I've been avoiding HFCS for as long as I can remember being able to make my own food choices, and I encourage everyone else too. I am so happy when I am at the grocery store and see food labels with "No HFCS" "No corn-syrup" "Made with real sugar". You didn't see this stuff even 5 years ago. And Pepsi brought back their soda with real sugar labeled "Pepsi Throwback". It's popular enough to have remained in stores for years now.
The winds are blowing against HFCS. The corn-growers are so threatened they've had to start actively advertising their product and trying to "educate" consumers with commercials. They never felt the need to do that until recently.
If we had restricted ourselves to following The Constitution to the letter we'd have torn it up and started fresh 3-4 times by now. It has only lasted so long because we didn't listen to the strict constructionists.
Ideas and data (which amount to the same thing) are not covered under the normal rules or laws of property. Not even natural law supports such a notion. You can't own an idea. You can't own a string of numbers.
I'll let Thomas Jefferson speak for me since he figured this out over 200 years ago:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
You actually struck something profound there, with your hyperbole. If some company made a type of seed that would grow, but not not reproduce viable seeds, that'd be immoral. Or imagine a company creating an organism that would spread promiscuously from field to field, and then suing farmers who's fields were cross-polinated from those organisms. You actually don't have to imagine it, such a company exists: Monsanto.
But if you grow fruit and grains and bake a pie, I don't have any choice but to pay for the pie if I want that one you made ethically. If I take the recipe you use and make my own, I haven't stolen your pie. I've done nothing wrong.
I go farther than that and say that artificial scarcity is immoral. Imagine if food was infinitely reproducible but a company put restrictions on it so that poor people in many parts of the world would have to pay for it and couldn't have access to that resource. That's immoral.
Information is free to reproduce, when you put artificial restrictions on it you are committing a similar act.
You misunderstand. I am not unethical. The system I promote is the ethical one, contrasted with the one we currently have which is not. One of the consequences of switching to the ethical production/distribution model that I and others advocate is that expensive works such as Game of Thrones might not be possible. But they shouldn't ever have been possible to begin with, since they only came into being through exploitation and an immoral economic model.
Want an example of an industry that "gets it"? Porn.
They "closed the loop" by buying up the popular streaming sites that were taking their content and distributing it for free. They then control the ads on those sites. So the ads on the free sites pay for the production of content which they then sell in a higher quality and more convenient form for people who are willing to pay.
This would be like the MPAA buying ThePirateBay and letting it keep running, distributing movies. Yeah, they're not getting sales from it buy they are making at least *something* from the ads, which is more than they were making before by letting the underground market operate independently. And people will still go to see movies in the cinema and buy DVDs.
But this would require them to admit that copyright is basically a dead letter. The suites are too old, their minds too fossilized in 20th century media biz paradigms to even think of such a thing. "My God, you mean ANYONE could use Mickey Mouse without paying us?! The horror!"
The porn industry is younger, more willing to innovate and take chances, more "liberal". The regular entertainment industry is conservative, and they don't like change (that's what conservative means). Unfortunately for them, the world is going to change regardless of their inability to keep up or respond to it.
I simply don't agree with the concept of paying money for digital goods. I don't recognize the legitimacy of the construct known as "intellectual property" or copyright and since there exists a mechanism in this age to reproduce digital information infinitely at nearly no cost I have no qualms or ethical hangups about taking as much as I can.
The rules of physical objects simply don't transfer to the internet. It's immoral to attempt to impose those rules on the higher plain of existence of pure thought.
And I fully recognize that there's no current method for these big, multi-million dollar, productions to get made if everyone thought and acted as I do. So be it. If such projects can't be made and distributed ethically then they shouldn't be made at all.
Without bankruptcy society would have no way of cutting losses and moving forward. Much more resources and labor would go into paying off debts that have no hope of ever getting repaid. There would be much less incentives to take risks on new ideas and innovations, and less money to do it with as the majority of money earned would be used for servicing debt. When someone or some entity is so in debt that they'll never be able to repay it all, the best thing for society as a whole is to wipe the slate clean and then not loan any more money to that entity for a time.
