There are no chemicals. The stickers are made of starch, are printed on with edible dyes and are stuck on the fruit with a thin layer of glucose. They are in fact perfectly edible and biodegradable. It's quite possible laser etching (by heating the fruit) will produce more dangerous compounds. Frankly, this isn't even a problem, people just like the lasers because they look cool.

Brick and mortar stores have something called "shelf space". Having 80 different copies of Pride and Prejudice in a real store wouldn't make any sense. This is simply Amazon doing the same thing, but online. Just because they have unlimited digital shelf space, doesn't mean they HAVE to carry your book. The user experience comes first, and if I walked into a brick and mortar store and was met with 80 different publishings of Pride and Prejudice, I wouldn't be so happy either. So quit bitching, Amazon is entirely within its rights.

... but can it run Crysis? I'm not much of a physicist, but this sounds like exciting news. I'm not really clear on how a single molecule can have properties similar to a transistor though. Gotta cool it down to 1.4 K though, ouch.

That this rover landed in 2004 with a planned mission of 90 Martian days and we're now in 2009 still amazes me. To keep these rovers functioning for that long is an engineering triumph. Even with equipment failures, dust storms, broken wheels etc. the engineers at NASA manage to make the best of these rovers and learn more about Mars. If we're lucky, the rovers will still be working when we land there, one day. It's nice to see such human ingenuity.

It's a minority government, so the Conversatives can't just force the legislation through. They need to convince the other parties.

Sweet. Hopefully the US will follow suit.

Good for Adobe, but Acrobat is crap anyways. It takes forever to load up and uses way more system resources than it should. Foxit Reader is what you should be using.

Patriotism is a disease

Hate to say it, but I think Microsoft Office is a flat out better product than OpenOffice.org. It starts up faster, it has the whole macro system, it's just a lot more powerful.

What makes you think there isn't free-market competition right now? OpenOffice.org users can open MS files and save to the format as well. There are a few bugs, but those are true among Microsoft products too (open the same document in Word 97 or Word 2000 or Word 2003 and they look different). Open standards are great, but I highly doubt it will make a dent in Microsoft's hold of the office software market.

I wish we had this kind of speed in Canada. I guess it's not so much the speed as the bandwidth caps. What the hell are we supposed to do with a 20 GB download limit?

Somehow Canada missed the boat with Unlimited download/upload.

Someone has to stop these stupid genetic patents. Patents and copyrights are both way out of hand these days. Software patents, now this. I've heard of companies attempting to patent viruses and such (the kind they use to get DNA into other organisms), but a pig? I think patent law has a clause saying you can't patent a living organism (when did genes become "inventions"?). Recently though, big pharma and biotech companies like Monsanto has been lobbying to let this shit happen.

There was a movie that touched on this The Corporation. It's a Canadian movie and I think Monsanto is mentioned in there more than once.

I sincerely don't know how these companies get away with it. Giving them the same rights as people legally was a bad idea. Don't the people working at Monsanto realize how twisted this shit is?

I hope they never award the Nobel Prized based strictly on this. It could be a good way of pointing people in the right direction, but it will also let in a bunch of crap.

The last thing we need is scientists Googlebombing their papers (or creating junk networks to increase page ranks). I bet the Creationists would have a field day with this. "Look, our theories have scientific basis, check out our CiteRank".

Technology is a tool, it should never replace human intelligence.

Good link. I think it just proves that you can't trust the competitors to defend your personal information either.

In the end, no one will defend your important documents more than you will, and that's why I doubt Google Docs will ever gain much market share in the enterprise sector until the day they allow it to be hosted on the intranet (like they do for their corporate search service).

For small businesses it might be an interesting solution though. I think most people don't know much about security in general (not just computers), so hosting things on a Google server might be better than on your spyware ridden home office computer.

Surely not, but the fact that Google is now hosting business services, they are quickly becoming the information sink of the universe. They have a history of easily folding to law enforcement, which makes me uneasy about hosting corporate stuff online. I just don't like all the big brother business, and while I use GMail for personal stuff, I wouldn't start trusting Google with sensitive documents, memos etc.

Web based tools have another huge problem. You're at Google's mercy for upgrades, feature changes etc. Does anyone remember the crap they started with the iGoogle sidebar? That sort of stuff quickly discourages corporate clients.