No different than the mind control device that has managed to turn all people without a TV into automatons, reciting the same liturgy of disdain at every available opportunity. You are not morally superior, intellectually free or otherwise improved simply because of your rejection of TV.
Likewise, I'm not a better person because I choose not to drink alcohol. Does not drinking alcohol give me more time to pursue more "noble" activities each week that is unclouded by alcoholic distractions? Absolutely. However, so would a number of other choices like avoiding Slashdot. Is my wife a better person than you because she abstains from participating on this site? No.
TV is one form of entertainment out of many. And, despite the deep longings and ideal dreams of the anti-TV elite, removing televisions from homes will not result in 230 million Americans suddenly picking up Tolstoy. Rather, they'd simply turn to other forms of entertainment that demand equally little of their intellect.
I enjoy TV. I enjoy movies. I enjoy books. I have not stated a logical paradox in the previous 3 sentences.
I get plenty of respect. However, virtually none of it is because I'm a "geek" or "all powerful technician". Rather, it comes from the fact that I do what I do well, under promise and over deliver, communicate effectively, deal honestly and straighforwardly with clients and customers, provide generously of my time, information and resources and otherwise try to be a better person.
That respect has hardly fluctuated over the past 8 years that I've been working as a professional. It's because it's not tied to my profession. Instead, it's the kind of respect that lasts: the kind that's earned. Earned respect goes more with personal integrity than your station in life. There are people in all of society's strata that I have immense respect for. At the same time, there are lots of people in highly respected *positions* that I have 0 respect for.
If your level of respect fluctuates and is tied almost entirely to your chosen profession, it's not *you* that's been getting the respect, it's your job title. You've just been inheriting respect from your profession.
Given that companies that don't go out of their way to support Linux (less than 5 percent of computing market) get drilled on./, I'd like to point out that 25% of households in the US get their TV via satellite, which is a royal pain with MythTV, if you can get it working at all.
I don't think it will. A GREAT deal of the text-based communication going back and forth right now is doing so textually because audio and video would be inappropriate in the settting.
Why do people use text messages on their phones instead of just calling? I can talk WAY faster than anyone can whip up text messages. However, I can discretely send a text message or email from my PDA without anyone else around me being part of the conversation.
This is the same reason that, despite improvements in voice recognition, I think it's crazy to think that voice recognition will replace textual typing as a data entry method. Why?
Put 50 people in a room with fabric cubicle walls and have them all type messages to their significant other on IM or email. Now, have all 50 call that same person instead. You go from a mild chatter of keyboards, during which pretty much everyone can concentrate and work on their own messages to complete chaos.
Text communication will only die as a critical communication method when similarly private methods arrive to replace it.
I agree with you about non-existant reasons. I just tend not to speak in absolute terms.
Another non-existant reason people cite is recurring transactions. They claim that you need to store the card in order to bill for future months. However, again, there are better ways, including using the tools provided by the back-end processors to set up recurring transactions directly, which again gives you a totally safe transaction id to use to suspend future payments, etc.
All of those examples are from the same author (the guy in charge of phpmath.com), but go to show that there are actually interesting things being done with PHP.
I'd love to see some books that *don't* spend 200 pages explaining how to get to fetching an array from MySQL.
If you're storing credit card numbers *at all* in your ecommerce projects, you've got bigger problems than which DBMS you use.
Most credit card processing back ends will give your application transaction id's which can be used to complete a transaction, reverse it, etc. all without ever needing the credit card number itself.
Similarly, the personal information that's collected for the purposes of things like shipping should be pulled off the web server in most cases. For most of my clients, we set them up with a firewalled internal server that pulls down that information on a daily basis. Also remember that for the VAST majority of ecommerce, it's not like the whole process happens without human intervention. In most cases, only a provisional transaction (that expires if not followed up) takes place automatically. The "real" transaction only happens when someone actually fulfills the order (after a human being is done reviewing it).
Doing a few things like this result in nothing being stored on the server that isn't available in the phone book, tax records or otherwise publicly available.
Information security starts long before you pick a database server and extends way beyond it as well.
Personally, I write off anyone who indicates that they'd store credit card numbers in *any* database without a REALLY good reason.
The "system which has served us well for over 100 years" isn't a single, constant system reaching back to the Constitution. Rather, it's mutated quite a bit, especially in the last 30 years. To defend most of the major parameters of modern copyright is really to defend the changes of the last 30 years.