It seems we only apply the last part to natural persons of the working and middle classes.
Can you understand that such a system actually sounds more desirable to many people, because they consider helping others and their society as a whole to be a higher virtue than enriching themselves? It would be nice if everyone did this voluntarily, but unfortunately there are people who think they made it to the top all on their own and so shouldn't have to pay back into the system. Those people have to be dragged forward by the rest of society that would rather see every succeed somewhat, than a few people succeed immensely and many fall by the wayside.
You are confusing the meaning of transliteration to mean transposition. Transliteration is the conversion of characters from one alphabet into another based on closest approximation, usually of by sound.
Those are all flaws in 3rd party add-ons, or the default browser, Safari. Pwn2Own just proves that using the default browser on a platform with scripting enabled is unsafe regardless of platform. You shouldn't use IE on Windows, you shouldn't use Safari on OS X (at least without scripting disabled). So don't do that, and all the tricks used at Pwn2Own on the Macs will be rendered ineffective.
This might have been true at one time, but it's not anymore. You can download a Windows 7 ISO and install it and it'll activate and be indistinguishable from a boxed copy with a legitimate license.
Yes, that's what libertarians think they understand. In reality, any government weak enough to allow the level of individual freedom and an unregulated market will not be strong enough to maintain rule of law. Somalia is the inevitable result of libertarian ideals put into practice. Libertarianism is at odds with reality, at odds with everything we understand about sociology and human behavior.
A libertarian paradise, with rule of law, enforcement of contracts, no violent force used on anyone, would exist for about five minutes; until someone realized they can use their money to simply pay people with guns to harass and bully their neighbors and the weak central government. So Somalia both is and is not a libertarian ideal. It absolutely does not embody the written doctrine of libertarian philosophy, but that's because it's impossible to make it work in the real world. When you try, you get Somalia.
Africa has more than enough arable land and resources to feed itself solely with food produced from the continent. Their problems are political, and socioeconomic.
I don't have an answer to fix the problem, and I don't know enough about the situation and the history to give a very insightful explanation as to how it came about but it seems that the African people cannot govern themselves effectively. This goes back even to before Europeans arrived. They were subsistence farmers and hunter/gathers organized in tribal groups or regional empires that fought with their neighboring tribes when the Europeans came and that's mostly what they are still today. The only difference is that we provided them with terrible new weapons to kill each other much more effectively, and we established an amoral economic basis by which the most ruthless among them could gain much wealth and power by exploiting their kinsmen through cooperation with resource extracting imperialists.
I don't see a way out of this nightmare for them. Africa will remain mired in all of the worst aspects of humanity for the foreseeable future. Everything anyone does to try and help just addresses the symptoms, not the systemic problems which the West seems ill-equipped even to identify, much less remedy.
I still prefer cash for most transactions (at least ones in person) because it's anonymous, secure, and untraceable. It's a dirty secret of government that they need those features sometimes, too. Cash won't go away as long as there are covert operations that need funding and deniability.
You can get pretty much all popular periodicals and newspapers for free. Very helpful people online choose to redistribute them for free to anyone who wants them:)
You're the wrong one. Apple was late with the patch to the version of Java that they maintain but it's still not an Apple product, it's from Oracle. This is a flaw in Oracle's Java, and starting with 10.8 Java will no longer be part of Apple's OS.
This is a flaw in Java, which isn't an Apple or "Unix" product. Apple is only responsible for it insofar that they bundle Java with their OS, which is going to end with their next major release of OS X.
Unless you know you need Java, disable it. Also, install something like Noscript for whatever browser you use. You'll be safe then, at least against the types of attacks we've been seeing.
I don't recall there ever being a self-replicating worm for a *nix platform that could infect you just by being unpatched and connected to the network; please correct me if I'm wrong. You have to actually navigate to an infected site for these trojans to get you.
