Seriously, this is said so often that it fails to have much meaning, but let's consider what it means. You need vitamin A to live. But it can kill you. A simple requirement, something you'll die without, and it'll run you through.
The same is true for many vitamins. Vitamin C is an obvious exception.
Consider the healthiest things you love to eat. I'll name some of mine: Mangoes will turn my skin orange, cherries will give me a tummy ache, coconuts will give me heart disease, coffee will make me vomit and shake and die a violent painful death. If I have too much of them - which I don't intend to do!
Grandparent:Can you imagine what chemicals are needed to turn plant fats into something you can put on your bread?
Parent replied:hydrogen
Problem is, once you bind the hydrogen it's trans fat and no longer vegetable oil - it's gone from super yummy and healthy to ugly grey goo that happens to be one of the unhealthiest things you can eat.
Personally, I prefer to make my sandwiches with hommus and dip my bread roll in fresh olive oil.
Interesting that the decaf was only "theoretically harmful" to fatties. To normal or skinny people it has the reverse effect and the level of the naughty chemical dropped.
So maybe if you happen to be normal or skinny, decaf is even better for you than you thought.
Of course we puritanical vegan types aren't dying of a heart attack anyway because we barely eat enough saturated fat to make the cholesterol we need to bind our cells together (yay coconuts and avocadoes: necessary to bind our cells together).
Does anyone else have trouble actually bringing up the article without a bunch of stuff all over the top of it? (Say, in Firefox?)
Re:Robust == Robust flavor? This is incorrect
on
Drink Decaf and Die
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've always understood that the reason decaffeination removes flavour is that the caffeine tastes bitter. The solution is not to use different beans, but to roast a little darker to restore the strong bitter taste.
My favourite decaf comes from a little boutique that measures it out at the point of sale. Next to their darkest roast coffee, it is clearly even darker still!
I think the reason most decaf is so bad is that you have to get it pre-ground (even at restaurants and cafes) and thus it's stale and the wrong grind anyway, or else it's such a fringe item that it sits around longer on the shelf going stale between roasting batches.
You get a picture in a little heart shaped frame (you supply the frame) and one for your computer background. But no nude pictures because I don't think we've been together long enough for that sort of trust.
Also, I forgot to mention, you'll need to join my religion, or at least adopt core practices such as vegetarianism.
Well you live in Philadelphia and I live in Canberra, so I think this could work very well. I'll let you know where to send the jewellery. You'll get several gushing love letters a week in the post written on my beautiful stationery and air mailed so you can enjoy them sooner.
Yeah I am a girl, and although I'm not this guy's girlfriend and won't give head to a guy who is laughing at me, I go along with the basic psychology.
We're more interested in a man with his own opinions and beliefs. It shows he's a thinker and comfortable with himself. A sycophantic agreement man has our attention for a short while and then we dump him for the spineless nerd he is.
Contract of adhesion is a new one for us here in Aussie land. We do have plenty of precedent, however, for a unilateral contract. That's where you make an offer and the person accepts your terms and comes to tell you that they've been carried out.
For example, if you offer a reward for a solution to a problem, I don't have to tell you I accept your offer before I go looking for the solution. I can simply mail it to you with a letter talking about payment.
Usually, Aussies need a "terms and conditions apply" notice. You'll need to advertise those terms and conditions in a prospectus before completion of many contracts. For example, my bank gave me a book showing all their fees and payments and made me take it away for a few days before they'd let me open an account.
If a product/service has terms and conditions I need to peruse, I should have a few weeks to change my mind. Phone company sales girls always tell you that when they come door-to-dooring.
I think that clicking "I agree" when you don't shows bad faith and judges tend to frown on that sort of thing. If you had it done at the shop and didn't know, you could expect leniency.
The Australian Trade Practices Act also bans various nasty types of contracts, and common law covers many others. It's a grey area, and my contracts lecturer said there's not really any civil law covering computers software licenses, so the EULAs can get away with stuff other people couldn't - unless the high court really gets passionate, which they do occasionally but haven't yet in this case.
As noted by another person in reply, a contract doesn't have to be an exchange of things, but an exchange definitely has to take place. The exchange has to be equitable and reasonable. For example, I couldn't indenture myself for 10 years for a packet of peanuts.
You can buy the right to negotiate for another contract. You can swap secrets and have NDAs as contract clauses. You can make any arrangement you like as long as the parties are well defined, and it's reasonable for each party to feel like it's a good deal.
If the details are not complete, a court has the power to fill in the details with what's "reasonable". If you call for a service and they don't quote and then charge too much, you might still have to pay - if it's really too much, a court will decide what's reasonable, and they'll probably decide for the other guy's benefit (eg twice the going rate instead of thrice).
