Umm, if you're not ingesting carbohydrates, and don't have glucose in your blood, you won't need insulin (an incredibly destructive hormone anyway)
Ok, I'll bite.
Insulin is one of the strongest anabolic steroids we know of.
You are probably thinking of the catabolic hormones that _increase_ blood sugar levels, not insulin, which lowers it. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin
Last time something truly horrible happened to the food we eat, we got BSE. We had cows eat "processed" meat-by-products. That feed had been heat processed, and contained other dead animals. It turns out the heat didn't destroy a little protein structure called a prion, and an abundance of this substance destroyed the protein substances in the brain, leaving large cavities. The prion also multiplied, and eventually killed off the animal.
This hadn't happened if we hadn't turned a herbivore into a carnivore.
This disease was later passed to humans, where it is called Creuzfeld-Jacobs syndrome.
Are people really entertaining the idea that trying to grow cows in vats is a good idea? We can't even change their feed without goofing up.
Imagine that the Mexicans, instead of just flooding across our borders in insane numbers, were firing homemade rockets into downtown San Diego and El Paso. Imagine that this had been going on for two years. And imagine that the people doing this (the Zapatistas, say) won the next Mexican presidential election. Now they're the Mexican government. Then they fire some more rockets. Since they're the government, that's now an act of war.
Hamas rules in Palestine. Hizbollah is shooting rockets from Lebanon, and is not ruling Lebanon. The two countries are on opposite sides of Israel.
I work for Telio, which is an european VOIP operator. I may be biased. Caveat emptor.
Our customers have been able to do voip calls using our softphone on intercontinental flights for a year or so, given a decent IP service on the plane. I have even been in a teleconference with one of our employees who was somewhere above the atlantic ocean.
Downside: Latency. These calls have to go via satellites, which means a typical delay of several hundred milliseconds.
Hm. Is there a reason why the United States is just letting the Chinese practice their blatantly economic-nationalist trade policy, all the while sitting under the pretenses of free trade? How that particular "regulatory tangle" not constituting a barrier to free trade? Where are the retaliatory sanctions?
If you look a couple of years back, the US stepped all over a number of patents from just after the declaration of independence up through the industrial revolution. The US hasn't become a fanboy of patents until you guys became a developed country.
What am I supposed to be outraged about? Broadband providers have never, as far as I can recall, provided bandwidth free of charge to their customers; nor would I expect them to. What am I missing here?
Erlangs formula. This guy has sold you N units of something. He knows that you are only going to use N/50 of what you bought, so he can charge you for less than the full cost of N. In a perfect world, you would use none of his resources and still pay what you pay today. In a truly awful world, you would actually use the N units.
All of a sudden, you start pulling more than N/50 (voip traffic? p2p? video?) through. He either has to change the 50 to 40 (which means you pay more), or he must stop you from using more resources. Upping the price will not be popular with the shareholders.
I remember my professor had an experiment with 60GHz transmission around 1995. He was looking into it because some abundant gas (oxygen and water, as far as I remember?) absorbs 60GHz radiation, so it was a very nice choice for secure short-range communications - someone who wanted to listen in had to sit almost on top of you to listen in.
Of course, the same applies to the receiving end, which is a drag. If this is really 60GHz, it will never compete with WiMAX - this will have a range somewhere in between Wifi and Bluetooth with any sensibly-sized amplifier/antenna combo.
Yes, I'm going ape on this one. I'm going ape because each time I think of NK I imagine the life of those poor bastards who were born there and when I do this I almost cry.
I notice you have not mentioned Sudan - a country without any WMDs, but experiencing one of the biggest famines the world has ever known. 10000 people are dying in Darfur - every month.
Yes, people write about "massively fattening foods". On the ground used for delivering meat substitute to macdonalds so that western people can get their daily fat kick you could probably grow enough food to take the sting off the Darfur chrisis.
This does, however, not make your points invalid. You are perfectly correct. So was the guy that made you go apeshit. It is possible to have more than one bad thing going on in the world at any given time.
Yes, it _is_ possible for other countries to be run by idiots - even if the regime in NC is a bad one.
Re:Why aren't competitors beating Google to market
on
Mapping Google Maps
·
· Score: 1
Easy. The competitors are squeezing efficiency. Google employees get time to do off-the-marketing horizon stuff.
Nontrivial innovation doesn't happen while you are on a schedule. Tom DeMarco, "Slack" should be mandatory reading for every PHB.