Finding a legally registered, unloaded, gun belonging to a law abiding (if forgetful) citizen does not count as stopping terrorism. Not to mention that all of these objects are things that would easily be caught by standard X-rays. The TSA has NEVER stopped a terrorist. Not one. In the years since 9-11 any terrorist activity was either stopped well before they got to the airport, or they actually got on the plane and the attempt failed. But I guess the TSA needs to brag about something to justify their existence, so they point out all the absent minded people they've detained for forgetting about something dangerous in their bag.
Terrorism is stopped by law enforcement work outside of the airport. If a terrorist plot made it that far without being discovered, you've already failed and you need to move farther up the chain to figure out what went wrong and how it could have been foiled sooner. In terms of value for our dollars, the TSA is a huge waste.
Couldn't we have just blockaded Okinawa and waited a few months for them to starve to death? They weren't going to get resupplied and the island wasn't self sufficient, was it? Or it wouldn't be with constant bombardment. They wouldn't be growing crops on the surface. I know they had extensive cave systems but they weren't growing food down there. Even if they had stores, they wouldn't last forever. We could have just waited. We lost all those men by choice. Maybe it was the right choice, but we could have just blockaded and bombarded every island. Even the home islands.
It shows you just how isolated they are. Any other country wanting to build a rocket to send a satellite into space could build on the 100+ years of research and development done by the rest of the world.
I'm sure whatever mistake they made here was made by some rocket scientist in the past and has already been corrected, but they don't have access to that. They had to start from nothing and repeat all the mistakes of the past.
I'm sure they get some help from the Russians and China, but they are all about trying to do things their own way, alone. Except feed themselves, apparently.
So they should just squander it all right now as fast as they can? Burn up a resource that has many other uses than energy when there are alternatives?
That's the kind of thinking that is dooming mankind.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been avoiding HFCS for as long as I can remember being able to make my own food choices, and I encourage everyone else too. I am so happy when I am at the grocery store and see food labels with "No HFCS" "No corn-syrup" "Made with real sugar". You didn't see this stuff even 5 years ago. And Pepsi brought back their soda with real sugar labeled "Pepsi Throwback". It's popular enough to have remained in stores for years now.
The winds are blowing against HFCS. The corn-growers are so threatened they've had to start actively advertising their product and trying to "educate" consumers with commercials. They never felt the need to do that until recently.
If we had restricted ourselves to following The Constitution to the letter we'd have torn it up and started fresh 3-4 times by now. It has only lasted so long because we didn't listen to the strict constructionists.
Ideas and data (which amount to the same thing) are not covered under the normal rules or laws of property. Not even natural law supports such a notion. You can't own an idea. You can't own a string of numbers.
I'll let Thomas Jefferson speak for me since he figured this out over 200 years ago:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
You actually struck something profound there, with your hyperbole. If some company made a type of seed that would grow, but not not reproduce viable seeds, that'd be immoral. Or imagine a company creating an organism that would spread promiscuously from field to field, and then suing farmers who's fields were cross-polinated from those organisms. You actually don't have to imagine it, such a company exists: Monsanto.
But if you grow fruit and grains and bake a pie, I don't have any choice but to pay for the pie if I want that one you made ethically. If I take the recipe you use and make my own, I haven't stolen your pie. I've done nothing wrong.
I go farther than that and say that artificial scarcity is immoral. Imagine if food was infinitely reproducible but a company put restrictions on it so that poor people in many parts of the world would have to pay for it and couldn't have access to that resource. That's immoral.
Information is free to reproduce, when you put artificial restrictions on it you are committing a similar act.
You misunderstand. I am not unethical. The system I promote is the ethical one, contrasted with the one we currently have which is not. One of the consequences of switching to the ethical production/distribution model that I and others advocate is that expensive works such as Game of Thrones might not be possible. But they shouldn't ever have been possible to begin with, since they only came into being through exploitation and an immoral economic model.
