I doubt that they're going to complain about someone needing to wear special shoes or support corsets or whatever is needed. Naturists tend to be somewhat open-minded, unless there's a dodgy looking geezer wearing a full set of clothes and a big raincoat whilst taking lots of photos (they got all funny about it when I tried).
I would agree that drying foods is probably the safest way of storing spoilable food, but then again, agriculture is relatively recent in evolutionary timescales. There's a lot of people who have trouble with modern wheat (Coeliacs) and it's exceptionally high gluten content (it makes for fluffier, lighter bread).
I don't see any problem with storing food in a jar to make it last longer, but almost all of the commercially available canned and jarred foods tend to have some preservative added and we (as a species) haven't been eating canned foods for long enough to really determine it's health effects.
Okay, healthy and natural aren't the same as "spoils immediately", but it's an easy rule of thumb.
Another approach is to only buy foods from around the edges of the supermarkets as that's where all the fresh food is. Just stay away from the inner aisles.
That's an interesting link. It looks like they're thinking about modifying gut fauna to change how efficiently the fats are processed. I wonder if it'll lead to different weight-loss treatments as most of the current approaches seem to be about preventing the gut from absorbing the fat which tends to lead to disturbing side effects.
So how did their bodies know how much fat was required?
Surely it makes far more sense to assume that the gut will try to digest as much of the fat as is practical. In cold climates, having a gut that only digests what body needs at that moment in time will lead to people dying in the winter as they haven built up their fat reserves.
I would be interested to see any evidence that the human gut only digests the fat that the body requires.
I agree with you about fats being demonised. I always try to avoid "low-fat" foods in supermarkets because they are a sure sign of a large amount of sugar and salt.
I also think that by eating foods that "taste high-fat" whilst being low-fat that we're training ourselves to want more and more of those foods as they aren't providing the fat content that our bodies are wanting. Same thing with artificial sweeteners - people are training they're taste buds to demand incredibly sweet foods and when the body doesn't get the expected sugar rush, it demands even more!
I'm not sure that the Atkins diet is representative of a typical hunter-gatherer diet as primitive diets didn't tend to have a lot of meat as it's a lot easier to eat things growing around you than it is to go hunting down an antelope.
So, are you saying that all the fat that was eaten back in the day (in Sweden and Finland) was actually not digested? To my mind, you're saying that the fat will get digested if you're eating a diet high in fat, otherwise why would your forebears have eaten such a diet?
Hmm, I can understand someone not absorbing all the fat if they change their diet to a high fat/protein zero carb diet, but that's like putting diesel in a petrol engine - we're not designed for that at all. I would imagine that the stomach would adapt after a period of time though, as it's surprising what diets that humans can survive on.
In any kind of usual diet, though, I severely doubt that any surplus fat just gets passed through. I know that happens with vitamin C, but that's unusual in being a substance that we can't produce in our bodies. I'd be interested in seeing if you can find any other links that aren't on an Atkins-style diet.
If BMI isn't that accurate, then the easiest way to determine how fat someone is would be to measure how much medical care the person (if indeed there's a strong correlation between weight and health).
In fact, the next logical step would be to penalise anyone who needs medical treatment - after all, they're just stealing money from the us "healthy" people. How about just get people to pay for their own treatment - easy to regulate and apolitical.
If you're saying "hassle with reading labels", then you're doing it wrong. Fruit and vegetables don't have labels. Eggs don't have labels; farm animals don't have labels.
There's an easy test for if something is good to eat - does it go bad quickly? If it can sit on a shelf for months and still be edible, then it's been made for the supermarkets benefit and not yours.
How does fat get passed through without being digested? Isn't that going against all our hunter-gatherer evolved genes?
The biggest problem with food is processed vs un-processed food. You're very unlikely to get fat/unhealthy by eating un-processed food, so a free-range beef burger will tend to be a lot healthier that a white flour bun. Then again, a hormone injected, factory farmed, mechanically recovered meat burger will probably be a lot unhealthier than some boiled potatoes.
Another way to check the law is to complain to them about a Sony device, the NAS-SC500PK for instance. http://www.sony.co.uk/product/hdd-audio/nas-sc500pk is the page advertising it. I've sent in a complaint to the ASA about it - let's see if we can get Sony to fight the ASA to make format shifting declared legal.
That's an interesting post. I disagree that RMS isn't about people's freedom - he's just refusing to compromise on the licensing to allow proprietary software to "piggyback" onto GPL code.
I agree that it's a shame that the accessibility components aren't available in GPL form, but he's not affecting your right to use free software, it's just that you may not have the capabilities to use it.