I'm sorry - how does having showed your ID actually help in identifying a specific corpse out of all the corpses surrounding a crash site?
If you were after THAT - shouldn't you rather go for DNA samples of each passenger before a flight (and discard the samples unchecked in case the flight landed safely)?
Ok, you run a DNA test on the corpses. DNA tests are comparative. Who are you going to get samples from to find out who should get to bury the body - that is, who is related to the diseased?
Wouldn't it be so much easier if you knew the next of kin already? This is where it helps to know who is on the flight _before_ anything happens. It is also a good idea to tell the families of the people on the flight about the accident before they get to see close-up-coverage of mangled bodies on the telly. This is also only possible if you know something about the people on the plane.
In short: if you live in a region that considers ISO-8859-1 to be a default, then 437 is for you, if you live somewhere else, you probably already know all this, and you have only read it this far to see if you could correct some of more glaring mistakes I have made.
And høw wøld yø write abøøt the famøs møøse or yør cøsin Sven?
Why do WE have to do something about it? Where is the rest of the world? Why is darfur Americas fault? What do you want us to do there, invade? How do you know there's genocide going on there?
We are. A friend is working for an aid agency in Darfur right now. As far as I know, the french have sent about 1000 soldiers there to help quieten things down.
If you doubt the fact that there is severe malnourishment and military problems in and around Darfur, you need to go to other news sources. I won't point the finger at any one party as a cause of the conflict. That solution is too easy and moronic.
Norway gives in excess of 1.5 billion NOK (divide by eight or so to get euros or dollars) each year to aid programmes. Strangely, most of this money ends up in areas where there are no alleged weapons of mass destruction or oil, and therefore, no CNN either. I can give you the exact figures if you want. The US is, by the way, considered a poor contributor to aid programmes since promises come cheaply, but the money to go with them doesn't show up.
You may feel hard done by when people criticize the US for their foreign policy, but I think you are barking up the wrong tree when you are stating that the US is the only nation that tries to take steps to solve problems in other parts of the world. From my point of view, that is just plain wrong.
The UN _is_ doing something, by the way. They have just bent the arms of the sudanese government by way of a resolution. There is also a local variant akin to the UN on the african continent that is heavily involved in Sudan right now.
So get off your high horse, please. You are making a fool of yourself up there.
HARKIN: In Scandinavia and in Japan, you
have services whereby young people can pass along street corners and
they can be automatically hooked up via location based tracking to
someone who meets their personal profile for the purposes of dating or
finding a friend.
And people want this? Can't people make up their mind for themselves?
Sure they can. But if you are in "dating mode" (or whatever), why shouldn't you be willing to broadcast the fact? Apparently, this is happening anonymously via bluetooth, mostly. Why shouldn't you go into a singles bar or use any of the other ways of communicating the fact that you are available, interested in someone who wants to go with you to a concert, need someone to eat dinner with or whatever. You are the one who chooses to make this information public, and you get matches only from other people with the same stated interest (although not necessarily the same goal) as yourself. This is not the system choosing for you, this is an attempt to link people who are broadcasting something similar.
According to the media, this has also gone to the point of people broadcasting "willing to have sex". If two people are both interested, they find out who owns the other (bluetooth-enabled, mostly) phone by arranging to meet somewhere. I assume this is something every male geek out there has dreamt about.
It is up to you to choose to broadcast your intent to do something. I can't see what is so wrong about this, or why this stops you "making up you mind for yourself". You still get to see the girl/guy/whatever before you are dragged off to meet their family, you know.
Next time you pass a gorgeous girl, ponder what might happen if she actually _had_ the same interests as you instead of you coming across as a complete jerk trying to pick her up with some old pick-up-line.
No, I am not using these services. I just think you are judging a service without knowing enough about it.
When you're on the company's time you should be working.
You know, we found out in the 1960s that stopwatch monitoring doesn't work. Employees do not become more effective if you expect 100% focus for 8 hours.
What does increase efficiency is variation. What also increases efficiency is the employees feeling that they have some leeway in how they structure their day. They should be able to make a private call during office hours if the office they are calling is only open during office hours. This also goes the other way: If your boss calls you a saturday and asks you for help because something just blew up, the slack you have been cut earlier should give him more than enough goodwill for you to try to figure out a way to move your private life out of the way.
This obviously stops somewhere, but I think you are far too categoric in stating that you should be working 100% of the time when you are on company time. That way lies micromanagement and poor resource utilization, which places you in a risky position, fat ready to trim.