Want an example of an industry that "gets it"? Porn.
They "closed the loop" by buying up the popular streaming sites that were taking their content and distributing it for free. They then control the ads on those sites. So the ads on the free sites pay for the production of content which they then sell in a higher quality and more convenient form for people who are willing to pay.
This would be like the MPAA buying ThePirateBay and letting it keep running, distributing movies. Yeah, they're not getting sales from it buy they are making at least *something* from the ads, which is more than they were making before by letting the underground market operate independently. And people will still go to see movies in the cinema and buy DVDs.
But this would require them to admit that copyright is basically a dead letter. The suites are too old, their minds too fossilized in 20th century media biz paradigms to even think of such a thing. "My God, you mean ANYONE could use Mickey Mouse without paying us?! The horror!"
The porn industry is younger, more willing to innovate and take chances, more "liberal". The regular entertainment industry is conservative, and they don't like change (that's what conservative means). Unfortunately for them, the world is going to change regardless of their inability to keep up or respond to it.
I simply don't agree with the concept of paying money for digital goods. I don't recognize the legitimacy of the construct known as "intellectual property" or copyright and since there exists a mechanism in this age to reproduce digital information infinitely at nearly no cost I have no qualms or ethical hangups about taking as much as I can.
The rules of physical objects simply don't transfer to the internet. It's immoral to attempt to impose those rules on the higher plain of existence of pure thought.
And I fully recognize that there's no current method for these big, multi-million dollar, productions to get made if everyone thought and acted as I do. So be it. If such projects can't be made and distributed ethically then they shouldn't be made at all.
Without bankruptcy society would have no way of cutting losses and moving forward. Much more resources and labor would go into paying off debts that have no hope of ever getting repaid. There would be much less incentives to take risks on new ideas and innovations, and less money to do it with as the majority of money earned would be used for servicing debt. When someone or some entity is so in debt that they'll never be able to repay it all, the best thing for society as a whole is to wipe the slate clean and then not loan any more money to that entity for a time.
It seems we only apply the last part to natural persons of the working and middle classes.
Can you understand that such a system actually sounds more desirable to many people, because they consider helping others and their society as a whole to be a higher virtue than enriching themselves? It would be nice if everyone did this voluntarily, but unfortunately there are people who think they made it to the top all on their own and so shouldn't have to pay back into the system. Those people have to be dragged forward by the rest of society that would rather see every succeed somewhat, than a few people succeed immensely and many fall by the wayside.
You are confusing the meaning of transliteration to mean transposition. Transliteration is the conversion of characters from one alphabet into another based on closest approximation, usually of by sound.
Those are all flaws in 3rd party add-ons, or the default browser, Safari. Pwn2Own just proves that using the default browser on a platform with scripting enabled is unsafe regardless of platform. You shouldn't use IE on Windows, you shouldn't use Safari on OS X (at least without scripting disabled). So don't do that, and all the tricks used at Pwn2Own on the Macs will be rendered ineffective.
This might have been true at one time, but it's not anymore. You can download a Windows 7 ISO and install it and it'll activate and be indistinguishable from a boxed copy with a legitimate license.
Yes, that's what libertarians think they understand. In reality, any government weak enough to allow the level of individual freedom and an unregulated market will not be strong enough to maintain rule of law. Somalia is the inevitable result of libertarian ideals put into practice. Libertarianism is at odds with reality, at odds with everything we understand about sociology and human behavior.
A libertarian paradise, with rule of law, enforcement of contracts, no violent force used on anyone, would exist for about five minutes; until someone realized they can use their money to simply pay people with guns to harass and bully their neighbors and the weak central government. So Somalia both is and is not a libertarian ideal. It absolutely does not embody the written doctrine of libertarian philosophy, but that's because it's impossible to make it work in the real world. When you try, you get Somalia.
Africa has more than enough arable land and resources to feed itself solely with food produced from the continent. Their problems are political, and socioeconomic.
