As I see it, the lack of accountability is not (at least not primarly) because of their corporation status, but because of their vast financial capabilities. You could file a lawsuit against Sony and its directors, but given the relatively small actual damages you incurred and the relatively large amount of money Sony has to defend against lawsuits (and insurnance, etc.) it's probably not a great idea.
In other words, I think this is a problem with the civil justice system in general when dealing with two parties with vastly different financial capabilities more than a problem with corporations protecting individuals from litigation. I agree it should be fixed, I just don't think it has anything in particular to do with the kinds of legal structures under which people organize.
That's an awfully fine line to draw -- corporation vs. partnership. So are Limited Liability Companies are okay and corporations are bad, or is it just partnerships that are acceptable?
Seriously, partnerships have all the same "rights" as corporations and can do all the same evil things. What's your point here?
I'm not quite sure i agree with you here.. We [Holland] don't have corporate rights the way you do, and yet i live in no fear whatsoever that my government will arbitrarily shut down newspapers. Why is that?
It's either because you're too trusting of your government or your corporations actually do have a right to free speech; I really can't imagine any other option. If your newspapers don't have a right to free speech I'd be scared -- maybe you trust your government, but that seems like a bad plan to me, even if they happen to be behaving well at the moment. And if your newspapers do have a right to free speech then there's not much difference from here.
It's also a little misleading to say that corporations in the US have "rights"; that's really more something that anti-corporation-whiners have invented than a fact of law. Corporations are *not* people, they cannot vote, be licensed to drive, hold political office, etc. But as agents of their owners and managers, corporations do inherit all rights that any group of people would hold collectively, inside or outside a formal legal entity.
For example, individual have the right to free speech under the first amendment. That right also applies to a collective group of people without formal organization; they can assemble, publish, speak, etc. collectively just as they could individually. Likewise corporations have the same right to free speech as the collective group of people who make up the corporation would if they were not formally organized. All the SCOTUS really said is that being organized as a corporation is not sufficient cause to restrict the rights that the collective owners of a corporation would have ordinarly, not that corporation are "people" or that corporations necessarily inherit every right or privilege under law to which their individual owners are entitled.
On a related note, given how much the colonies whined about taxation without representation, I find it interesting that corporations are taxed but do not get to vote.
Without the power to own things there is literally no concept of a corporation. Maybe I missed the original point, but I thought this discussion was about rights (inalienable tenants of humanity) for corporations, not about the existance of corporations in the sense of a legal structure for shared ownership (which is a civil construct granted by law, not a basic human right).
If you need me to I can come up with some pretty convincing arguements for the existance of legal entities with the power to own things and execute contracts though -- among other things it's incredibly difficult to organize any significant amount of capital without a legal structure to support group ownership.
Let's say a group of 10 people want to buy and develop a plot of land. Without a unified legal entity to own the property and execute contracts they would *all* have to be party to *every* transaction. Therefore a single member could refuse to execute a contract and prevent the other 9 from executing that contract, even if the other 9 are in absolute agreement. Without a legal structure to grant the 9 power to out-vote the one holdout a single member could effectively ruin the entire "company". There are many other similar situations one could imagine; as I noted, organizing any signficant number of people or amount of captial would be very difficult without a formal legal structure.
I've got an IBM Model M at work -- on the days I'm in the office you can hear me typing clear across the building. Do you suppose that will make up for it?
The problem isn't that corporations have rights, it's that the people running corporations (sometimes) decide to do bad things. Taking away "rights" from corporations doesn't address that problem in any meaningful way, and it creates many new problems. Corporations don't *do* anything, good, bad, or otherwise; their owners and managers control and are responsible for any action a corporation might take. Make your own analogy about tools (corporations) and their users (owners/managers).
Let's say we took away all coprorate "rights", and it was now illegal for the board of McBigCorp to give money to their favorite McCongressmen. The board of McBigCorp could still give the board's members $100M in bonuses and the board members could, as private individuals, give $100M to their favorite McCongressmen. So long as the board members want McCongressmen to have the money, no law restricting corporate "rights" will stop them.
It's also not a trivial task to draw the line between the law and rights necessary to carry out the legal will of the owners and managers -- like property ownership, contract law, and recourse through the justice system -- and "rights" that we grant to individuals. Take free speech as an example: If corporations don't have the right free speech, what's to stop the government from shutting down a newspaper for purely politcal reasons? The newspaper coproration owns the means of production and distribution and holds the copyright on the content, so there is no individual's right free speech being directly restricted and so no individual has direct recourse to assert their first ammendement rights. Would you argue that corporations have no "rights" and therefore only newspapers published by individuals are protected speech?