If the box says "contains the usual EULA", then most clauses are almost implied in the contract of sale.
And finally, if you really want to give something away from the goodness of your heart, rather than to mutual benefit, and you want that promise to be legally binding, you can deliver it in the form of a writ. Sort of a one-way contract, it usually contains the word "solemnly" as in "I solemnly declare that my son can have my house for free". A lawyer could write one up in a few minutes.
The grandparent is a physicist. If you are sitting still and I am moving, then if you press two buttons simultaneously, that's great, but as I move past you, I'll see you press first one then the other. You'd say my point of view is an illusion, but according to relativity theory, the loss of simultanaity is real, and not an illusion.
Hence, you can't say whether the use was simultaneous without first specifying a reference point.
of course with the speeds at which we move, you could specify you, me, the magistrate, and the earth as reference points and if you use the computers for a few seconds, it's clearly simulaneous for all observers.
Honesty? Well I believe in these fundamentals: Right Understanding Right Thought Right Speech Right Action Right Livelihood Right Effort Right Mindfulness Right Concentration
Or, put slightly differently and more usefully: (But it all comes out in the interpetation)
The general Slashdot opinion is *He was a thief because he bought something at a low price with the intention of selling it - without caring whether it might be non-legitimate
*He was stupid because his greed stopped him from seeing that it was clearly stolen and he could go to jail
You know what? People sell things cheaply all the time! I'd be more concerned at $300 that the thing was a lemon - it would never cross my mind that it had been stolen. I'm an honest person - a fundamentalist. I believe that using a stolen computer is bad karma for me - but you ask and you have to trust other humans. Otherwise you're just another hater.
So you ask the person "why are you selling it?"
And the person answers "Well I'm about to go overseas, I need to get cash pronto for an operation, my wife left me and I'm buying her out of the house" or whatever story the person has. If it's not a valid reason, then you apply your ethical belief appropriately (with extra caution for merchants!)
What sort of paranoid fool checks up on every arrangement she makes? Who does it take to say "I don't believe you - prove that you don't know the value of this item!"
Pawn shops are always full of great deals on specialist items such as camera lenses, because even pawnbrokers don't know the value of things. So why distrust someone selling a computer?
Are you really all so caught up in this culture of fear that you check and double-check everything you do? Just in case the Thought Police come and take you away?
What next? I know, you won't be able to buy a hard drive because what if it once contained copies of songs? In fact, you won't be able to buy the computer used to obtain those copies - and that could be any computer! New network card? Practically fraud! And don't forget your new OEM microsoft software as you buy your shiny new computer! Good consumer!
I love my Southern sky. As an Australian, I can't say "I love a sunburnt country", but I love the Magellanic Clouds, the Southern Cross, the Pliades... Looking up is how I know I'm home.
And of course your photos won't show bizarre things like the upside-down-moon!
It's about darn time people started putting more effort into the southern sky. You can just survey for a night and show up interesting things down here!
I'm impressed. The link to The Onion that was marked Google instead of Humour was a bit of a low point for Slashdot. But a story about a bunch of cranks that doesn't even include a link is a whole new record. Are you guys having a competition?
Tomorrow's Stupid News article: RocketRainbow writes about a staggering discovery: "Some guy in a bar told me that he made a time machine". The implications are astonishing.
I know this reply is a bit late, but here's my two cents.
When I was in law school* we had a thing called unilateral contracts. The difference between a unilateral contract and a bilateral contract is the negotiation phase.
For example, if I were to go to the Slashdot editors and say "I want you to stop posting dupes and you want free goodies. Let's make a deal," then we would negotiate a bilateral contract. On the other hand, if I sent out an email to all slashdot editors "Free iPod to anyone who can go a week without posting a dupe", then although they didn't discuss with me their intention of trying, they can come to me at the end of the week and say "look, no dupe! Gimme my iPod!"
Now, if Lexmark wants to cover their item with shrinkwrap licensing, then it's pretty reasonable of them to do so. You "buy" a membership to a gym (well, other people do... trust me, I've been inside a gym a few times!) and with that comes their usual list of rules and regulations. The cartridge is a physical object. It's yours. But you only get it if you agree to do anything else in the contract of sale. In effect, you're buying the cartridge for "$35 plus a promise you will recycle it in this manner".**
The biggest legal obstacle is the fact that you probably bought the cartridge from wal-mart or dick smiths or your local newsagent, rather than lexmark. But now that intellectual property is involved, they can say they swapped their IP for your promise to behave in a particular way. And that the contract was written on the package.