However, he doesn't say what he wants. Does he want to delay the process, and why does he think that will lead to a better risk management than the current plant? Has he got any suggestions for how the risks can be mitigated?
IMHO, Alvarez comes across as a person that does not want this cleanup to take place at all because that may lead to nuclear power not becoming mainstream if an accident occurs during the cleanup.
I wouldn't mind hearing about a few more. Perhaps you could talk with your wife and make a list of four books or so which you think cover this topic for someone with a project management background (Tom DeMarco, Alistair Cockburn, Edward Yourdon)?
2x2 matrices are sometimes useful, but more often they just encourage us to limit the number of possibilities we consider
If you are looking for ways out, yes. That is something brainstorming techniques can help you with.
If you have a problem choosing between available options, you are past the brain-storming stage. If the authors of this book advocate doing a form of triage on your options, I am all for it. All to many people in leading positions don't want to make decisions when they are small and manageable - meetings and other forms of "feeling good about your job" seem to be much more important. I do this myself - I think it is a basic human characteristic to be wary of change.
They tend to sit and wait until the choice among the few remaining options are blindingly obvious. This is where people get fired and companies start the process of going out of business. At that time, a number of better options have become unavailable because some resource is no longer available - money, time or manpower. Or the market itself, for that matter.
Engineer-type managers live and breathe this stuff, and may need to widen their view of available options, as you say. Luckily, not all managers have engineering backgrounds.
I think managers with backgrounds from other disciplines may need to learn how to do this stuff. Engineering-type disciplines are, as far as I know, the only disciplines which promote this kind of mindset.
Why does the government feel that it needs to know the "ID" of my vehicle?
Someone pinches your license plates. You need a new set. How do you know that the *stard who stole your license plates doesn't put them on his own car, which incidentally looks like yours. You would end up with all his tickets. VINs make it possible to actually find out if this has happened for the police - is this the car which should have these license plates?
If someone pinches your car and sends it somewhere else, it will be possible for you to reclaim your car if someone ever catches the guys who did it. Without VINs, a car without a license plate is up for grabs.
The company which makes your car also has issues that makes it necessary to identify individual cars. Say that one engine assembly line is faulty, and this problem surfaces two years down the line when engines start keeling over. Would you rather have a spectacular engine failure, or a letter from your friendly automaker telling you they need to provide you with a new engine? Please feel free to abstract this to brake systems failures, if you want.
Let's see... how many manhours can a consultant charge the PHB to run the following SQL query
Brilliant.
On one side, we have the pessimists blowing this issue out of proportion.
On the other side, we have people who don't know the first thing about the practicalities of actually changing a system that is deployed on hundreds of boxen telling us that it is really a one-liner, no really!
The reason being that once something is in space, it has a huge advantage over anything comming up to it.
I don't agree.
Anything sitting in space has a huge energy problem because it is prohibitively expensive to develop something that can keep up there. Any extra weight costs a lot of money, which means that you are energy- and weight limited. Anything coming up through the atmosphere can carry enough energy for just one mission. Lob a couple of hundred kilos of steel pellets into a satellite orbit, but going the other way, and you will knock the thing out. If you don't do it on the first pass, one of the following passes will do it, and you need next to zero guidance. You will also wreck that particular orbit for a long, long time. The cost is close to zero compared to the cost of keeping a satellite in orbit.
You might say that you can just use something to knock the shotgun-like missile out, but a satellite carries a very limited amount of energy and weight. If you have to continue to defend a satellite, sooner or later you _will_ run out of energy. It is only a matter of time.
As for the energy problem: Yes, you can use a radioactive energy source instead of "clean" energy from chemical sources or solar panels. What happens if I time my attack so the broken satellite reenters the atmosphere above, say, Washington DC? Sounds like a very bad idea to me. Using a radioactive power pack would be comparable to giving Saddam chemical weapons and asking him to be nice. But then again, some complete muffin already did that, so who am I to argue?
I also don't see what the point would be. If the US can't control a country with no functioning infrastructure like Iraq, what is the point of spending billions of dollars on space weaponry?
If I travelled to the good city of Parma, rented some space, and produced something that for all intents and purposes would otherwise be known as Cheddar cheese (a product of Cheddar, UK, only!), would you call this "Parmesan?"
What would happen would be a hefty fine. If you were using a cheddar process, the result would not be parmigiano reggiano, just as a brie is not a hard cheese.
