fairly different substance. Which would you prefer?
To be fair to monsanto, its not ALL just a nefarious plot to make money off farmers.... Part of it stems from some of the most basic things in bio-engineering. Every GMO sci-fi story I've ever read has stressed the importance of not letting GMO organisms propagate outside of human control. 'cuz you, know, weed-killer resistant grasses are a good thing only in strictly-limited circumstances.
That said, there's no question its MOSTLY a nefarious plot to make money off farmers;)
while I agree at some level, at least a week with the wireless off is kind of a minimum for me. Why? Becuase I use my kindle all the time. With my phone I can plug it in at the end of the day, but my kindle may still be in my hands when I fall asleep, and then I like to bring it with me, etc. etc. So overall, finding a time and remembering to charge it is a much bigger issue than with a phone for my use profile (and while mine is a bit extreme, its by no means unique.) And a standard 'day' of continuous use has to be very long -- I expect to be able to fly anywhere on the wolrd on signifcantly less than one charge. (also, this allows you to take short international trips without worrying about chargers etc.)
Overall, while more battery life than it currently has would not be as huge a selling point, I actually noticed and appreciated the longer battery life between the k2 and the k3.
Slashdot Mirror
If much of your life is meetings, the ability to forward calendar items back and forth, and collaborate on changing them etc. is . . . well, actually, that + phone integration is probably the only reason I actually GET to most of my meetings.
Manning broke his NDA by relaying the information, afaik he didn't "hack" it, he had access to it due to his work area, of course he had to sign an NDA to keep it secret and he broke this NDA. Illegal... well, the US army certainly has a civil case against him, and due to the nature of the information it may even be a criminal one. I cannot see what law Wikileaks broke. I didn't read the Aussie legal code, but it would be the only country I know where publishing the info of foreign governments is a crime.
The wonderful thing about working for the federal government is that things that would be civil actions if you were working for a corporation tend to be criminal actions when you do it to the federal government. I assure you that the NDA for classified information clearly states criminal, not civil, penalties for violating it. This is true whether you are military, civilian, or contractor. That Manning falls under the UCMJ has relatively little impact on the situation.
Oh? The posting of classified government information isn't illegal in the EU? Really now? LOL.
The posting of EU classified government information may be illegal in the EU (EU states do not have as strong press freedom laws as the US, actually -- as one friend put it "about the time the US was publishing the Freedom of Information Act, the UK was updating the Official Secrets Act") but wikileaks hasn't done that. I find it hard to think of any law in the EU wikileaks could have broken. Yet.
In the US the pentagon papers case leaves it carefully ambiguous as to whether one is allowed to publish classified information when one gets it in ALL cases, but certainly in some cases it is legal as that was the point of the precedent. (NOTE: US law has no forgiveness for Manning, nor should it -- he broke a half dozen laws that on several occasions he specifically promised to uphold. Wikileaks, though, is probably okay. It depends on whether Wikileaks is classified as a journalistic or intelligence gathering agency.)
But in this case what is at issue is a.) EU law, and b.) that wikileaks has not so much as been indicted in any court, nor, in truth, is it likely to be. Bravo to wikileaks for taking this action, and I hope they win, it will be a win for free speech and freedom of the press around the world.
If someone can hold an entire city to ransom, they are clearly not "just another disposable grunt admin".
I don't think you understand the concept of "disposable". It means when you're gone, they don't miss you. If you're gone and they want passwords that only you have, you weren't disposable.
No, it means you weren't doing your job right and deserved to be fired. Any IT admin who doesn't put all the key admin passwords written down in a secure vault should be fired even if you can't get the passwords out of him and have to re-do your servers.
In the end what I think is gonna have to happen is to have a clear standard for making a bit for bit copy of VMs and other electronic data, so that it can be verified and work for the chain of evidence without taking down entire colos just to serve a warrant. It would have to be FOSS because even though I see nothing wrong with proprietary per se, when someone's life is on the line we are gonna want to be able to see the source and ensure it is doing what they claim.
That's more or less what I was trying (badly) to advocate in my post, yes.
The theory is that people are more likely to file if they think they'll succeed in getting a patent at the end. After all filing a patent is basically an investment, and the risk is that you'll pay for the filing and not get the patent. The higher the risk, the less likely you are to want to invest in a patent.
Also, I get tired of no eye candy for me, the eye candy always *is* me.
Would you play completely through a game that had half naked men and only men that were half naked in it?
But so many male characters ARE beefy hunky shirtless guys (In Western-made games at least). The God of War series has Kratos in nothing but a loincloth for the entire thing. Conan, same thing, just off the top of my head.
And if beefy dudes isn't your thing, there are plenty of shirtless feminine men in Asian-made games.
