"Provenance?" This isn't a Regency Table we're talking about, it's commoditized food. I eat stuff where the manufacturer can't even tell me what kind of oil they use (one or more of ...) let alone prove the genotype of every grain of wheat. Do you think a company that buys a million pounds of flour a year gets it all from the same place? Or even cares about the varietal? Consumers don't care if their bread is made from Calingiri or Ytipi. Farmers don't: they'll generally change their varietal every couple of years when the seed man tells them there's something new out. Keeping varietals separate in an 80 ton silo (never mind a 100,000 ton bulk carrier) is more trouble than anyone wants to go through.

You need to stop confusing "ingredient list" with "chemical composition." As an ingredient, "sugar" means "refined sugar," but there's sugar in everything. Even beef is 1-2% sugar.

Most people are interested in "sugar" in the sense of "refined sugar" so-called empty calories that contain no additional micronutrients and have high glycemic index. When you refine sugar out of cane juice, or beets, or just about anything, you preferentially select sucrose from all the other sugars, proteins, and minerals in the extract.

Most food is a mixture. If your recipe is bitter, you can make it more pleasant by adding refined sugar, honey, maple syrup, apple juice, cane juice, or a host of other things. Some of those ingredients have their own distinctive flavor, which may mix well or badly with your other ingredients. Refined sugar is popular because it's pretty flavor neutral and stores forever. Cane juice is also pretty flavor neutral and cheap, but not as easy to store or transport.

An ingredient list is not a chemical analysis

Most of the genetic modification of plants is based on a bacterium (agrobacterium tumefaciens) that naturally performs horizontal gene transfer between plants. Usually, this results in plant tumors, but given a few million generations and a few billion plants, there's no reason to imagine it couldn't transfer the gene.

Maybe more importantly, both barley and rice (and wheat, and....) naturally express SUSIBA2. Barley SUSIBA2 transcripts (accession AY323206) are 82% identical to rice SUSIBA2 (accession NM_001066651), so it's not even like they're wildly different things.

Any web site that does this suffers a fatally inflated sense of worth. There is almost no content on the web that can't be found in alternative form somewhere else. NYT blocking non-subscribers? The Guardian is running a story about the same thing. Used up all your "free" views on ESPN? MLB.com has scores and commentary. Seriously, I can count on one hand the ad-supported web sites that I would suffer should they drop off the planet tomorrow.

A surprising number of sites I read are written by enthusiasts who pay BlueHost (or someone) $5/month for hosting, and don't run any ads. Honestly, that's what I thought the web was supposed to be: a platform where anyone could publish content based on their passion for collecting pocket lint that looks like famous people, and connect with similar maniacs around the world. You pay a little to host your own stuff and contribute to the community, and you get to read other people's ramblings for free. I'm not surprised that it's turned into a way to get paid $0.25 for posting pictures of your cat sitting in a sink, but neither can you convince me that removing advertising would make those people stop posting cat pictures.

If you believe your content is so valuable that I'll turn off my ad blocker just to read it, you're wrong.

Radio advertising started as a patronage model. Phillip Morris or Dove would pay for the production or syndication of a radio show, and the show/broadcaster would express their gratitude. Not unlike PBS today. From a listener perspective, this is great - you get content and you have relatively unobtrusive product mentions. From a sponsor perspective, it's great - your brand gets associated with popular bits of culture, you get the opportunity to mention new products, and people begin to associate your brand with class and good works. Everyone knew The Shadow smoked Lucky Strikes (or whatever). Sponsors had an interest in evaluating the quality of programming, because who wants to be associated with a crappy show?

Internet advertising is the exact opposite of this. There's zero connection between the advertiser and the content producer, because ad placement is determined by a third party. Ads appear on Joe's Scat Collection just as much (or more) as CNN.

I'd be happy to see the current advertising model die. I think a lot of companies would do well to establish "Arts" sponsorship programs to reward people putting actual, quality content on the web. These people complaining that content will disappear from the web if advertising is blocked/ignored/banned are missing the point that 95% of web 'content' is completely without value. If you want to keep an online diary on facebook, you are not entitled to make an income from it, and no one is obligated to pay you to look at a picture of yesterday's dinner.