Oddly enough, you can (In Australia, anyway) also include another contract as one of the items on the primary contract. Lexmark could conceivably come up with some loophole so that you bought the cartridge for "$35 plus the following promises to Lexmark".**
In conclusion, you do NOT need negotiation for there to be a contract. You just need for each party to gain something. And you can't change a unilateral contract by crossing out part of it and signing it, so don't try. There are so many ways for Lexmark to get away with something like this - not least because the judges want them to! And judges have a tendency to make up their mind first and then choose the legal arguments.
*Law school was fucking boring and I left to pursue full-time astrophysics. BUT, it was the best law school in Australia, and I got in over half a semester of contracts! Everything but the finer points.
The protein thing is a few years out of date. Consider a vitamin b12 supplement, though. You can get your vitamin b12 by growing bacteria in a cow and killing and eating it, or by growing bacteria in a lab then extracting the vitamin. I take a little floravital, which also has liquid iron (useful for a woman my age) and a few other goodies.
I had minestra for lunch. My brain is fine. I'm not trying to use hyperbole, rather I'm inviting comment on ways to encourage people to consider the impact of their decisions. For example: Next time you consider eating a steak, I invite you to consider that the average vegan uses half the water and a tenth the land used by an average meat eater.
Sorry, I should know by now to use a few more steps.
*Temperatures rise *Wilderness starts to die *Crops become harder to grow *"No worries! Just chuck a bit of this on it! We think it's safe, and you'll improve your productivity and hence income by 500%. You'll need to renew your patent license again next year."
Slashdot Mirror
ME TOO!!!!!!!!!
Seriously, this is said so often that it fails to have much meaning, but let's consider what it means. You need vitamin A to live. But it can kill you. A simple requirement, something you'll die without, and it'll run you through.
The same is true for many vitamins. Vitamin C is an obvious exception.
Consider the healthiest things you love to eat. I'll name some of mine: Mangoes will turn my skin orange, cherries will give me a tummy ache, coconuts will give me heart disease, coffee will make me vomit and shake and die a violent painful death. If I have too much of them - which I don't intend to do!
Parent replied:hydrogen
Problem is, once you bind the hydrogen it's trans fat and no longer vegetable oil - it's gone from super yummy and healthy to ugly grey goo that happens to be one of the unhealthiest things you can eat.
Personally, I prefer to make my sandwiches with hommus and dip my bread roll in fresh olive oil.
Interesting that the decaf was only "theoretically harmful" to fatties. To normal or skinny people it has the reverse effect and the level of the naughty chemical dropped.
So maybe if you happen to be normal or skinny, decaf is even better for you than you thought.
Of course we puritanical vegan types aren't dying of a heart attack anyway because we barely eat enough saturated fat to make the cholesterol we need to bind our cells together (yay coconuts and avocadoes: necessary to bind our cells together).
Does anyone else have trouble actually bringing up the article without a bunch of stuff all over the top of it? (Say, in Firefox?)
I've always understood that the reason decaffeination removes flavour is that the caffeine tastes bitter. The solution is not to use different beans, but to roast a little darker to restore the strong bitter taste.
My favourite decaf comes from a little boutique that measures it out at the point of sale. Next to their darkest roast coffee, it is clearly even darker still!
I think the reason most decaf is so bad is that you have to get it pre-ground (even at restaurants and cafes) and thus it's stale and the wrong grind anyway, or else it's such a fringe item that it sits around longer on the shelf going stale between roasting batches.
Australia, dude.
You get a picture in a little heart shaped frame (you supply the frame) and one for your computer background. But no nude pictures because I don't think we've been together long enough for that sort of trust.
Also, I forgot to mention, you'll need to join my religion, or at least adopt core practices such as vegetarianism.
Well you live in Philadelphia and I live in Canberra, so I think this could work very well. I'll let you know where to send the jewellery. You'll get several gushing love letters a week in the post written on my beautiful stationery and air mailed so you can enjoy them sooner.
Yeah I am a girl, and although I'm not this guy's girlfriend and won't give head to a guy who is laughing at me, I go along with the basic psychology.
We're more interested in a man with his own opinions and beliefs. It shows he's a thinker and comfortable with himself. A sycophantic agreement man has our attention for a short while and then we dump him for the spineless nerd he is.
Contract of adhesion is a new one for us here in Aussie land. We do have plenty of precedent, however, for a unilateral contract. That's where you make an offer and the person accepts your terms and comes to tell you that they've been carried out.
For example, if you offer a reward for a solution to a problem, I don't have to tell you I accept your offer before I go looking for the solution. I can simply mail it to you with a letter talking about payment.