True, but, in your average RPG nearly EVERY female NPC shows cleavage and/or are otherwise customized to some extent for attractiveness, whereas a lot of the male NPCs are much more 'plain'. I'd argue that this isn't, as some suggest, so much about the target demographic as about most of the avatar artists being heterosexual males ;)
So the closest vehicle to comparison would seem, from the description, to be the JSF. I agree though, without video its kind of hard to imagine this thing.
Basically the issue here is that a warrant is issued for the FBI to be able to take a piece of hardware which was probably used for criminal activity back to their lab. This makes a lot of sense, in some ways. If the server isn't offline and in the FBI's possession, how do they establish chain-of-custody?? Several techniques for restoring deleted data more or less require physical access, (and certainly require that other servers not write to them) etc. etc. Just cloning a VM may not establish evidentiary custody, and also may not allow full forensic analysis.
On the other hand, as you point out, modern data centers don't work that way. As we move to the cloud, load-balanced data centers, multiple-client hosting services etc. this can cause unreasonable impact. Not sure what the solution would be. My gut feel is that in some cases seizing hardware merely isn't practical . . . their warrant sweeps up more that isn't relevant than is etc. OR they need to furnish replacement hardware, OR . . . but really, an entirely new area of law needs to be developed. This is one case where "on a computer" or "on the internet" actually DOES change the rules. The FBI doesn't have any CHOICE but to seize hardware, because otherwise the evidence is not, currently, usable in court... this isn't just about seizure rules, but about evidentiary standards for digital data, etc. etc. etc.
But they didn't. Which we should be treating as a good thing, not complaining.
Its publicized because its pretty much illegal to arrest someone secretly -- one of those things in place to prevent police abuse of power. Arrest reports are public records. At that point you can try to slip it in to the daily feed, but its generally easier to just issue a press release in a high profile case. In this case, however, it looks like they didn't do that. They just arrested the guy and haven't talked yet about the details.
I just have to say that I use very few plugins, and I'm not sure I've ever actually SEEN firefox come in at under 500 mb. Ever. Now granted, usually I'm up to more than ten tabs by the time a task manager pops up where I might check this, but still....
See, but I remember being a five news paper town. The two local-local papers: The Mariner and The Journal for my town. Then you had the Ledger, a regional paper for my town and the others in the area, and then the Globe and Herald. Between them there really wasn't anything that's covered on the 'net today with any real degree of reliability that wasn't in the paper.
I kinda haveta agree with GP. I have no objection to posting this as a matter of fact, but it kinda feels like its posted as if the US set out to smear China. That's not what happened. Yes, many people's understanding of what happened in Tianamen is highly garbled (in no small part, I feel obliged to point out, because China went to a GREAT DEAL of effort to prevent accurate reporting, which not only reduced the number of facts but is also precisely the wrong way to handle the sensationalist western media) but there's nothing in this cable that's a particularly stunning revelation . . . I think what bothers people about much of the reporting surrounding wikileaks is that people act like we're getting all these stunning revelations of facts that were, for the most part, public already, and nobody paid much attention to them (and the important policy implications) until wikileaks came along. What's worse, the attention being paid seems to focus on the presumption that these facts WEREN'T publicly available information in some form before, which distorts the argument from a rational discussion of what impact the facts should have on policy, to "OMG coverup!". (and I'm not denying that the US Government certainly hasn't gone out of its way to clear up the misconceptions its citizens have on this subject.) Finally, on those occasions when wikileaks truly DOES reveal something new or surprising, that gets lost in all the noise. Come to think of it, conspiracy theorists, you might want to think about that last point...
In British English, a public school is type of fee paying private school,
No it isn't. Private and public schools are both forms of independent schools, neither is a subcategory of the other. Private schools are businesses run to make money and typically accept pupils based on their parents' ability to pay. Public schools are non-profit entities (typically registered charities), which exist to provide education. They typically do charge fees, but also provide financial assistance to a significant number (often over 20%) of students who are academically able, but not from families that are able to pay.
Which, more or less, makes a British 'public' school what Americans think of when they say 'private school'. Well, excepting that most american private schools are in some fashion religious, but our notable secular private schools are things pretty much directly modeled on British public schools. In some cases explicitly so.
Honestly... it wasn't a pleasant experience.
which means they are the most reliably defeatable enemies in the universe.
Surely they're not as incompetent as Evil Warlords, who are so bad that they have to keep a rulebook on screw-ups to avoid.
You forgot the most important part: "... and then, decide that this time is special, so ignore all the advice."
So basically you're saying that the current situation on the internet amounts to a job security program for web developers. What I"m having difficulty understanding is where the problem is with this? Actually when I put it that way, it explains a lot....
