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In response to growing awareness about the dangers of artificial sweeteners, what does the manufacturer of one of the world’s most notable artificial sweeteners do? Why, rename it and begin marketing it as natural, of course. This is precisely the strategy of Ajinomoto, maker of aspartame, which hopes to pull the wool over the eyes of the public with its rebranded version of aspartame, called “AminoSweet”.

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Fuck you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up. A few days is how long I expect it will take before you either knock this shit off, or I delete every Google account I have ever had and use Bing out of fucking spite.

update the author has protected her weblog.

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The success of many attacks on computer systems can be traced back to the security engineers not understanding the psychology of the system users they meant to protect. We examine a vari- ety of scams and “short cons” that were investigated, documented and recreated for the BBC TV programme The Real Hustle and we extract from them some general principles about the recurring behavioural patterns of victims that hustlers have learnt to exploit.
We argue that an understanding of these inherent “human factors” vulnerabilities, and the neces- sity to take them into account during design rather than naïvely shifting the blame onto the “gullible users”, is a fundamental paradigm shift for the security engineer which, if adopted, will lead to stronger and more resilient systems security.

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Bill Gates said a changing climate is especially bad for developing nations, mainly because it hurts crop yields. Temperature increase has effects on weather, ecosystems can’t adjust and collapse. There is uncertainty about how bad the effects of increases in atmospheric CO₂ are but they will be bad. Until we get to near zero, the temperature will go up. “We have to get to zero.”

Currently, 26 billions tons of CO₂ are released each year. Americans are responsible for 20 tons per person. The global average is 5 tons per person.

He showed this equation:

Total CO₂ = World population x Services x Energy of each service x CO₂ per unit of energy

The neat thing about an equation that uses only multiplication is that if any of the four factors can be reduced to zero, then you don’t have to worry about the other three factors. The total CO₂ output will be zero. So which one can we make zero?