Usually, Aussies need a "terms and conditions apply" notice. You'll need to advertise those terms and conditions in a prospectus before completion of many contracts. For example, my bank gave me a book showing all their fees and payments and made me take it away for a few days before they'd let me open an account.
If a product/service has terms and conditions I need to peruse, I should have a few weeks to change my mind. Phone company sales girls always tell you that when they come door-to-dooring.
I think that clicking "I agree" when you don't shows bad faith and judges tend to frown on that sort of thing. If you had it done at the shop and didn't know, you could expect leniency.
The Australian Trade Practices Act also bans various nasty types of contracts, and common law covers many others. It's a grey area, and my contracts lecturer said there's not really any civil law covering computers software licenses, so the EULAs can get away with stuff other people couldn't - unless the high court really gets passionate, which they do occasionally but haven't yet in this case.
A couple of points from ANU law school.
As noted by another person in reply, a contract doesn't have to be an exchange of things, but an exchange definitely has to take place. The exchange has to be equitable and reasonable. For example, I couldn't indenture myself for 10 years for a packet of peanuts.
You can buy the right to negotiate for another contract. You can swap secrets and have NDAs as contract clauses. You can make any arrangement you like as long as the parties are well defined, and it's reasonable for each party to feel like it's a good deal.
If the details are not complete, a court has the power to fill in the details with what's "reasonable". If you call for a service and they don't quote and then charge too much, you might still have to pay - if it's really too much, a court will decide what's reasonable, and they'll probably decide for the other guy's benefit (eg twice the going rate instead of thrice).
If the box says "contains the usual EULA", then most clauses are almost implied in the contract of sale.
And finally, if you really want to give something away from the goodness of your heart, rather than to mutual benefit, and you want that promise to be legally binding, you can deliver it in the form of a writ. Sort of a one-way contract, it usually contains the word "solemnly" as in "I solemnly declare that my son can have my house for free". A lawyer could write one up in a few minutes.
The grandparent is a physicist. If you are sitting still and I am moving, then if you press two buttons simultaneously, that's great, but as I move past you, I'll see you press first one then the other. You'd say my point of view is an illusion, but according to relativity theory, the loss of simultanaity is real, and not an illusion.
Hence, you can't say whether the use was simultaneous without first specifying a reference point.
of course with the speeds at which we move, you could specify you, me, the magistrate, and the earth as reference points and if you use the computers for a few seconds, it's clearly simulaneous for all observers.
OK, the implication is that Linux has better Tao. I quote the Tao te Ching (#78 of the contemporary semantic edition available on wikisource)
Who'da thought the old man would be so demonstrably right?
None
More gentle and tender than water
None
Better in breaching strongholds
None can replace it
Gentleness can overcome strong
Tenderness can overcome hardness
None
Ignorant of these in the world
Yet few practice
Thus the ideal leader stated
Bearer of a nation's humiliation
Leader of society
Bearer of a nation's ill omen
King of the world
Right words
Paradoxical
You're just the person to buy my second-hand volvo 244. It's not sexy, but with all the diseases going around, who wants to be sexy?
Volvo: Boxy but good.
Thankyou, sir. You have made my evening complete.
To everyone heading out to buy pies, I urge you to select vegan pies, made from soya custard!
Muah!
Come on, it's got to be worth a giggle. 200 other students think so, too!
Just in case, why not stop by the food co-op on your way and pick out a nice armful of ripe, juicy tomatoes?
I love the way he's got professor dress down: blue checked shirt always goes with green sweater! Go Bill, you trendy go-getter, you!
My karma is excellent! Thanks for asking.
Honesty? Well I believe in these fundamentals:
Right Understanding
Right Thought
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration
Or, put slightly differently and more usefully: (But it all comes out in the interpetation)
Propiety
Wisdom
Benevolence
Righteousness
Trustworthiness
Honesty is fundamental to any religion that expects you to spritually develop yourself.
Ooh! I hereby claim the naming rights to Rocket's Corollary to Godwin's Law.
The T-word ends the argument!
Unless I'm a Hindu fundamentalist, or something in the Dharmic tradition.
Then it's definitely not new-age or at all wishy-washy: it's quite well defined.
No! You mentioned it! Now you've cancelled its effect!
Who ARE you people?
The general Slashdot opinion is
*He was a thief because he bought something at a low price with the intention of selling it - without caring whether it might be non-legitimate
*He was stupid because his greed stopped him from seeing that it was clearly stolen and he could go to jail
You know what? People sell things cheaply all the time! I'd be more concerned at $300 that the thing was a lemon - it would never cross my mind that it had been stolen. I'm an honest person - a fundamentalist. I believe that using a stolen computer is bad karma for me - but you ask and you have to trust other humans. Otherwise you're just another hater.