First, telecommute != physically distant from office. I come in to the office most days, but I also telecommute on a fairly regular basis. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Second, many if not most people put where they live ahead of their company. If your company announced tomorrow that it was moving all of its office across the country, do you really think everyone would pick up and move? Conversely, if I apply for a job with the intention of telecommuting, I am demonstrating a preference for that company over all others in the world regardless of their location; someone who applies locally is likely doing so in part because of the location of the company, not their global preference for the company. I just don't see how telecommuting is necessarily related to company allegiance.
Finally, if I can get more done from home than my peers can in the office, why would you promote them instead of me? I don't know about other people, but I'm actually more productive at home than I am in the office. There's no one to interrupt me and I can work the (non-contiguous) hours when I'm focused instead of trying to fit all my work time into the hours that I'm willing to be in the office. It would be silly to promote a less productive worker just because they spend more time in the office. That doesn't mean it won't happen, but it would be the wrong choice, and there's only so much I'm willing to do to guard against bad management decisions.
I think I'd much rather know the median time between failures than the mean. It's not that the MTBF is unrelated to lifetime, it's that I don't have enough information to know *how* it's related to lifetime.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm planning to use the AppleTV to play mostly non-Apple videos. I just want a slick interface to integrate my ReplayTV, MythTV, ripped DVD and downloaded content into the living room. Right now I use my laptop; the AppleTV is a better interface and doesn't cost $1000.
I'm also aware that it's not the only option for video playback, but you've got to admit, for the things that it does, the interface is pretty nice.
So what you're saying is "If you run a program that does nasty things while you're logged in as an admin user, that program could gain root privileges, even without your password"
You'd still have to run a program that does nasty things, and that program would still have to be launched with admin privileges. Once you get to that point, it doesn't really matter how the rest of the system behaves -- the best you can hope for is some sort of log. Anything else would prevent you from actually using the system.
For example, a malicious program running as your user could, without a password, install a script that runs automatically at loging and waits for you to run a privilege-elevating program (like sudo or the installer). It could then use hijack the privileges you get from that program to execute commands as root. Or it could sit around and look for recently created installer packages (like those downloaded by Software Update), and infect the package with a script that will be run as root after the user willingly types their password.
What you're really saying is that "now" is a spacial-local observation (i.e. it's all relative). It's not they you're sending information back in time a billion years, it that "1 billion years ago" for a distant observer actually *is* "now" for us and visa versa.
Upon further investigate, the Finder vulnerability is also pretty weak. It's at least got the potential to allow code execution (but not privilege escalation) and I agree that it's sloppy programming that should be fixed.
But their report says that in trying to expliot the flaw their DMG failed validation test done before mounting the image and that they were therefore unable to create a working exploit. The rest of their report is based on the assumption that they could manipulate parts of the DMG file and bypass the validation already in place, without any real indication of how that might happen.
While there are some valid bugs listed, the Disk Management one basically says "anyone in the admin group can arbitrarily set file permissions". I don't know about you, but given that the admin group has, by design, unrestricted access to `sudo` I wouldn't consider their ability to set file permissions in a convoluted way a very serious security threat.
The report talks about the ability to change permissions and then use those changed permissions to run programs as root. Maybe it's just me I'm pretty sure it would be easier to just type `sudo su` followed by your password. Follow that with `rm -f/var/log/asl.log` and you'll even delete the evidence.
There are good reasons to send YPrPb signal as an output from an MPEG source, such as DVD or OTA HD-TV -- it more closely matches the input MPEG stream format. This allows for less overall mangling becuase it allows the output device, which presumably knows its own color profile, to do the only colorspace conversions that might be necessary.
I just don't understand why it's the only option. As far as I can tell the only things you have to do to make your input accept RGB and YPrPb is add a menu option and about 25 lines of DSP setup code. Most (if not all) video output devices process to pixel data with matched luminance and hue resolution and do color separations, be that RGB or some higher number of colors. Accepting RGB as input for that conversion seems almost trivial.
Heat Exchanger Just because you're using the pool as a heat sink doesn't mean you have to run the actual pool water through your computer.