The problem with the hybrid solution would be that it opens the door to allowing all kinds of proprietary software to interface with GPL code without respecting the license.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure how a "self-contained" proprietary module can't be used with free software unless it requires to be linked with the GPL code, but if I had to bet money, I'd put it on RMS' interpretation of the GPL. It's a real pity that there aren't more GPL accessibility components, but it's not stopping you from using open source - you just have to go for differently licensed open source (e.g. BSD).
It might be fun to point and laugh at the "funny looking" man who doesn't wear shoes and dress up smart to give talks, but you're focussing on the man and not the ideas.
He is very rational and has very good reasons behind everything he says. Whether or not you agree with him is less important than THINKING about the issues that he raises.
I think RMS viewpoint is more about people's freedom, rather than open source being a better software methodology.
By just comparing software on how well it works, you're missing out on the whole ethics side of the argument.
I can't think of a car analogy, but here's a vegetable analogy. It's like comparing organic produce with non-organic produce and saying that organic farming is a waste of time as the tomatoes are smaller and until organic farming can produce bigger tomatoes than non-organic farming, it's a waste of time.
To be fair, my music is probably about half ripped from CD (my wife used to work for a CD distributer and they had a monthly allowance of CDs to take home) and half downloaded. I used to buy a lot of music on CD, but nowadays, I only tend to buy rare old reggae or support artists who distribute independently (e.g. Radiohead).
I'm no longer the target demographic for buying music, so you're right, my opinion doesn't count for much. However, my large music collection means that I favour MP3 whereas smaller music collections should mean that people will find it easier to go with FLAC which I think is the future.
Surely the days of music on CDs are numbered as it's a waste of resources to have factories churning out plastic CDs. In order to phase out the production of music CDs, we need a better format than MP3 to ensure that we're not sacrificing sound quality and I think that FLAC is the next logical step.
That said, I only bother keeping my music collection in MP3 format as I'm not an extreme audiophile and MP3 is good enough for my purposes. (Also, my music collection is currently just under 1TB, so storing it all in FLAC would probably expand it to 5TBs which is a bit unwieldy at present.)
I haven't seen an example of that. All the motherboards I've used have allowed you to enable the hardware virtualisation if the processor supports it. I'm typing this on an HP 6530b that fully supports hardware virtualisation - KVM runs fine on it - and typically HP are a bunch of asshats.
I agree with you about the OEMs' attitude, but I don't think they're that concerned about planned obsolescence to pass up an essentially free feature that they can use to differentiate against their competitors.
Often laptops require upgrading because consumers like the latest shiny processor/screen/form factor and not because they aren't suitable for using. In my experience, laptops often get handed down when they're "upgraded" to a newer model and I, for one, try to avoid manufacturers that don't treat their customers fairly (although I did buy an HP netbook, but that was because the keyboard and screen were excellent quality for the price - shame about the VIA processor). When I next buy a laptop, support for an open BIOS would be a big bonus for me and I'd be prepared to spend more money on a system that supports tweaking. The last camera I bought was a Canon mainly because of the existence of the CHDK firmware for it (waterproof Powershot D10 - excellent little camera) even though Canon don't actually help with CHDK.
I don't see how the BIOS makes much difference to upgrading a laptop's components, anyway as it's not usually practical to swap any of the chipset in a laptop. Usually the only upgrades you can do are the hard disk and memory and a crappy BIOS doesn't prevent you doing that.
I'm curious how Windows EULA can protect you against lawsuits.
If you are setting up and installing the OS, then surely it's you who agrees to the EULA and the customer isn't agreeing to anything. If something goes wrong, the customer can still sue you, but you're unable to blame the software vendor because you agreed to their EULA when you installed the software. Also, what happens when a software company goes out of business? What use is your support contract then?
There's so many different attack vectors for javascript that I'm much happier using NoScript's whitelist way of letting the user decide which websites to run javascript on. It catches all those mis-typed URLs - there's no benefit in running javascript on www.ggogle.com. Not to mention all the cross-site scripting attacks that it prevents.
I'm not aware of sites being crippled by it. Any ones in particular you're thinking of?
I wish I could do that!
The BBC has a unique way of funding - if you own equipment CAPABLE of receiving TV, you have to buy a TV License and the money goes to the BBC.
That means, that effectively, there is no way I can legally not pay the BBC as long as I own a TV (even if I only watch non-BBC channels)!