So you ask the person "why are you selling it?"
And the person answers "Well I'm about to go overseas, I need to get cash pronto for an operation, my wife left me and I'm buying her out of the house" or whatever story the person has. If it's not a valid reason, then you apply your ethical belief appropriately (with extra caution for merchants!)
What sort of paranoid fool checks up on every arrangement she makes? Who does it take to say "I don't believe you - prove that you don't know the value of this item!"
Pawn shops are always full of great deals on specialist items such as camera lenses, because even pawnbrokers don't know the value of things. So why distrust someone selling a computer?
Are you really all so caught up in this culture of fear that you check and double-check everything you do? Just in case the Thought Police come and take you away?
What next? I know, you won't be able to buy a hard drive because what if it once contained copies of songs? In fact, you won't be able to buy the computer used to obtain those copies - and that could be any computer! New network card? Practically fraud! And don't forget your new OEM microsoft software as you buy your shiny new computer! Good consumer!
Mmm... we're looking at the same stars.
I love my Southern sky. As an Australian, I can't say "I love a sunburnt country", but I love the Magellanic Clouds, the Southern Cross, the Pliades... Looking up is how I know I'm home.
And of course your photos won't show bizarre things like the upside-down-moon!
It's about darn time people started putting more effort into the southern sky. You can just survey for a night and show up interesting things down here!
I'm impressed. The link to The Onion that was marked Google instead of Humour was a bit of a low point for Slashdot. But a story about a bunch of cranks that doesn't even include a link is a whole new record. Are you guys having a competition?
Tomorrow's Stupid News article: RocketRainbow writes about a staggering discovery: "Some guy in a bar told me that he made a time machine". The implications are astonishing.
I know this reply is a bit late, but here's my two cents.
When I was in law school* we had a thing called unilateral contracts. The difference between a unilateral contract and a bilateral contract is the negotiation phase.
For example, if I were to go to the Slashdot editors and say "I want you to stop posting dupes and you want free goodies. Let's make a deal," then we would negotiate a bilateral contract. On the other hand, if I sent out an email to all slashdot editors "Free iPod to anyone who can go a week without posting a dupe", then although they didn't discuss with me their intention of trying, they can come to me at the end of the week and say "look, no dupe! Gimme my iPod!"
Now, if Lexmark wants to cover their item with shrinkwrap licensing, then it's pretty reasonable of them to do so. You "buy" a membership to a gym (well, other people do... trust me, I've been inside a gym a few times!) and with that comes their usual list of rules and regulations. The cartridge is a physical object. It's yours. But you only get it if you agree to do anything else in the contract of sale. In effect, you're buying the cartridge for "$35 plus a promise you will recycle it in this manner".**
The biggest legal obstacle is the fact that you probably bought the cartridge from wal-mart or dick smiths or your local newsagent, rather than lexmark. But now that intellectual property is involved, they can say they swapped their IP for your promise to behave in a particular way. And that the contract was written on the package.
Oddly enough, you can (In Australia, anyway) also include another contract as one of the items on the primary contract. Lexmark could conceivably come up with some loophole so that you bought the cartridge for "$35 plus the following promises to Lexmark".**
In conclusion, you do NOT need negotiation for there to be a contract. You just need for each party to gain something. And you can't change a unilateral contract by crossing out part of it and signing it, so don't try. There are so many ways for Lexmark to get away with something like this - not least because the judges want them to! And judges have a tendency to make up their mind first and then choose the legal arguments.
*Law school was fucking boring and I left to pursue full-time astrophysics. BUT, it was the best law school in Australia, and I got in over half a semester of contracts! Everything but the finer points.
**I made up a number
The protein thing is a few years out of date. Consider a vitamin b12 supplement, though. You can get your vitamin b12 by growing bacteria in a cow and killing and eating it, or by growing bacteria in a lab then extracting the vitamin. I take a little floravital, which also has liquid iron (useful for a woman my age) and a few other goodies.
I had minestra for lunch. My brain is fine. I'm not trying to use hyperbole, rather I'm inviting comment on ways to encourage people to consider the impact of their decisions. For example: Next time you consider eating a steak, I invite you to consider that the average vegan uses half the water and a tenth the land used by an average meat eater.
Sorry, I should know by now to use a few more steps.
*Temperatures rise
*Wilderness starts to die
*Crops become harder to grow
*"No worries! Just chuck a bit of this on it! We think it's safe, and you'll improve your productivity and hence income by 500%. You'll need to renew your patent license again next year."