Now, this guy doesn't seem to have caught on to that, but it's not a totally implausible solution. Keeping the heat in water, even through an exchanger, is still more efficient than trying to dump the heat directly to the air, at least until you build a radiator the size of your pool.
I don't mean to troll, but what exactly are you trying to "lock down" that OS X won't let you?
Last time I ran a mac lab I could limit access and remotely force settings (often with the choice to allow local overrides if desired) to:
Any or all system preference panes
Network and Removable disks
Printers
Program execution (i.e. allow only certain programs)
The Dock
Finder.app
Safari.app
Mail.app
I'll grant you that AD provides a better interface for choosing how machine, group, and user settings are inherited/replaced, but beyond that I have trouble guessing what else I'd want to "lock down". Did I just run a more open lab than most Windows admins would?
I'd say 1 is a indication of particular skills you have, and the other is an indication of your general employability (i.e. do you show up for work and every day and not get caught stealing). While general employability is often assumed for professional positions it is quite possible the single most important factor to consider when hiring someone for an entry-level position.
Even with gigs of RAM it's still useful to have some swap space. You won't use it all the time, but it's still handy to have.
The obvious example is transient large memory use. I've got all my usual apps open. Now I want to play WoW on my lunch break. Rather than quitting everything I can just let the system swap out my apps when WoW loads and swap them back in when I quit. Maybe your laptop holds enough RAM that you don't care, but mine only holds 2 GB, and I can easily use more than that, particularly when you throw something like WoW into the mix.
I'd also consider things like an automounter -- in my use, the automounter gets called maybe 2 times a day, but it has to be running all the time to be effective. I'd rather wait for it to swap-in and run than have it taking up real memory on my system all day long. Sure, the automounter by itself isn't big, but combined with the other 25 trivial programs that are always running you can see non-trivial memory savings.
That's true in the US too. You can't ask people when they graduated or other such things (no matter how useful or relevant they are) for fear that you'll be sued for age-based descrimination.
As I read it, Griggs v. Duke Power applies more specifically to selection requirements rather than ranking, but I guess I could see it made into an argument about the later if the proper context was presented.
Still, "years of related work experience" is pretty easy to put into the "reasonable measure of job performance" bucket, and given that, the requirement of intent to discriminate against a protected group stands.
Except "people with less work experience" is not a protected group, so it's not unlawful to discriminate on the basis of previous work experience, unless you do so with the intent of discriminating against an actual protected group. I'm just guessing, but I'd say it would be awfully hard to win a case based on such "discrimination", short of someone admitting that they did it to avoid hiring women.
Replace "cancer" with "global warming" and replace "controlled food additives" with "human activity" and you have almost exactly the argument used by oil companies and many conservatives to claim global warming does not exist. It's not a logical argument, it's an argument that insinuates that any possible error on her part, no matter how small, makes his argument correct. The words "definitive" and "fact" are the nasty ones in this case. The truth is, science is usually somewhat vague and full of additional questions and problems that must be solved, especially in answering new questions, like the kind that are constantly coming up in the rapidly changing field of food additives. He's not claiming he has any proof that she's wrong, he's just claiming that because she's not holding "definitive facts" in her hand, that makes him right.
Professor Toy then goes on to say, "We do know that half of cancers are caused by lifestyle factors such as being overweight." He's using this as an argument that the actress is incorrect. Once again, though it may sound like a refutation, it's just more false logic. Just because his statement may be true says absolutely nothing about the accuracy of her statement. In fact, half the factors being lifestyle related point very strongly to half of them being something else.
You're ignoring perfectly good science just because it's not comprehensive, while complaining that a scientist is dismissing unsupported claims by citing science that's at least peripherally related and demonstrates differing results. I hardly know where to begin.
We can't conclusively prove that a food additive is safe in all contexts, or even to completely list every context in which it is not safe. It's simply a logically impossibility to conclusively test such a hypothesis.
I really don't see how you can read Prof. Toy's statements as an attempt to duck the issue. He specifically refutes the "roaring ahead" claim by noting that the difference in lifetime cancer rates are readily explained by longer life spans. He goes on to refute the claim of food additives causing cancer by noting that studies of the harm caused by food additives, in his expert opinion, provide no definitive evidence of harm. He didn't cite specific studies, but they didn't really give him room for a bibliography either.
The fact that Prof. Toy doesn't offer a conclusive theory of causation for cancer is hardly evidence that the science he cites is useless. He doesn't claim to know what causes cancer, nor should he. Ms. Lumley does claim to know that food additives cause cancer, and Prof. Toy refutes that specific claim, citing studies to that very affect.
