mad_ddog
Monday, December 31, 2007
  Globe and Mail: Calgary cracks down on trans fat

In response, Burger King Restaurants of Canada called it “one of the highest priorities” for the company to make its restaurants free of added trans fat by the end of next year, starting in Calgary on Jan. 1.

“The company has also identified trans fat-free, par-fry and baked-good solutions for our products, and is currently testing these products as well,” Burger King said in a statement.

The above text makes it sound like Burger King decided to roll out the non-trans fat cooking oil in Calgary first for no particular legal reason - just an arbitrary business-related reason.
But now, there's the article about Calgary's switch to non-trans-fat cooking oils for ALL food establishments:

That quick hit of greasy food to ease the New Year's Day hangover will come with an unexpected bonus in Calgary as the city becomes the first in Canada to regulate use of artery-clogging trans fats served in restaurants.

As of Tuesday, city eateries will not be allowed to cook with fats and oils that have more than 2-per-cent trans fats in total fat content. The same rule applies to all margarines and margarine-based spreads served in those outlets.
Burger King - always second-place to McDonald's and now we see why. They just can't get their act together unless there's government legislation involved. Lazy or apathetic - take your pick.

  Globe and Mail: The dark side of booming TV sales
At the end of the article about what to do with old CRT-style TVs, there's this nugget of info (summary - they recycle as much as possible as opposed to the old method used on Black & white TVs - dump them in the landfill):

By the numbers

$1,099 — Average cost to make a 42-inch high-definition television last year

$820 — Average cost to produce that TV now

150 million — Global demand for HD TVs by 2010

  Discover: Long Live Closed-Source Software!
Comments to come, just wanted to put this thing up so I wouldn't forget.

But back to that dingy bachelor pad near MIT. When Richard told me his plan, I was intrigued but sad. I thought that code was important in more ways than politics can ever be. If politically correct code was going to amount to endless replays of dull stuff like Unix instead of bold projects like the LISP Machine, what was the point? Would mere humans have enough energy to carry both kinds of idealism?

Twenty-five years later, that concern seems to have been justified. Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

Before you write me that angry e-mail, please know I’m not anti–open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.


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