But then you wouldn't be able to have your safe count your money for you. It wouldn't be able to confirm who made the deposit. It wouldn't be able to communicate with your central office to tell you how much money was at each different location. It wouldn't be able to call the bank for a pickup when it's full. My guess is this is basically the same as ATM/USB hacks, where Brinks decided that the safe is going to be installed in a sufficiently secure area that it's OK to leave a USB port exposed.

This thing is not a "safe" in the sense of a monothithic box with a door where you might keep your Krugerands. Compusafe is a gas station/back office safe, with a touch screen GUI, cash reporting, and centralized accounting. ie, your night clerk drops a stack of bills into the loading tray, and the safe counts them, separates them, and sends a note home how much is in it. This seems to be a 4th generation product, so, like most software running on legacy platforms, I would guess that Brinks thinks the fact they've been using this code for 15 years means that they have already fixed most of the bugs and vulnerabilities. Or at least that it's much cheaper to keep using the same software they've been using for 15 years: why fix what ain't (known to be) broke?

US FASCAM mines are designed to be delivered by air. Think cluster bomb that waits until someone gets close to explode. They are not your grandfather's minefield.

Of course, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, China, Russia, and the US refused to sign that treaty. The list of non-signatories is interesting from the perspective of being known by the company you keep.

A password book or password safe on your home computer is really only vulnerable to a directed, personal attack. You are vulnerable to these, and they're essentially impossible to completely defend against. They're also very low yield for the attacker.

A corporation/website is (probably) a harder target, but orders of magnitude higher yield. Realistically, you are much more likely to have personal information or passwords compromised by the Anthem, OPM, or Target hacks than by a keylogger or similar attack surreptitiously installed on your computer. (I'm fairly confident betting that you have already received free credit monitoring as the result of a large scale data breach) Hand-written passwords encourage you to use weaker passwords than computer-generated random character strings. Hand written passwords encourage password re-use, so your vulnerability to counterparty failure is greatly magnified.

A cloud-based password keeper has all the disadvantages of aggregating passwords, and all the disadvantages of trusting a high-yield counterparty to keep your secrets.

Not even great Scrabble players have 500,000 word vocabularies. Fewer than 200,000 of those words are in current use. Most of us live with 20,000 or so words we'll recognize as words and actually use only 1000-2000. 1000^3 is almost exactly 256^5

It also turns out that humans are bad at random, and will tend to choose nouns when asked for words. So, much like "choose an 8 character password with mixed case and at least one non-letter," "choose three random words" sounds like a lot of randomness until you bring humans into the process. "Sociogenetic earleen shaef" is not nearly as memorable as "correct horse battery."

"Race" in humans mostly identifies groups that spent a lot of time isolated from each other. You can absolutely identify genetic markers that are more concentrated in Africa than in Asia, for example. Even today, many people have generations of family or tribal history with very little change in geography and consequently very little genetic mixing. (not so much in the Americas, but they're a special case)

In the past 1000 years or so, humans have broken a lot of the geographic and language barriers that used to separate us, with the not-so-surprising result that the inbred markers that represent "Italian," "Jewish," or "Japanese" become more widely distributed. "Race" is essentially a word for "extended family," and the visible phenotype little different from saying "you have your mother's eyes."

You don't get a Manning or Snowden-scale breach from people memorizing documents. Hiring trustworthy people is key, but there's no reason to make it easy for people to walk out with the crown jewels when you (inevitably) make a mistake of trust.

I think this reflects exactly UI fatigue that comes from constant, pointless upgrades. Lots of us 'grew up' with computers. Discovering how to make the computer your own. The tweaks and barely-documented features that make you more efficient. Learning the keyboard alternatives to tedious menu trees. When you're new to the system, you expect to have to put some time in, and it's rewarding to learn the semi-secrets.

Then someone comes in and changes it all. Moves the menus around; revises the shortcuts; renames the control panel widgets. It makes you think you've learned all that stuff in vain, because someone is just going to come around and change it all in 3 years. Why bother, then, learning any but the most common features. UI fatigue turns power users into PlaySkool users, but that's ok, because the UI is built for PlaySkool users.

You forgot:
Single 15% tax threshold: $9226
Married 15% tax threshold: $18450
Single 39.6% tax threshold: $413200
Married 39.6% tax threshold: $46850
Double the deduction and lower rates at every income level up the chain. Most advantageous to the single-earner family, but if you believe that "Two can live as cheaply as one," it's still a distinct advantage for two-earner families.