The current mostly advertisement supported model that's dominant on the internet is warping how we interact with each other and how we use services - reminds me of a bad mix of Orwell's 1984 and The Matrix (the part where humans are used as batteries).

I'd gladly pay for a lot of content on the internet, but currently I either don't have the option or the pricing is outrageous - scientific articles and newspaper subscription comes to mind as being way overpriced. We need microtransactions and the first step is building the infrastructure to make it possible. Things like app.net instead of surveillance supported services like facebook are the step in the right direction.

No. You must be new here. :)

What part of...

No relevant similarity was identified between the putative peptides and known allergens and toxins, using different databases.

...don't you understand from the original paper?

I'll just link to this post that explains what the news reports misunderstood. It contains quotes from the original authors of the study whose results are misrepresented here.

I believe the article was referring to the UK. I don't know what the laws are there, but here in the U.S., a company would be closed down quickly if it were found the meat had been adulterated like that.

Oh boy, you're in for a shock then. Meat (and in general, food) safety in the US is way behind most of the EU countries. Eric Schlossers' excellent book - Fast Food Nation - details the US meat packing industry (from wikipedia's summary):

In his examination of the meat packing industry, Schlosser finds that it is now dominated by casual, easily exploited immigrant labor and that levels of injury are among the highest of any occupation in the United States. Schlosser discusses his findings on meat packing companies IBP, Inc. and on Kenny Dobbins. Schlosser also recounts the steps involved in meat processing and reveals several hazardous practices unknown to many consumers, such as the practice of rendering dead pigs and horses and chicken manure into cattle feed. Schlosser notes that practices like these were responsible for the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, aka Mad Cow Disease, p. 202-3), as well as for introducing harmful bacteria into the food supply, such as E. coli O157:H7 (ch. 9, "What's In The Meat"). A later section of the book discusses the fast food industry's role in globalization, linking increased obesity in China and Japan with the arrival of fast food. The book also includes a summary of the McLibel Case.

There is much more material, but this should suffice as a quick summary. The book is a decade old, the problems are current however.

I'm going to undo a bunch of mod points with this post, but I wanted to point out that the blog post you cite is flat out wrong.

I'd like to say that I'm for building more nuclear plants of 4th or later generation design and that even with the LNT model, the maximum number of deaths from Fukushima might be on the level of a single bus accident. That said, the blogpost is incredibly misleading. It took me a while to track down the original source that the post claims to cite from UNSCEAR and it's this paragraph:

In general, increases in the incidence of health effects in populations cannot be attributed reliably to chronic exposure to radiation at levels that are typical of the global average background levels of radiation. This is because of the uncertainties associated with the assessment of risks at low doses, the current absence of radiation-specific biomarkers for health effects and the insufficient statistical power of epidemiological studies. Therefore, the Scientific Committee does not recommend multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels;

What they are saying in short is that the statistical uncertainty is strong enough at low levels of radiation doses WRT cancer risk is that it's not possible to tell whether the LNT model is true or not and THEREFOR it shouldn't be used to say "this many people will die from this much low level radiation". They aren't saying that LNT is wrong. They aren't saying that LNT is right. They are saying we don't know.

The quote from the report is from here. It's from the latest report to the general assembly, page 16.

This is exactly what I wanted for my home: to measure temperature/light/humidity with 4-5 various sensors placed around the house that transmit data wirelessly to a base station which is capable of logging / exporting / graphing the data in fairly standard ways, without the proprietary junk.

I was considering this controller with some sensors, but at $150 each, it's a tad expensive. I could probably build it myself from some raspberry pi derivative, however I'd rather not reinvent everything from scratch.

I was really surprised not to find a much less expensive solution and an open source ecosystem that provides this kind of home monitoring solution (with the possibility to base some home automation on this)

This is why we need mandatory trial registration, so that we have a paper trail for abandoned trials and trials which fail to confirm an effect.

In the name of security Google has been pestering for my phone number for years, while their motives are much less about my security and more about their business reasons.

He's referring to the reasons the US/UK engineered the 1953 Iranian coup

For 1-2$ tops, sure. Without a keyboard and mouse, who's going to pay dozens of dollars for a game?

You can always do better, especially with the advantage of hindsight. Worrying about Fukushima's failure in retrospect is however the equivalent of picking faults in the security of a garden gate when there is no fence around the property at all.

If it was irresponsible to build a power plant without higher flood protection and keep the old design running for as long as they did, how much more irresponsible was neglecting tsunami protection for the half million people in the area that resulted in more than 15k deaths and 340k people getting displaced?. The parliamentary inquiry should have been focused on that, not driven by the people's irrational and overblown fear of the word "nuclear".

There has been a tsunami that killed over 10000 people and demolished multiple cities and dozens of chemical plants and factories. If this was a man-made disaster where the fuck was the planning to prevent it? Why are we still talking about the nuclear plant, where at most a couple of dozen people will die in the next hundred years?

Sure, we could have done more to prevent the damage in Fukushima, like build units from a newer generation (fukushima daichi's sister plant survived the same tsunami, but was slightly younger and thus had much less problems), have better oversight, regulation, emergency response etc. However, that is like asking what could have been done better about shark deaths in Nevada ("noone expected it to happen", "zomg, sharks!"), and totally ignoring deaths by drugs abuse, cancer, transportation accidents and cardiovascular causes in the meantime.

The point is, reinforcing Fukushima would have been a waste of money and effort, money and effort that would have been better spent on building better flood barriers to protect places where people actually live.

Absolutely. The UK sent people to Libya while Gaddafi was still in power in exchange for lucrative business opportunities.

All the IBM engineers will do is decrease the issue of traffic by a couple of percent, maybe raise efficiency by 10-20% here and there, but the real issue is cultural. Cars suck for a dense urban environment, you need people on bikes, carpooling and the most important thing: good public transportation.

Good public transportation means though forcing cars out from city centers by creating bus lanes, creating tram lines on previously car-only roads, building enough parking space at the edge of the city where people could switch over to public transport, etc.