Up until then, you had to specifically register anything you wanted copyrighted. This ensured that the work that the "vast majority of people who produce IP" to make money from their works were protected, while allowing everything else to be public domain (the stuff created for reasons other than money). For most of the time before 1976, you also had to renew that copyright periodically to keep it.
Essentially, for the first 200 years of American copyright, making money from IP was an active process: deliberately file for copyright, include specific notice on all published copies, renew to continue copyright, etc.
What we have now is a passive process: everything is automatically copyrighted, notice doesn't need to be included, no renewals are needed and your family gets to automatically keep these passive rights long after you're dead.
Those 2 systems, while both called "copyright", have little in common as far as their approach, intent and results.
"Damn...do people not put much value in a good stereo these days?"
It's pretty much a "law" that there are multiple items in your house that I or other posters would react the same way you react to a cheap stereo. And, unless you have unlimited funds, you're going to focus on a few things and this is going to be true for everyone.
For instance, is your car a "good" car with "good" performance setup?
Do you settle for 35mm or sub 8 megapixel camera equipment instead of medium format slide film?
Did your main cooking skillet cost less than $200 or your main chef's knife cost less than $300?
Do you sleep on a sub-$1000 mattress?
Is any of the furniture in your house made by Sauder or any other "assemble-at-home" company instead of hand crafted, quartersawn oak?
Is your lawn perfectly manicured without a single weed?
Is your computer completely up to date or do you make due with a 2-3 year old model?
For every one of those questions there are quite a few people who would say, "Don't people value their (furniture|cooking equipment|photography gear, etc) these days" and be talking about you or me in one or more of those categories.
People spend their money proportionally to their interests and priorities. Switch out lists of priorities and you'll get an entirely different ratio of spending.
After reading (rather listening to the audiobook) the book "Blink", I've been looking to try something like this. The reason is the breakdown of the Pepsi challenge and a variation that really IS difficult.
The author took 3 glasses (rather than 2) and asks the taster to choose the 1 that's different. It turns out that this is WAY harder than it ought to be. Despite the participants' assertions that they were sure they could tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke, it didn't turn out that way and people were only "right" 33% of the time or the same as blind luck. Despite their "expertise", they really aren't able to tell the difference.
Once I move later this month and get my audio setup up and running in the new house, I may give this a shot with my friends. A playlist of 2 MP3's and a WAV of the same song and the reverse: 2 WAV and 1 MP3 and see how easy it actually is to tell the difference.
There's far too little blind testing of things like this in audio equipment.
Just because you want to read "An awful lot" as "the bedrock of" doesn't mean that's what I said. An awful lot of money is spent on crappy exercise gadgets. Are they the "bedrock" of the modern economy? Of course not.
I'm not sure where you're reading me as "rewriting the history of the US", but I was citing a singular relevant example in history, explaining it in context and drawing the parallels: all within a few paragraphs.
I was unaware that for my point to be valid, I also needed to place it within the entirety of the socioeconomic context of 19th century, the Industrial Revolution, slavery and intercontinental transportation. Apparently, rather than taking 2 minutes to make a post, I was supposed to do full research and cite numbers, including percentages of GDP. I used the term "an awful lot" as a loose, abstract term. I'm sorry we're assigning different values to that amount, but don't paint me as some idiot out to rewrite history for my own political agenda.
I'm not writing my thesis; I'm posting in a discussion of music copyright and other countries "stealing" on a website. And, in that context, the fact that something similar has happened before, where a lot of money was at stake, where the roles were reversed, and where the stuff in question was *also* music was relevant.
You're apparently seeing an entirely different "whole point" than I was actually making or stating. I'm not here to stand on a soapbox with my propaganda in my hand, redfaced. I've been on this site for a long time, and have a history of posting pretty carefully, without trying to distort anything to fit my decidedly moderate approach to life.
Sorry, I forgot I was on Slashdot. I'll explain more slowly. Sheet music is 1, as in a singular, example of early American disregard of international standards of intellectual property laws. That 1 example sits inside a trend that took place of things like turning a blind eye toward patent infringement (if the patent was elsewhere), etc.
I used sheet music as my example, because (get this), it was actually relevant to the discussion at hand. Before the advent of recorded music, sheet music and player piano rolls were BIG business and the businesses involved were the RIAA of their time. There was a great uproar about the US just flaunting the rules.