I'm not a Gates fan, or a Microsoft fan, but I don't think you have to admire someone to admit their strengths, and Bill Gates clearly has an almost unsurpassed ability to judge the merits of an idea, and turn a vision into reality. It's the same kind of ability that Jobs, and even Linus and RMS have. None of them is perfect, none of them always picks right, but all of them have combination of vision, follow through, and a certain kind of charisma that gets other people nodding their heads and reaching for their wallets (Obviously with RMS and Linus it's more of a figurative wallet).
I feel obliged to point out that, at least in the case of Linus (and even to some extent RMS), the wallet isn't that figurative, even if its not necessarily as large as that Microsoft reaches for. IIRC Linus makes a salary that I certainly wouldn't turn down, and Linux in general is big business with major investments from some very serious companies. As RMS says, we need to not confuse 'free software' with 'free as in beer' especially these days...
Funny, I never heard the spread of Roundup-resistant weeds being blamed on farmers using only Roundup. I read that it was due to the marketing of Roundup to suburban home-owners, as an easy one-step way to keep their lawns free of dandelions and crabgrass. BTW, suburban lawns (and lawns in general) are TERRIBLE for the environment in multiple ways.
I don't disagree on the lawns. One of the most upsetting things of moving back east is that there are places where you are actually REQUIRED to have a lawn. I think this is an abomination. On the other hand, of course, they more or less have the water to support it. When water falls from the sky, i guess you can waste it on frivolity -- which is not to say you should.
As to the roundup resistant ragweed, that's probably due to farmers. For evidence I cite the recent scientific american article on the very topic. But really, it doesn't surprise me. Very few home owners use roundup in the quantity, and in the scope of area large enough to truly create large numbers of resistant plants.
If you don't think there aren't fanboys who want to see older plants replaced by newer, more efficient, safer designs, please, come to Illinois. The lobby against this has been raging for a decade.
So, I don't know the Illinois case specifically, but most of the time when I hear about arguments against plant upgrades, the people doing the argument tend to be of the theory that if you don't upgrade the plant eventually it will get shut down.... very occasionally this is confused with a power company who wants to build a totally new plant instead of upgrade an old one, but . . . in general its not nuclear power 'fanboys' in the anti-upgrade lobby....
I find it highly amusing that half the anti-GMO respondents on this thread are complaining about Monsanto making GMO crops that are sterile, and the other half are complaining that Monsanto didn't do a good enough job making GMO crops that are sterile....
Well, the main difference is that GMOs can and do incorporate genetic material from completely different species, like the GM tomato that incorporated genes from a species of salmon, creating organisms that NEVER could have arisen naturally or through traditional agricultural techniques like crossbreeding and artificial selection.
And perhaps that's a fair argument. But...
1.) In the 5000 or so years humans have been working to modify crops and livestock to their own needs, there have been numerous technical advantages which supply significant qualitative leaps to their ability to do so. "Traditional agricultural techniques" also include things like grafting, and cross-pollinations which are impossible in the natural world by hand pollination. Grafting, one notes, specifically allows one to generate the properties of two breeding-incompatible species into one plant. Your argument is that all the technologies which went before are 'good' and this newest technique is 'bad'. I note that things like monoculture etc. were becoming prevalent before this newest technique came around.
2.) With enough time and determination you can artificially select for almost anything. Round-up-ready crops are one of our oldest GMOs, and, unsurprisingly, various weeds like ragweed are increasingly starting to have round-up-resistant strains. Note that round-up resistant ragweed is NOT a cross-species jump, but an entirely different mechanism to accomplish the same thing. I note that this is also a good reason to be careful about not misusing our GMO organisms: scientists note that this happened so quickly because farmers went to using just round-up to suppress weeds, rather than more traditional combination of methods, which made it much easier to breed round-up resistant rag weed (which is definitely not a good thing.)
3.) Finally, yes it wasn't 'natural' in some indefinable magical sense to use a salmon gene in a tomato. That said . . . I am reminded long ago of listening to someone from the food chemical industry talk about strawberry flavoring. Artificial strawberry flavoring, he noted, was something created in the lab to be as close to chemically identical to the chemical(s) which produce strawberry flavor in an actual strawberry as was possible. "All natural" strawberry flavoring, on the other hand, included about a dozen different plants none of which, one notes, was related to an actual strawberry and was chemically a fairly different substance. Which would you prefer?
That said, there's no question its MOSTLY a nefarious plot to make money off farmers ;)
Overall, while more battery life than it currently has would not be as huge a selling point, I actually noticed and appreciated the longer battery life between the k2 and the k3.