It's basically a form of taxation, except that there is no representation - I can't vote for the bosses of BBC.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that they're going to complain about someone needing to wear special shoes or support corsets or whatever is needed. Naturists tend to be somewhat open-minded, unless there's a dodgy looking geezer wearing a full set of clothes and a big raincoat whilst taking lots of photos (they got all funny about it when I tried).
She said she faked it, but wanted to avoid hurting your feelings (I don't remember why).
I would agree that drying foods is probably the safest way of storing spoilable food, but then again, agriculture is relatively recent in evolutionary timescales. There's a lot of people who have trouble with modern wheat (Coeliacs) and it's exceptionally high gluten content (it makes for fluffier, lighter bread).
I don't see any problem with storing food in a jar to make it last longer, but almost all of the commercially available canned and jarred foods tend to have some preservative added and we (as a species) haven't been eating canned foods for long enough to really determine it's health effects.
Okay, healthy and natural aren't the same as "spoils immediately", but it's an easy rule of thumb.
Another approach is to only buy foods from around the edges of the supermarkets as that's where all the fresh food is. Just stay away from the inner aisles.
That's an interesting link. It looks like they're thinking about modifying gut fauna to change how efficiently the fats are processed. I wonder if it'll lead to different weight-loss treatments as most of the current approaches seem to be about preventing the gut from absorbing the fat which tends to lead to disturbing side effects.
So how did their bodies know how much fat was required?
Surely it makes far more sense to assume that the gut will try to digest as much of the fat as is practical. In cold climates, having a gut that only digests what body needs at that moment in time will lead to people dying in the winter as they haven built up their fat reserves.
I would be interested to see any evidence that the human gut only digests the fat that the body requires.
I agree with you about fats being demonised. I always try to avoid "low-fat" foods in supermarkets because they are a sure sign of a large amount of sugar and salt.
I also think that by eating foods that "taste high-fat" whilst being low-fat that we're training ourselves to want more and more of those foods as they aren't providing the fat content that our bodies are wanting. Same thing with artificial sweeteners - people are training they're taste buds to demand incredibly sweet foods and when the body doesn't get the expected sugar rush, it demands even more!
I'm not sure that the Atkins diet is representative of a typical hunter-gatherer diet as primitive diets didn't tend to have a lot of meat as it's a lot easier to eat things growing around you than it is to go hunting down an antelope.
So, are you saying that all the fat that was eaten back in the day (in Sweden and Finland) was actually not digested? To my mind, you're saying that the fat will get digested if you're eating a diet high in fat, otherwise why would your forebears have eaten such a diet?
Hmm, I can understand someone not absorbing all the fat if they change their diet to a high fat/protein zero carb diet, but that's like putting diesel in a petrol engine - we're not designed for that at all. I would imagine that the stomach would adapt after a period of time though, as it's surprising what diets that humans can survive on.
In any kind of usual diet, though, I severely doubt that any surplus fat just gets passed through. I know that happens with vitamin C, but that's unusual in being a substance that we can't produce in our bodies. I'd be interested in seeing if you can find any other links that aren't on an Atkins-style diet.
Wish I could mod this up
If BMI isn't that accurate, then the easiest way to determine how fat someone is would be to measure how much medical care the person (if indeed there's a strong correlation between weight and health).
In fact, the next logical step would be to penalise anyone who needs medical treatment - after all, they're just stealing money from the us "healthy" people. How about just get people to pay for their own treatment - easy to regulate and apolitical.
If you're saying "hassle with reading labels", then you're doing it wrong. Fruit and vegetables don't have labels. Eggs don't have labels; farm animals don't have labels.
There's an easy test for if something is good to eat - does it go bad quickly? If it can sit on a shelf for months and still be edible, then it's been made for the supermarkets benefit and not yours.
How does fat get passed through without being digested? Isn't that going against all our hunter-gatherer evolved genes?
The biggest problem with food is processed vs un-processed food. You're very unlikely to get fat/unhealthy by eating un-processed food, so a free-range beef burger will tend to be a lot healthier that a white flour bun. Then again, a hormone injected, factory farmed, mechanically recovered meat burger will probably be a lot unhealthier than some boiled potatoes.
Another way to check the law is to complain to them about a Sony device, the NAS-SC500PK for instance. http://www.sony.co.uk/product/hdd-audio/nas-sc500pk is the page advertising it. I've sent in a complaint to the ASA about it - let's see if we can get Sony to fight the ASA to make format shifting declared legal.
That's an interesting post. I disagree that RMS isn't about people's freedom - he's just refusing to compromise on the licensing to allow proprietary software to "piggyback" onto GPL code.
I agree that it's a shame that the accessibility components aren't available in GPL form, but he's not affecting your right to use free software, it's just that you may not have the capabilities to use it.