There are several requirements that have to be met in order for something to be called parmigiano reggiano. Making it in the right place is only one of them. 18 months of aging is another. The producers are only allowed to make the cheese between the months of may and november - for quality reasons.
There is something called the parmigiano reggiano cheese control consortium. They market the parmesan cheese (just as Pepsi does), and they control the quality of the products (Hey, just as Pepsi does). They have existed since 1934.
You are wrong in thinking that parmesan cheese comes from Parma. It can be made anywhere in the Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Mantua or Bologna regions. It is also not a cheese it is possible to make industrially, unlike the parmesan-labeled muck you are cheering for.
I suggest you actually take a piece of the parmesan-labeled cheese to Italy, and then see if you can taste a difference from a freshly-cut wheel of the real McCoy. My bet is that you can.
More of the manufacturing process can be found here.
Oh, and by the way, "brut champagne" means "dry sparkling wine from the champagne district in France, made with the champagne process". This is just as much a regional label as parmigiano reggiano is.
We shape other peoples perception of us by the way we "sell" ourselves.
If women consistently sell themselves short compared to men when they buy printers or what have you - why shouldn't they also get different treatment in return as a response to their own interaction?
I am not saying this is the whole problem. I do think it is part of the problem, and something that very few people seem to think about - women in particular.
Slashdot Mirror
Insulin is one of the strongest anabolic steroids we know of.
You are probably thinking of the catabolic hormones that _increase_ blood sugar levels, not insulin, which lowers it. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin
Last time something truly horrible happened to the food we eat, we got BSE. We had cows eat "processed" meat-by-products. That feed had been heat processed, and contained other dead animals. It turns out the heat didn't destroy a little protein structure called a prion, and an abundance of this substance destroyed the protein substances in the brain, leaving large cavities. The prion also multiplied, and eventually killed off the animal.
This hadn't happened if we hadn't turned a herbivore into a carnivore.
This disease was later passed to humans, where it is called Creuzfeld-Jacobs syndrome.
Are people really entertaining the idea that trying to grow cows in vats is a good idea? We can't even change their feed without goofing up.
Just some facts for you.
Our customers have been able to do voip calls using our softphone on intercontinental flights for a year or so, given a decent IP service on the plane. I have even been in a teleconference with one of our employees who was somewhere above the atlantic ocean.
Downside: Latency. These calls have to go via satellites, which means a typical delay of several hundred milliseconds.
Why shouldn't China do the same?
If you don't like it, stop buying chinese goods.
Because it has got a lower MTBF than the internal memory of the phone?
Telio isn't making a loss either.
(Revenues around $6.4M, operating profit before extraordinary expenses around $700k)
Caveat emptor: I work for Telio. My views are biased.
All of a sudden, you start pulling more than N/50 (voip traffic? p2p? video?) through. He either has to change the 50 to 40 (which means you pay more), or he must stop you from using more resources. Upping the price will not be popular with the shareholders.
Of course, the same applies to the receiving end, which is a drag. If this is really 60GHz, it will never compete with WiMAX - this will have a range somewhere in between Wifi and Bluetooth with any sensibly-sized amplifier/antenna combo.
Yes, I'm going ape on this one. I'm going ape because each time I think of NK I imagine the life of those poor bastards who were born there and when I do this I almost cry.
I notice you have not mentioned Sudan - a country without any WMDs, but experiencing one of the biggest famines the world has ever known. 10000 people are dying in Darfur - every month.
Yes, people write about "massively fattening foods". On the ground used for delivering meat substitute to macdonalds so that western people can get their daily fat kick you could probably grow enough food to take the sting off the Darfur chrisis.
This does, however, not make your points invalid. You are perfectly correct. So was the guy that made you go apeshit. It is possible to have more than one bad thing going on in the world at any given time.
Yes, it _is_ possible for other countries to be run by idiots - even if the regime in NC is a bad one.
Nontrivial innovation doesn't happen while you are on a schedule. Tom DeMarco, "Slack" should be mandatory reading for every PHB.
Um, and how would you drive the car after having had a nuclear bomb dropped on your head?
If you were after THAT - shouldn't you rather go for DNA samples of each passenger before a flight (and discard the samples unchecked in case the flight landed safely)?
Ok, you run a DNA test on the corpses. DNA tests are comparative. Who are you going to get samples from to find out who should get to bury the body - that is, who is related to the diseased?
