Dear Telco Industry,
Why the hell can’t I buy a damn phone that’s cool from a company that doesn’t try to rip me off? Why can’t I just pay you, say, $70 a month, and you provide me a bunch of minutes and data. And sell me a phone, I’ll pay you let’s say $450 for it, with a real full-featured web browser (with Flash, you worthless bastards). And i won’t have to sign a contract to do so, because if I quit paying you, you’ll just quit providing the service I pay you for. Since even today you bill a month in advance, that’ll make us even and you are shouldering zero risk for this transaction.

The sugar industry has been waging war on McNeil, the division of Johnson & Johnson which makes the Splenda artificial sweetener (Splenda is the trade name for the chemical compound sucralose).

Let’s start with how sucralose is made. A sucralose molecule, or C₁₂H₁₉Cl₃O₈, is created by adding three chlorine atoms to a sugar (sucrose) molecule (C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁) along with three more hydrogen atoms and three more oxygen atoms.

You might recognize chlorine from its job as half of the molecule for table salt, NaCl. Or, if you’re an ignorant fool who listens to the sugar industry’s propaganda, from its role in household cleaners like bleach.

Is the element chlorine inherently harmful in every chemical compound? HELL NO. However, the sugar industry is spouting off ignorant bullcrap in order to try to protect their bottom line–insisting on calling sucralose the “chlorinated articicial sweetener” and spouting off about how it contains this “dangerous chemical” whereas refined sugar is “natural.” This mindless fearmongering is pretty laughable, considering the epidemic occurrence in the western world of poor health for which refined sugar is a large part of the problem.

I mean, let’s consider the differences here:
Sugar: Typical American consumption levels have been proven to cause diabetes and obesity.
Sugar substitutes: The sugar industry asserts that they might cause some “unknown” health problems, even though they have never, ever proven a causal link between ANY ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS and any health problem, even ones that have been around for as far back as 40, 42, or even 129 years! Mind you, any tests you may have heard about with lab rats regarding cancer have been thoroughly discredited owing to the fact that the same rats also developed cancer spontaneously when injected with pure water! These are rats bred for their ability to develop cancer. Also, the dosages necessary to cause problems are something like 30 cans of Diet Coke per day on an ongoing basis. Nobody drinks that.

I’m just really disgusted with the sugar industry’s attempts to portray sugar substitutes as nothing but poison while completely ignoring the hazards of their unnatural product. Refined sugar is processed by chemically extracting everything except the sucrose from the cane or sugarbeets. And it causes severe health problems. Not “suspected” of causing problems, not correlated with health problems—PROVEN to cause real diseases like diabetes. And they are trying to portray this as some hippie “natural” thing where refined sucrose is “natural” and “wholesome” and sugar substitutes are the devil.

Um, since over 1.1 million people LITERALLY DIED FROM DIABETES^(source) in 2005 and I even know people who suffer from it, and sugar also contributes strongly to tooth decay, while no one has EVER gotten any disease or health problem as a result of consuming saccharin or aspartame, sucralose or any other sweeteners, I’m pretty sure I am going to keep on consuming artificial sweeteners enthusiastically.

Sugar industry, F*$K OFF with your lies.

Something’s wrong when the freaking ads are obviously not made by humans anymore. You ever click on the eBay spam ads that eBay puts on every single google search results page–no matter how irrelevant eBay is? You know the ones, like “CHEATING GIRLFRIEND–Find Cheating girlfriend on eBay!” Actually a quick bunch of searches reveals they must have toned that down a bit lately. But if you thought they decided to quit carpet-bombing the Internet with irrelevant links to eBay, think again!

Found on Digg, click here for full Digg screenshot. Click the ad to see what comes up when you click the ad.

The ad was animated, too. The “Urgent” and the big red X icon were blinking.

I can’t count how many times I’ve clicked on a plausible eBay ad, such as one mentioning a particular model number of something I’m looking for, and found upon clicking, “No results match your search criteria.” Those are bad enough without these useless wastes of space.

Is it really that profitable to them to just blanket the world with ads for every conceivable noun in the hopes that someone will show up and buy something?

I hate eBay.

Nate Porter (1:44): I’m really excited to see what happens with the new ipods if they’re platform is related to the iphone

Dan (1:45): well i guess they’ve gotta be
A. they operate so similarly and B. with all the resources apple pissed away on iphone they’d have been incapable of releasing anything this year that wasn’t basically an iphone.
leopard may well turn out to just be a desktop version of iphone OS by the time it freakin’ comes out

Nate Porter (1:48): lol
Nate Porter (1:48): It’s true
Nate Porter (1:48): So true

Too bad I never post in my blog anymore. Well, I wanted to say that Flight of the Conchords is an awesome show. I took a moment to compile a YouTube playlist of all the episodes of their new show to-date.

UPDATE: YouTube videos were taken down. Sorry.

If you’re interested in seeing the photos from our 2007 vacation to Disneyland, they’ve been posted in the Photos section.

So on Apple’s startpage today, I noticed this headline:

Mac OS X Tip: FTP Files Right from the Finder

…so I clicked on the article, curious because I know for a fact that you can’t write to a mounted FTP share on Mac OS X.

“… did you know that you don’t have to buy a third-party FTP client to FTP your files? That’s right baby, you can do it right from within Tiger. … Once you’re “in,” you’ll see a folder — now you can just drag-and-drop the file you want to transfer into that folder and the transfer will begin.”

Hmm, not according to Mac OS X 10.4 Help

“Note: From the Finder you connect to FTP servers with read-only access. To copy files to an FTP server, use an FTP program.”

or Apple support article “Mac OS X 10.2 or Later: Cannot Copy to FTP Servers in the Finder”:

You can use the Connect To Server command to connect to an FTP server in the Finder, but you will have read-only access. You cannot copy, or upload, to an FTP volume in the Finder.

The screenshot on that tip page looks a little unfamiliar to me. Perhaps Apple’s Hot Tips department has been on Leopard so long they’ve forgotten it hasn’t been released yet. Can anyone confirm that this is even a feature in Leopard?

And can someone at Apple get their features straight?

So I’ve been trying out Joost. It seems pretty cool. Let me know if you need an invite (you have to be cool, though, to get one. )

Compare these identical notebooks, configured with respectable specs (Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5500, 1gb single stick, 80gb, Intel Wireless, Bluetooth, 15″ XGA, 8X DVD-ROM:

Latitude™ D520N Duo (with FreeDOS): $984

Latitude™ D520 Dual Core (with Windows XP Home Edition SP2): $965

Here’s the proof: (below the cut, click “More” below)

From my experience, the crippling in XP Home is indeed less than worthless. I wouldn’t use it, even for Dell’s payment of $19. Thanks, but no thanks.

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