Today (I'm drawing a parallel and wanted to warn you), countries like China, Russia and others that aren't recognizing US and other major IP holding countries' patents, trademarks and copyright are growing very quickly, unfettered by the legal constraints that those systems put in place, *much like the US did*. History is repeating.
At some point, it's likely that, in those countries, the protections will start showing up as one Russian wants protection from another Russian "stealing" his work. Then, eventually, some other countries will step into the "abuser" role.
What's hilarious is that, if you go back 150 years or so, the United States were the ones flaunting the world's copyright laws. Sheet music was being flagrantly copied in the US and British and other European countries were outraged that this upstart country was regarding the theft of sheet music as some sort of 'right'.
An awful lot of the financial build-up of the US was based on disregarding intellectual property law (from the rest of the world) early on.
"I wonder if anyone at the IRS actually checks what job title you put on your tax forms? "
This is the federal government. It's probably someone's exclusive job to not only read it, but hand copy it in blue ink into large 3 ring binders which are then manually typed in by someone else employed full-time to do such an activity.
You need to adjust the contrast on your moral monitor. Morality's color depth is deeper than 2 bits; it's at least 8 bit greyscale. Just because someone/some group/something irritates you to extreme levels 80% of the time doesn't remove your ability to be pleased the other 20% of the time.
And, yet, many of us also are married, some with kids.
I have a wife of 7 years, 2 dogs, 4BR house and all of the other "normal" stuff. Sure, the basement houses my home theater and an office/server room, but it's not unheard of for a geek to lead a relatively normal life while still loving tech.
"isn't civil protest more appropriate than armed overthrow?"
Given that the people writing the Constitution and Bill of Rights just finished an armed overthrow of the government, I don't think they were against the concept.
Personally, my priorities are right in line with my state's laws: not putting anyone to death. Maximum penalty for *anything* in my state is life without parole.
Where are you reading that those pardoned from the death sentence from this ruling are going to be let out to live beside you? In almost every case, it's going to be turned into life without parole.
I've also had some pretty good success getting the word out using prweb.com. They do free press releases, with some cheap upgrades. I've had $80 press releases get read 100,000 times in a couple of days. Those press releases rank fairly high in Google, at least for the first couple of weeks and can really help with some of the projects that are tailored to a real-world need (i.e. software for autistics vs. just another MP3 player).
Heck. The radio show my wife listens to was discussing how many people use the same 6 words for passwords: "password", "sex", etc. They then had a call-in segment on how to keep track of passwords. Someone called in and talked about this really useful program their husband showed them called, you guessed it, "Gator". It helps you remember your passwords, etc. All of the radio staff, ooed and aahed about how useful that would be. I called in immediately to set the record straight and was on hold long enough that they moved on to something else and they never did go back.
While it may seem strange, people actually seek this crap out.
I read an article a while back about those folks who are messing with evolutionary simulations in software (with a downloadable toolkit, etc). One of their experiments showed that theory worked out completely. When they restricted the flow of "food" or started killing off some of the organisms, the pace of evolution skyrocketed. The other interesting side effect was that some of the organisms learned to figure out when they were being watched and started playing dumb to avoid being killed off. Pretty interesting stuff.
I missed the part where $500 was the minimum price for a PDA? I carry a Tungsten T2 that I paid less than $200 for that has voice recording (even easier to "jot" down an idea by just pressing a button and saying it), bluetooth access to my cellphone (that was free when I signed up for service) for email, web, SSH, etc. in addition to "sticky note" capability. It syncs with my work PC wirelessly and picks up my scheduled appointments (which are added by authorized people).
Yeah. Lots of people attribute "special" to food items that are anything but special in restaurants. While my next story is Taco John's as well, the "super hot" sauce that customers come in "because no one else does it that way" is just an industrial can of jalapeno peppers, opened poured straight into a blender, pureed and put in a bottle.
Of course, then there's the stuff that just swears you off a restaurant. When I worked at Taco John's, the first time I was asked to make a batch of the taco beef, I cooked up the 20 pounds of hamburger and asked where I should drain the grease (as I'd already drained it into a pan). 3 people rushed in to warn me not to drain it or I'd get in trouble. Having to pour 4 pounds of fat back into that meat was pretty much the end of it for me.