Slashdot Mirror
As I see it, the lack of accountability is not (at least not primarly) because of their corporation status, but because of their vast financial capabilities. You could file a lawsuit against Sony and its directors, but given the relatively small actual damages you incurred and the relatively large amount of money Sony has to defend against lawsuits (and insurnance, etc.) it's probably not a great idea.
In other words, I think this is a problem with the civil justice system in general when dealing with two parties with vastly different financial capabilities more than a problem with corporations protecting individuals from litigation. I agree it should be fixed, I just don't think it has anything in particular to do with the kinds of legal structures under which people organize.
That's an awfully fine line to draw -- corporation vs. partnership. So are Limited Liability Companies are okay and corporations are bad, or is it just partnerships that are acceptable?
Seriously, partnerships have all the same "rights" as corporations and can do all the same evil things. What's your point here?
I'm not quite sure i agree with you here.. We [Holland] don't have corporate rights the way you do, and yet i live in no fear whatsoever that my government will arbitrarily shut down newspapers.
Why is that?
It's either because you're too trusting of your government or your corporations actually do have a right to free speech; I really can't imagine any other option. If your newspapers don't have a right to free speech I'd be scared -- maybe you trust your government, but that seems like a bad plan to me, even if they happen to be behaving well at the moment. And if your newspapers do have a right to free speech then there's not much difference from here.
It's also a little misleading to say that corporations in the US have "rights"; that's really more something that anti-corporation-whiners have invented than a fact of law. Corporations are *not* people, they cannot vote, be licensed to drive, hold political office, etc. But as agents of their owners and managers, corporations do inherit all rights that any group of people would hold collectively, inside or outside a formal legal entity.
For example, individual have the right to free speech under the first amendment. That right also applies to a collective group of people without formal organization; they can assemble, publish, speak, etc. collectively just as they could individually. Likewise corporations have the same right to free speech as the collective group of people who make up the corporation would if they were not formally organized. All the SCOTUS really said is that being organized as a corporation is not sufficient cause to restrict the rights that the collective owners of a corporation would have ordinarly, not that corporation are "people" or that corporations necessarily inherit every right or privilege under law to which their individual owners are entitled.
On a related note, given how much the colonies whined about taxation without representation, I find it interesting that corporations are taxed but do not get to vote.
Without the power to own things there is literally no concept of a corporation. Maybe I missed the original point, but I thought this discussion was about rights (inalienable tenants of humanity) for corporations, not about the existance of corporations in the sense of a legal structure for shared ownership (which is a civil construct granted by law, not a basic human right).
If you need me to I can come up with some pretty convincing arguements for the existance of legal entities with the power to own things and execute contracts though -- among other things it's incredibly difficult to organize any significant amount of capital without a legal structure to support group ownership.
Let's say a group of 10 people want to buy and develop a plot of land. Without a unified legal entity to own the property and execute contracts they would *all* have to be party to *every* transaction. Therefore a single member could refuse to execute a contract and prevent the other 9 from executing that contract, even if the other 9 are in absolute agreement. Without a legal structure to grant the 9 power to out-vote the one holdout a single member could effectively ruin the entire "company". There are many other similar situations one could imagine; as I noted, organizing any signficant number of people or amount of captial would be very difficult without a formal legal structure.
I've got an IBM Model M at work -- on the days I'm in the office you can hear me typing clear across the building. Do you suppose that will make up for it?
The problem isn't that corporations have rights, it's that the people running corporations (sometimes) decide to do bad things. Taking away "rights" from corporations doesn't address that problem in any meaningful way, and it creates many new problems. Corporations don't *do* anything, good, bad, or otherwise; their owners and managers control and are responsible for any action a corporation might take. Make your own analogy about tools (corporations) and their users (owners/managers).
Let's say we took away all coprorate "rights", and it was now illegal for the board of McBigCorp to give money to their favorite McCongressmen. The board of McBigCorp could still give the board's members $100M in bonuses and the board members could, as private individuals, give $100M to their favorite McCongressmen. So long as the board members want McCongressmen to have the money, no law restricting corporate "rights" will stop them.