I don't have an answer to fix the problem, and I don't know enough about the situation and the history to give a very insightful explanation as to how it came about but it seems that the African people cannot govern themselves effectively. This goes back even to before Europeans arrived. They were subsistence farmers and hunter/gathers organized in tribal groups or regional empires that fought with their neighboring tribes when the Europeans came and that's mostly what they are still today. The only difference is that we provided them with terrible new weapons to kill each other much more effectively, and we established an amoral economic basis by which the most ruthless among them could gain much wealth and power by exploiting their kinsmen through cooperation with resource extracting imperialists.
I don't see a way out of this nightmare for them. Africa will remain mired in all of the worst aspects of humanity for the foreseeable future. Everything anyone does to try and help just addresses the symptoms, not the systemic problems which the West seems ill-equipped even to identify, much less remedy.
I still prefer cash for most transactions (at least ones in person) because it's anonymous, secure, and untraceable. It's a dirty secret of government that they need those features sometimes, too. Cash won't go away as long as there are covert operations that need funding and deniability.
You can get pretty much all popular periodicals and newspapers for free. Very helpful people online choose to redistribute them for free to anyone who wants them :)
Paying for things is so 20th century.
You're an idiot. Turning off an unneeded and insecure service is not equivalent to giving up on computing entirely. Shut the fuck up.
You're the wrong one. Apple was late with the patch to the version of Java that they maintain but it's still not an Apple product, it's from Oracle. This is a flaw in Oracle's Java, and starting with 10.8 Java will no longer be part of Apple's OS.
This is a flaw in Java, which isn't an Apple or "Unix" product. Apple is only responsible for it insofar that they bundle Java with their OS, which is going to end with their next major release of OS X.
Unless you know you need Java, disable it. Also, install something like Noscript for whatever browser you use. You'll be safe then, at least against the types of attacks we've been seeing.
I don't recall there ever being a self-replicating worm for a *nix platform that could infect you just by being unpatched and connected to the network; please correct me if I'm wrong. You have to actually navigate to an infected site for these trojans to get you.
I say the deserve another billion/yr because, afterall, look at all the terrorism they've stopped just this week!
Finding a legally registered, unloaded, gun belonging to a law abiding (if forgetful) citizen does not count as stopping terrorism. Not to mention that all of these objects are things that would easily be caught by standard X-rays. The TSA has NEVER stopped a terrorist. Not one. In the years since 9-11 any terrorist activity was either stopped well before they got to the airport, or they actually got on the plane and the attempt failed. But I guess the TSA needs to brag about something to justify their existence, so they point out all the absent minded people they've detained for forgetting about something dangerous in their bag.
Terrorism is stopped by law enforcement work outside of the airport. If a terrorist plot made it that far without being discovered, you've already failed and you need to move farther up the chain to figure out what went wrong and how it could have been foiled sooner. In terms of value for our dollars, the TSA is a huge waste.
Couldn't we have just blockaded Okinawa and waited a few months for them to starve to death? They weren't going to get resupplied and the island wasn't self sufficient, was it? Or it wouldn't be with constant bombardment. They wouldn't be growing crops on the surface. I know they had extensive cave systems but they weren't growing food down there. Even if they had stores, they wouldn't last forever. We could have just waited. We lost all those men by choice. Maybe it was the right choice, but we could have just blockaded and bombarded every island. Even the home islands.
It shows you just how isolated they are. Any other country wanting to build a rocket to send a satellite into space could build on the 100+ years of research and development done by the rest of the world.
I'm sure whatever mistake they made here was made by some rocket scientist in the past and has already been corrected, but they don't have access to that. They had to start from nothing and repeat all the mistakes of the past.
I'm sure they get some help from the Russians and China, but they are all about trying to do things their own way, alone. Except feed themselves, apparently.
So they should just squander it all right now as fast as they can? Burn up a resource that has many other uses than energy when there are alternatives?
That's the kind of thinking that is dooming mankind.