Slashdot Mirror
No different than the mind control device that has managed to turn all people without a TV into automatons, reciting the same liturgy of disdain at every available opportunity. You are not morally superior, intellectually free or otherwise improved simply because of your rejection of TV.
Likewise, I'm not a better person because I choose not to drink alcohol. Does not drinking alcohol give me more time to pursue more "noble" activities each week that is unclouded by alcoholic distractions? Absolutely. However, so would a number of other choices like avoiding Slashdot. Is my wife a better person than you because she abstains from participating on this site? No.
TV is one form of entertainment out of many. And, despite the deep longings and ideal dreams of the anti-TV elite, removing televisions from homes will not result in 230 million Americans suddenly picking up Tolstoy. Rather, they'd simply turn to other forms of entertainment that demand equally little of their intellect.
I enjoy TV. I enjoy movies. I enjoy books. I have not stated a logical paradox in the previous 3 sentences.
I get plenty of respect. However, virtually none of it is because I'm a "geek" or "all powerful technician". Rather, it comes from the fact that I do what I do well, under promise and over deliver, communicate effectively, deal honestly and straighforwardly with clients and customers, provide generously of my time, information and resources and otherwise try to be a better person.
That respect has hardly fluctuated over the past 8 years that I've been working as a professional. It's because it's not tied to my profession. Instead, it's the kind of respect that lasts: the kind that's earned. Earned respect goes more with personal integrity than your station in life. There are people in all of society's strata that I have immense respect for. At the same time, there are lots of people in highly respected *positions* that I have 0 respect for.
If your level of respect fluctuates and is tied almost entirely to your chosen profession, it's not *you* that's been getting the respect, it's your job title. You've just been inheriting respect from your profession.
Given that companies that don't go out of their way to support Linux (less than 5 percent of computing market) get drilled on ./, I'd like to point out that 25% of households in the US get their TV via satellite, which is a royal pain with MythTV, if you can get it working at all.
I don't think it will. A GREAT deal of the text-based communication going back and forth right now is doing so textually because audio and video would be inappropriate in the settting.
Why do people use text messages on their phones instead of just calling? I can talk WAY faster than anyone can whip up text messages. However, I can discretely send a text message or email from my PDA without anyone else around me being part of the conversation.
This is the same reason that, despite improvements in voice recognition, I think it's crazy to think that voice recognition will replace textual typing as a data entry method. Why?
Put 50 people in a room with fabric cubicle walls and have them all type messages to their significant other on IM or email. Now, have all 50 call that same person instead. You go from a mild chatter of keyboards, during which pretty much everyone can concentrate and work on their own messages to complete chaos.
Text communication will only die as a critical communication method when similarly private methods arrive to replace it.
I agree with you about non-existant reasons. I just tend not to speak in absolute terms.
Another non-existant reason people cite is recurring transactions. They claim that you need to store the card in order to bill for future months. However, again, there are better ways, including using the tools provided by the back-end processors to set up recurring transactions directly, which again gives you a totally safe transaction id to use to suspend future payments, etc.
Just because it's allowed doesn't make it a good idea.
Stuff like: Bayesian inference, Probability models, Web site user modeling, etc.
All of those examples are from the same author (the guy in charge of phpmath.com), but go to show that there are actually interesting things being done with PHP.
I'd love to see some books that *don't* spend 200 pages explaining how to get to fetching an array from MySQL.
If you're storing credit card numbers *at all* in your ecommerce projects, you've got bigger problems than which DBMS you use.
Most credit card processing back ends will give your application transaction id's which can be used to complete a transaction, reverse it, etc. all without ever needing the credit card number itself.
Similarly, the personal information that's collected for the purposes of things like shipping should be pulled off the web server in most cases. For most of my clients, we set them up with a firewalled internal server that pulls down that information on a daily basis. Also remember that for the VAST majority of ecommerce, it's not like the whole process happens without human intervention. In most cases, only a provisional transaction (that expires if not followed up) takes place automatically. The "real" transaction only happens when someone actually fulfills the order (after a human being is done reviewing it).
Doing a few things like this result in nothing being stored on the server that isn't available in the phone book, tax records or otherwise publicly available.
Information security starts long before you pick a database server and extends way beyond it as well.
Personally, I write off anyone who indicates that they'd store credit card numbers in *any* database without a REALLY good reason.
The "system which has served us well for over 100 years" isn't a single, constant system reaching back to the Constitution. Rather, it's mutated quite a bit, especially in the last 30 years. To defend most of the major parameters of modern copyright is really to defend the changes of the last 30 years.