It's also not a trivial task to draw the line between the law and rights necessary to carry out the legal will of the owners and managers -- like property ownership, contract law, and recourse through the justice system -- and "rights" that we grant to individuals. Take free speech as an example: If corporations don't have the right free speech, what's to stop the government from shutting down a newspaper for purely politcal reasons? The newspaper coproration owns the means of production and distribution and holds the copyright on the content, so there is no individual's right free speech being directly restricted and so no individual has direct recourse to assert their first ammendement rights. Would you argue that corporations have no "rights" and therefore only newspapers published by individuals are protected speech?
First, telecommute != physically distant from office. I come in to the office most days, but I also telecommute on a fairly regular basis. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Second, many if not most people put where they live ahead of their company. If your company announced tomorrow that it was moving all of its office across the country, do you really think everyone would pick up and move? Conversely, if I apply for a job with the intention of telecommuting, I am demonstrating a preference for that company over all others in the world regardless of their location; someone who applies locally is likely doing so in part because of the location of the company, not their global preference for the company. I just don't see how telecommuting is necessarily related to company allegiance.
Finally, if I can get more done from home than my peers can in the office, why would you promote them instead of me? I don't know about other people, but I'm actually more productive at home than I am in the office. There's no one to interrupt me and I can work the (non-contiguous) hours when I'm focused instead of trying to fit all my work time into the hours that I'm willing to be in the office. It would be silly to promote a less productive worker just because they spend more time in the office. That doesn't mean it won't happen, but it would be the wrong choice, and there's only so much I'm willing to do to guard against bad management decisions.
I think I'd much rather know the median time between failures than the mean. It's not that the MTBF is unrelated to lifetime, it's that I don't have enough information to know *how* it's related to lifetime.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm planning to use the AppleTV to play mostly non-Apple videos. I just want a slick interface to integrate my ReplayTV, MythTV, ripped DVD and downloaded content into the living room. Right now I use my laptop; the AppleTV is a better interface and doesn't cost $1000.
I'm also aware that it's not the only option for video playback, but you've got to admit, for the things that it does, the interface is pretty nice.
So what you're saying is "If you run a program that does nasty things while you're logged in as an admin user, that program could gain root privileges, even without your password"
You'd still have to run a program that does nasty things, and that program would still have to be launched with admin privileges. Once you get to that point, it doesn't really matter how the rest of the system behaves -- the best you can hope for is some sort of log. Anything else would prevent you from actually using the system.
For example, a malicious program running as your user could, without a password, install a script that runs automatically at loging and waits for you to run a privilege-elevating program (like sudo or the installer). It could then use hijack the privileges you get from that program to execute commands as root. Or it could sit around and look for recently created installer packages (like those downloaded by Software Update), and infect the package with a script that will be run as root after the user willingly types their password.
What you're really saying is that "now" is a spacial-local observation (i.e. it's all relative). It's not they you're sending information back in time a billion years, it that "1 billion years ago" for a distant observer actually *is* "now" for us and visa versa.
Upon further investigate, the Finder vulnerability is also pretty weak. It's at least got the potential to allow code execution (but not privilege escalation) and I agree that it's sloppy programming that should be fixed.
But their report says that in trying to expliot the flaw their DMG failed validation test done before mounting the image and that they were therefore unable to create a working exploit. The rest of their report is based on the assumption that they could manipulate parts of the DMG file and bypass the validation already in place, without any real indication of how that might happen.
While there are some valid bugs listed, the Disk Management one basically says "anyone in the admin group can arbitrarily set file permissions". I don't know about you, but given that the admin group has, by design, unrestricted access to `sudo` I wouldn't consider their ability to set file permissions in a convoluted way a very serious security threat.
/var/log/asl.log` and you'll even delete the evidence.
The report talks about the ability to change permissions and then use those changed permissions to run programs as root. Maybe it's just me I'm pretty sure it would be easier to just type `sudo su` followed by your password. Follow that with `rm -f
There are good reasons to send YPrPb signal as an output from an MPEG source, such as DVD or OTA HD-TV -- it more closely matches the input MPEG stream format. This allows for less overall mangling becuase it allows the output device, which presumably knows its own color profile, to do the only colorspace conversions that might be necessary.
I just don't understand why it's the only option. As far as I can tell the only things you have to do to make your input accept RGB and YPrPb is add a menu option and about 25 lines of DSP setup code. Most (if not all) video output devices process to pixel data with matched luminance and hue resolution and do color separations, be that RGB or some higher number of colors. Accepting RGB as input for that conversion seems almost trivial.
At least in my experience, "free time" and "smaller company" did not go together.