Wouldn't it be so much easier if you knew the next of kin already? This is where it helps to know who is on the flight _before_ anything happens. It is also a good idea to tell the families of the people on the flight about the accident before they get to see close-up-coverage of mangled bodies on the telly. This is also only possible if you know something about the people on the plane.
And høw wøld yø write abøøt the famøs møøse or yør cøsin Sven?
We are. A friend is working for an aid agency in Darfur right now. As far as I know, the french have sent about 1000 soldiers there to help quieten things down.
If you doubt the fact that there is severe malnourishment and military problems in and around Darfur, you need to go to other news sources. I won't point the finger at any one party as a cause of the conflict. That solution is too easy and moronic.
Norway gives in excess of 1.5 billion NOK (divide by eight or so to get euros or dollars) each year to aid programmes. Strangely, most of this money ends up in areas where there are no alleged weapons of mass destruction or oil, and therefore, no CNN either. I can give you the exact figures if you want. The US is, by the way, considered a poor contributor to aid programmes since promises come cheaply, but the money to go with them doesn't show up.
You may feel hard done by when people criticize the US for their foreign policy, but I think you are barking up the wrong tree when you are stating that the US is the only nation that tries to take steps to solve problems in other parts of the world. From my point of view, that is just plain wrong.
The UN _is_ doing something, by the way. They have just bent the arms of the sudanese government by way of a resolution. There is also a local variant akin to the UN on the african continent that is heavily involved in Sudan right now.
So get off your high horse, please. You are making a fool of yourself up there.
And people want this? Can't people make up their mind for themselves?
Sure they can. But if you are in "dating mode" (or whatever), why shouldn't you be willing to broadcast the fact? Apparently, this is happening anonymously via bluetooth, mostly. Why shouldn't you go into a singles bar or use any of the other ways of communicating the fact that you are available, interested in someone who wants to go with you to a concert, need someone to eat dinner with or whatever. You are the one who chooses to make this information public, and you get matches only from other people with the same stated interest (although not necessarily the same goal) as yourself. This is not the system choosing for you, this is an attempt to link people who are broadcasting something similar.
According to the media, this has also gone to the point of people broadcasting "willing to have sex". If two people are both interested, they find out who owns the other (bluetooth-enabled, mostly) phone by arranging to meet somewhere. I assume this is something every male geek out there has dreamt about.
It is up to you to choose to broadcast your intent to do something. I can't see what is so wrong about this, or why this stops you "making up you mind for yourself". You still get to see the girl/guy/whatever before you are dragged off to meet their family, you know.
Next time you pass a gorgeous girl, ponder what might happen if she actually _had_ the same interests as you instead of you coming across as a complete jerk trying to pick her up with some old pick-up-line.
No, I am not using these services. I just think you are judging a service without knowing enough about it.
You know, we found out in the 1960s that stopwatch monitoring doesn't work. Employees do not become more effective if you expect 100% focus for 8 hours.
What does increase efficiency is variation. What also increases efficiency is the employees feeling that they have some leeway in how they structure their day. They should be able to make a private call during office hours if the office they are calling is only open during office hours. This also goes the other way: If your boss calls you a saturday and asks you for help because something just blew up, the slack you have been cut earlier should give him more than enough goodwill for you to try to figure out a way to move your private life out of the way.
This obviously stops somewhere, but I think you are far too categoric in stating that you should be working 100% of the time when you are on company time. That way lies micromanagement and poor resource utilization, which places you in a risky position, fat ready to trim.
However, he doesn't say what he wants. Does he want to delay the process, and why does he think that will lead to a better risk management than the current plant? Has he got any suggestions for how the risks can be mitigated?
IMHO, Alvarez comes across as a person that does not want this cleanup to take place at all because that may lead to nuclear power not becoming mainstream if an accident occurs during the cleanup.
Thank you. It is now on my to-buy list.
I wouldn't mind hearing about a few more. Perhaps you could talk with your wife and make a list of four books or so which you think cover this topic for someone with a project management background (Tom DeMarco, Alistair Cockburn, Edward Yourdon)?
If you are looking for ways out, yes. That is something brainstorming techniques can help you with.
If you have a problem choosing between available options, you are past the brain-storming stage. If the authors of this book advocate doing a form of triage on your options, I am all for it. All to many people in leading positions don't want to make decisions when they are small and manageable - meetings and other forms of "feeling good about your job" seem to be much more important. I do this myself - I think it is a basic human characteristic to be wary of change.