Up until then, you had to specifically register anything you wanted copyrighted. This ensured that the work that the "vast majority of people who produce IP" to make money from their works were protected, while allowing everything else to be public domain (the stuff created for reasons other than money). For most of the time before 1976, you also had to renew that copyright periodically to keep it.
Essentially, for the first 200 years of American copyright, making money from IP was an active process: deliberately file for copyright, include specific notice on all published copies, renew to continue copyright, etc.
What we have now is a passive process: everything is automatically copyrighted, notice doesn't need to be included, no renewals are needed and your family gets to automatically keep these passive rights long after you're dead.
Those 2 systems, while both called "copyright", have little in common as far as their approach, intent and results.
"Damn...do people not put much value in a good stereo these days?"
It's pretty much a "law" that there are multiple items in your house that I or other posters would react the same way you react to a cheap stereo. And, unless you have unlimited funds, you're going to focus on a few things and this is going to be true for everyone.
For instance, is your car a "good" car with "good" performance setup?
Do you settle for 35mm or sub 8 megapixel camera equipment instead of medium format slide film?
Did your main cooking skillet cost less than $200 or your main chef's knife cost less than $300?
Do you sleep on a sub-$1000 mattress?
Is any of the furniture in your house made by Sauder or any other "assemble-at-home" company instead of hand crafted, quartersawn oak?
Is your lawn perfectly manicured without a single weed?
Is your computer completely up to date or do you make due with a 2-3 year old model?
For every one of those questions there are quite a few people who would say, "Don't people value their (furniture|cooking equipment|photography gear, etc) these days" and be talking about you or me in one or more of those categories.
People spend their money proportionally to their interests and priorities. Switch out lists of priorities and you'll get an entirely different ratio of spending.
After reading (rather listening to the audiobook) the book "Blink", I've been looking to try something like this. The reason is the breakdown of the Pepsi challenge and a variation that really IS difficult.
The author took 3 glasses (rather than 2) and asks the taster to choose the 1 that's different. It turns out that this is WAY harder than it ought to be. Despite the participants' assertions that they were sure they could tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke, it didn't turn out that way and people were only "right" 33% of the time or the same as blind luck. Despite their "expertise", they really aren't able to tell the difference.
Once I move later this month and get my audio setup up and running in the new house, I may give this a shot with my friends. A playlist of 2 MP3's and a WAV of the same song and the reverse: 2 WAV and 1 MP3 and see how easy it actually is to tell the difference.
There's far too little blind testing of things like this in audio equipment.
Just because you want to read "An awful lot" as "the bedrock of" doesn't mean that's what I said. An awful lot of money is spent on crappy exercise gadgets. Are they the "bedrock" of the modern economy? Of course not.
I'm not sure where you're reading me as "rewriting the history of the US", but I was citing a singular relevant example in history, explaining it in context and drawing the parallels: all within a few paragraphs.
I was unaware that for my point to be valid, I also needed to place it within the entirety of the socioeconomic context of 19th century, the Industrial Revolution, slavery and intercontinental transportation. Apparently, rather than taking 2 minutes to make a post, I was supposed to do full research and cite numbers, including percentages of GDP. I used the term "an awful lot" as a loose, abstract term. I'm sorry we're assigning different values to that amount, but don't paint me as some idiot out to rewrite history for my own political agenda.
I'm not writing my thesis; I'm posting in a discussion of music copyright and other countries "stealing" on a website. And, in that context, the fact that something similar has happened before, where a lot of money was at stake, where the roles were reversed, and where the stuff in question was *also* music was relevant.
You're apparently seeing an entirely different "whole point" than I was actually making or stating. I'm not here to stand on a soapbox with my propaganda in my hand, redfaced. I've been on this site for a long time, and have a history of posting pretty carefully, without trying to distort anything to fit my decidedly moderate approach to life.
Sorry, I forgot I was on Slashdot. I'll explain more slowly. Sheet music is 1, as in a singular, example of early American disregard of international standards of intellectual property laws. That 1 example sits inside a trend that took place of things like turning a blind eye toward patent infringement (if the patent was elsewhere), etc.
I used sheet music as my example, because (get this), it was actually relevant to the discussion at hand. Before the advent of recorded music, sheet music and player piano rolls were BIG business and the businesses involved were the RIAA of their time. There was a great uproar about the US just flaunting the rules.