Heat Exchanger
Just because you're using the pool as a heat sink doesn't mean you have to run the actual pool water through your computer.
Now, this guy doesn't seem to have caught on to that, but it's not a totally implausible solution. Keeping the heat in water, even through an exchanger, is still more efficient than trying to dump the heat directly to the air, at least until you build a radiator the size of your pool.
I don't mean to troll, but what exactly are you trying to "lock down" that OS X won't let you?
Last time I ran a mac lab I could limit access and remotely force settings (often with the choice to allow local overrides if desired) to:
Any or all system preference panes
Network and Removable disks
Printers
Program execution (i.e. allow only certain programs)
The Dock
Finder.app
Safari.app
Mail.app
I'll grant you that AD provides a better interface for choosing how machine, group, and user settings are inherited/replaced, but beyond that I have trouble guessing what else I'd want to "lock down". Did I just run a more open lab than most Windows admins would?
I'd say 1 is a indication of particular skills you have, and the other is an indication of your general employability (i.e. do you show up for work and every day and not get caught stealing). While general employability is often assumed for professional positions it is quite possible the single most important factor to consider when hiring someone for an entry-level position.
Or grab something like this patch: http://kerneltrap.org/node/1051 to do it automatically.
That way you programs can easily swap if you run low on active memory, but the cache won't pressure you into swapping even if you untar a 2 GB file.
Even with gigs of RAM it's still useful to have some swap space. You won't use it all the time, but it's still handy to have.
The obvious example is transient large memory use. I've got all my usual apps open. Now I want to play WoW on my lunch break. Rather than quitting everything I can just let the system swap out my apps when WoW loads and swap them back in when I quit. Maybe your laptop holds enough RAM that you don't care, but mine only holds 2 GB, and I can easily use more than that, particularly when you throw something like WoW into the mix.
I'd also consider things like an automounter -- in my use, the automounter gets called maybe 2 times a day, but it has to be running all the time to be effective. I'd rather wait for it to swap-in and run than have it taking up real memory on my system all day long. Sure, the automounter by itself isn't big, but combined with the other 25 trivial programs that are always running you can see non-trivial memory savings.
That's true in the US too. You can't ask people when they graduated or other such things (no matter how useful or relevant they are) for fear that you'll be sued for age-based descrimination.
As I read it, Griggs v. Duke Power applies more specifically to selection requirements rather than ranking, but I guess I could see it made into an argument about the later if the proper context was presented.
Still, "years of related work experience" is pretty easy to put into the "reasonable measure of job performance" bucket, and given that, the requirement of intent to discriminate against a protected group stands.
Except "people with less work experience" is not a protected group, so it's not unlawful to discriminate on the basis of previous work experience, unless you do so with the intent of discriminating against an actual protected group. I'm just guessing, but I'd say it would be awfully hard to win a case based on such "discrimination", short of someone admitting that they did it to avoid hiring women.
If only there were some way the installer could detect your platform and auto-strip on installation. Too bad that's impossible.
Professor Toy then goes on to say, "We do know that half of cancers are caused by lifestyle factors such as being overweight." He's using this as an argument that the actress is incorrect. Once again, though it may sound like a refutation, it's just more false logic. Just because his statement may be true says absolutely nothing about the accuracy of her statement. In fact, half the factors being lifestyle related point very strongly to half of them being something else.
You're ignoring perfectly good science just because it's not comprehensive, while complaining that a scientist is dismissing unsupported claims by citing science that's at least peripherally related and demonstrates differing results. I hardly know where to begin.
We can't conclusively prove that a food additive is safe in all contexts, or even to completely list every context in which it is not safe. It's simply a logically impossibility to conclusively test such a hypothesis.
I really don't see how you can read Prof. Toy's statements as an attempt to duck the issue. He specifically refutes the "roaring ahead" claim by noting that the difference in lifetime cancer rates are readily explained by longer life spans. He goes on to refute the claim of food additives causing cancer by noting that studies of the harm caused by food additives, in his expert opinion, provide no definitive evidence of harm. He didn't cite specific studies, but they didn't really give him room for a bibliography either.
The fact that Prof. Toy doesn't offer a conclusive theory of causation for cancer is hardly evidence that the science he cites is useless. He doesn't claim to know what causes cancer, nor should he. Ms. Lumley does claim to know that food additives cause cancer, and Prof. Toy refutes that specific claim, citing studies to that very affect.