The problem with the hybrid solution would be that it opens the door to allowing all kinds of proprietary software to interface with GPL code without respecting the license.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure how a "self-contained" proprietary module can't be used with free software unless it requires to be linked with the GPL code, but if I had to bet money, I'd put it on RMS' interpretation of the GPL. It's a real pity that there aren't more GPL accessibility components, but it's not stopping you from using open source - you just have to go for differently licensed open source (e.g. BSD).
That makes absolutely no sense.
It might be fun to point and laugh at the "funny looking" man who doesn't wear shoes and dress up smart to give talks, but you're focussing on the man and not the ideas.
He is very rational and has very good reasons behind everything he says. Whether or not you agree with him is less important than THINKING about the issues that he raises.
I think RMS viewpoint is more about people's freedom, rather than open source being a better software methodology.
By just comparing software on how well it works, you're missing out on the whole ethics side of the argument.
I can't think of a car analogy, but here's a vegetable analogy. It's like comparing organic produce with non-organic produce and saying that organic farming is a waste of time as the tomatoes are smaller and until organic farming can produce bigger tomatoes than non-organic farming, it's a waste of time.
To be fair, my music is probably about half ripped from CD (my wife used to work for a CD distributer and they had a monthly allowance of CDs to take home) and half downloaded. I used to buy a lot of music on CD, but nowadays, I only tend to buy rare old reggae or support artists who distribute independently (e.g. Radiohead).
I'm no longer the target demographic for buying music, so you're right, my opinion doesn't count for much. However, my large music collection means that I favour MP3 whereas smaller music collections should mean that people will find it easier to go with FLAC which I think is the future.
Surely the days of music on CDs are numbered as it's a waste of resources to have factories churning out plastic CDs. In order to phase out the production of music CDs, we need a better format than MP3 to ensure that we're not sacrificing sound quality and I think that FLAC is the next logical step.
That said, I only bother keeping my music collection in MP3 format as I'm not an extreme audiophile and MP3 is good enough for my purposes. (Also, my music collection is currently just under 1TB, so storing it all in FLAC would probably expand it to 5TBs which is a bit unwieldy at present.)
I haven't seen an example of that. All the motherboards I've used have allowed you to enable the hardware virtualisation if the processor supports it. I'm typing this on an HP 6530b that fully supports hardware virtualisation - KVM runs fine on it - and typically HP are a bunch of asshats.
I agree with you about the OEMs' attitude, but I don't think they're that concerned about planned obsolescence to pass up an essentially free feature that they can use to differentiate against their competitors.
Often laptops require upgrading because consumers like the latest shiny processor/screen/form factor and not because they aren't suitable for using. In my experience, laptops often get handed down when they're "upgraded" to a newer model and I, for one, try to avoid manufacturers that don't treat their customers fairly (although I did buy an HP netbook, but that was because the keyboard and screen were excellent quality for the price - shame about the VIA processor). When I next buy a laptop, support for an open BIOS would be a big bonus for me and I'd be prepared to spend more money on a system that supports tweaking. The last camera I bought was a Canon mainly because of the existence of the CHDK firmware for it (waterproof Powershot D10 - excellent little camera) even though Canon don't actually help with CHDK.
I don't see how the BIOS makes much difference to upgrading a laptop's components, anyway as it's not usually practical to swap any of the chipset in a laptop. Usually the only upgrades you can do are the hard disk and memory and a crappy BIOS doesn't prevent you doing that.
I'm curious how Windows EULA can protect you against lawsuits.
If you are setting up and installing the OS, then surely it's you who agrees to the EULA and the customer isn't agreeing to anything. If something goes wrong, the customer can still sue you, but you're unable to blame the software vendor because you agreed to their EULA when you installed the software. Also, what happens when a software company goes out of business? What use is your support contract then?
Best extension ever!
There's so many different attack vectors for javascript that I'm much happier using NoScript's whitelist way of letting the user decide which websites to run javascript on. It catches all those mis-typed URLs - there's no benefit in running javascript on www.ggogle.com. Not to mention all the cross-site scripting attacks that it prevents.
I'm not aware of sites being crippled by it. Any ones in particular you're thinking of?
I wish I could do that! The BBC has a unique way of funding - if you own equipment CAPABLE of receiving TV, you have to buy a TV License and the money goes to the BBC. That means, that effectively, there is no way I can legally not pay the BBC as long as I own a TV (even if I only watch non-BBC channels)! It's basically a form of taxation, except that there is no representation - I can't vote for the bosses of BBC.