They tend to sit and wait until the choice among the few remaining options are blindingly obvious. This is where people get fired and companies start the process of going out of business. At that time, a number of better options have become unavailable because some resource is no longer available - money, time or manpower. Or the market itself, for that matter.
Engineer-type managers live and breathe this stuff, and may need to widen their view of available options, as you say. Luckily, not all managers have engineering backgrounds.
I think managers with backgrounds from other disciplines may need to learn how to do this stuff. Engineering-type disciplines are, as far as I know, the only disciplines which promote this kind of mindset.
Why does the government feel that it needs to know the "ID" of my vehicle?
Someone pinches your license plates. You need a new set. How do you know that the *stard who stole your license plates doesn't put them on his own car, which incidentally looks like yours. You would end up with all his tickets. VINs make it possible to actually find out if this has happened for the police - is this the car which should have these license plates?
If someone pinches your car and sends it somewhere else, it will be possible for you to reclaim your car if someone ever catches the guys who did it. Without VINs, a car without a license plate is up for grabs.
The company which makes your car also has issues that makes it necessary to identify individual cars. Say that one engine assembly line is faulty, and this problem surfaces two years down the line when engines start keeling over. Would you rather have a spectacular engine failure, or a letter from your friendly automaker telling you they need to provide you with a new engine? Please feel free to abstract this to brake systems failures, if you want.
This is why you want VINs.
Let's see... how many manhours can a consultant charge the PHB to run the following SQL query
Brilliant.
On one side, we have the pessimists blowing this issue out of proportion.
On the other side, we have people who don't know the first thing about the practicalities of actually changing a system that is deployed on hundreds of boxen telling us that it is really a one-liner, no really!
Or are you possibly a troll, sir?
The reason being that once something is in space, it has a huge advantage over anything comming up to it.
I don't agree.
Anything sitting in space has a huge energy problem because it is prohibitively expensive to develop something that can keep up there. Any extra weight costs a lot of money, which means that you are energy- and weight limited. Anything coming up through the atmosphere can carry enough energy for just one mission. Lob a couple of hundred kilos of steel pellets into a satellite orbit, but going the other way, and you will knock the thing out. If you don't do it on the first pass, one of the following passes will do it, and you need next to zero guidance. You will also wreck that particular orbit for a long, long time. The cost is close to zero compared to the cost of keeping a satellite in orbit.
You might say that you can just use something to knock the shotgun-like missile out, but a satellite carries a very limited amount of energy and weight. If you have to continue to defend a satellite, sooner or later you _will_ run out of energy. It is only a matter of time.
As for the energy problem: Yes, you can use a radioactive energy source instead of "clean" energy from chemical sources or solar panels. What happens if I time my attack so the broken satellite reenters the atmosphere above, say, Washington DC? Sounds like a very bad idea to me. Using a radioactive power pack would be comparable to giving Saddam chemical weapons and asking him to be nice. But then again, some complete muffin already did that, so who am I to argue?
I also don't see what the point would be. If the US can't control a country with no functioning infrastructure like Iraq, what is the point of spending billions of dollars on space weaponry?
What would happen would be a hefty fine. If you were using a cheddar process, the result would not be parmigiano reggiano, just as a brie is not a hard cheese.
There are several requirements that have to be met in order for something to be called parmigiano reggiano. Making it in the right place is only one of them. 18 months of aging is another. The producers are only allowed to make the cheese between the months of may and november - for quality reasons.
There is something called the parmigiano reggiano cheese control consortium. They market the parmesan cheese (just as Pepsi does), and they control the quality of the products (Hey, just as Pepsi does). They have existed since 1934.
You are wrong in thinking that parmesan cheese comes from Parma. It can be made anywhere in the Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Mantua or Bologna regions. It is also not a cheese it is possible to make industrially, unlike the parmesan-labeled muck you are cheering for.
I suggest you actually take a piece of the parmesan-labeled cheese to Italy, and then see if you can taste a difference from a freshly-cut wheel of the real McCoy. My bet is that you can.
More of the manufacturing process can be found here.
Oh, and by the way, "brut champagne" means "dry sparkling wine from the champagne district in France, made with the champagne process". This is just as much a regional label as parmigiano reggiano is.
If women consistently sell themselves short compared to men when they buy printers or what have you - why shouldn't they also get different treatment in return as a response to their own interaction?
I am not saying this is the whole problem. I do think it is part of the problem, and something that very few people seem to think about - women in particular.