Today (I'm drawing a parallel and wanted to warn you), countries like China, Russia and others that aren't recognizing US and other major IP holding countries' patents, trademarks and copyright are growing very quickly, unfettered by the legal constraints that those systems put in place, *much like the US did*. History is repeating.
At some point, it's likely that, in those countries, the protections will start showing up as one Russian wants protection from another Russian "stealing" his work. Then, eventually, some other countries will step into the "abuser" role.
What's hilarious is that, if you go back 150 years or so, the United States were the ones flaunting the world's copyright laws. Sheet music was being flagrantly copied in the US and British and other European countries were outraged that this upstart country was regarding the theft of sheet music as some sort of 'right'.
An awful lot of the financial build-up of the US was based on disregarding intellectual property law (from the rest of the world) early on.
"I wonder if anyone at the IRS actually checks what job title you put on your tax forms? "
This is the federal government. It's probably someone's exclusive job to not only read it, but hand copy it in blue ink into large 3 ring binders which are then manually typed in by someone else employed full-time to do such an activity.
You need to adjust the contrast on your moral monitor. Morality's color depth is deeper than 2 bits; it's at least 8 bit greyscale. Just because someone/some group/something irritates you to extreme levels 80% of the time doesn't remove your ability to be pleased the other 20% of the time.
And, yet, many of us also are married, some with kids.
I have a wife of 7 years, 2 dogs, 4BR house and all of the other "normal" stuff. Sure, the basement houses my home theater and an office/server room, but it's not unheard of for a geek to lead a relatively normal life while still loving tech.
"isn't civil protest more appropriate than armed overthrow?"
Given that the people writing the Constitution and Bill of Rights just finished an armed overthrow of the government, I don't think they were against the concept.
Personally, my priorities are right in line with my state's laws: not putting anyone to death. Maximum penalty for *anything* in my state is life without parole.
Where are you reading that those pardoned from the death sentence from this ruling are going to be let out to live beside you? In almost every case, it's going to be turned into life without parole.
I've also had some pretty good success getting the word out using prweb.com. They do free press releases, with some cheap upgrades. I've had $80 press releases get read 100,000 times in a couple of days. Those press releases rank fairly high in Google, at least for the first couple of weeks and can really help with some of the projects that are tailored to a real-world need (i.e. software for autistics vs. just another MP3 player).
Heck. The radio show my wife listens to was discussing how many people use the same 6 words for passwords: "password", "sex", etc. They then had a call-in segment on how to keep track of passwords. Someone called in and talked about this really useful program their husband showed them called, you guessed it, "Gator". It helps you remember your passwords, etc. All of the radio staff, ooed and aahed about how useful that would be. I called in immediately to set the record straight and was on hold long enough that they moved on to something else and they never did go back.
While it may seem strange, people actually seek this crap out.
I read an article a while back about those folks who are messing with evolutionary simulations in software (with a downloadable toolkit, etc). One of their experiments showed that theory worked out completely. When they restricted the flow of "food" or started killing off some of the organisms, the pace of evolution skyrocketed. The other interesting side effect was that some of the organisms learned to figure out when they were being watched and started playing dumb to avoid being killed off. Pretty interesting stuff.
If typing effort was the main criteria, wouldn't go.com be kicking the competition?
I missed the part where $500 was the minimum price for a PDA? I carry a Tungsten T2 that I paid less than $200 for that has voice recording (even easier to "jot" down an idea by just pressing a button and saying it), bluetooth access to my cellphone (that was free when I signed up for service) for email, web, SSH, etc. in addition to "sticky note" capability. It syncs with my work PC wirelessly and picks up my scheduled appointments (which are added by authorized people).
Yeah. Lots of people attribute "special" to food items that are anything but special in restaurants. While my next story is Taco John's as well, the "super hot" sauce that customers come in "because no one else does it that way" is just an industrial can of jalapeno peppers, opened poured straight into a blender, pureed and put in a bottle.
Of course, then there's the stuff that just swears you off a restaurant. When I worked at Taco John's, the first time I was asked to make a batch of the taco beef, I cooked up the 20 pounds of hamburger and asked where I should drain the grease (as I'd already drained it into a pan). 3 people rushed in to warn me not to drain it or I'd get in trouble. Having to pour 4 pounds of fat back into that meat was pretty much the end of it for me.