Hacker News Reader

dbl9on No Evidence of Aloe Vera Found in the Aloe Vera at Wal-Mart, CVS

In that case it's clear fraud and will be dealt with, I assume. Given the comments here about a liberal market, I assumed labeling requirements are less strict over there.

dbl9on No Evidence of Aloe Vera Found in the Aloe Vera at Wal-Mart, CVS

In Germany and many places if not all of west and central Europe products get detailed labeling of ingredients. For instance if you buy what's supposedly a brand name syrup of plums and therefore should be 100% the result of cooking plums and nothing else except maybe conservatives, what you actually get according to the label is 99% various forms of industrialized sugar and then a little bit of plum flavor. This is great because I've also found such syrup which was what you'd expect and pretty much the same thing you get when you do at home, but it wasn't from the most famous brand in Germany, which is disturbing given the price you have to pay for the brand. Same with stuff that's supposed to be honey or all those fancy teas which have no trace of what the label says if you look into the ingredients list. Most people do not bother to read it, and I don't blame them, but if you do, you start to put many products on a personal blacklist of fakes.

That said, do US products not carry detailed ingredient lists or is this product discussed in the article part of a group of products that are exempt?

dbl9on Windows 10 Cannot Protect Insecure Applications Like EMET Can

As long as Microsoft isn't addressing the real blocker for people to skip Windows 8 and 10, they won't convince that user base. Those users might eventually move to 10, but will stick with 7 as long as they possibly can and the Windows apps they rely on support.

I must say I don't understand the reasoning behind Microsoft not providing a Pro or Enterprise Windows version that doesn't use the existing users as tester for UI experiments or how much sensitive information they're willing to share on a desktop machine intended for very likely private work (authoring text, media, code, etc.).

They're making the same mistake as GNOME and KDE are, with trying to shoehorn Tablet feature onto the desktop, while pretending the keyboard and mouse are less relevant now.

I admit that there are those who are not power users and run Windows, but those that aren't are most likely better served with a lower maintenance solution like a Tablet with a bluetooth keyboard for writing sessions, and there the privacy invasion is already accepted by using a mobile OS.

PC Gamers and creators are the power users who use Windows for various applications, and Microsoft is making life very hard for them by bundling the improvements in the subsystems with the mobile OS experience on top without offering the new kernel features and such with the old user experience and trustworthy environment.

If you think about it, using a desktop environment that leaks like that for sensitive works doesn't make sense. Someone writing a book or movie script or working on an unpublished program doesn't want even only metadata about it to leak into cacheandclipboard.mscloud.azure.com.

This is all very weird and self-destructive and provides fodder for those who would like to believe Microsoft, Google, Apple are adding these features on request by monitor+control agencies.

dbl9on IRS Requests Bitcoin Buyer Records in Broad Tax Evasion Case

I've been thinking about this and wondering how they could prevent people moving to a WeChat like app and doing all financial transactions within that. If you enable anonymity in that there's no need to identify your meat life persona with your WeChat profile, how would the control be retained? Short of illegalizing mobile devices that allow installing a banned app like WeChatAnonEdition and having traffic police carry inspection devices that would allow them to detect illegally open Android devices in a driver's pocket, I don't see how it can be prevented. If you sell and buy inside WeChatAnonEdition and also get your salary inside WeChatAnonEdition, there is no monitoring and control anymore.

Just to be clear, I'm not agains taxes, because not paying taxes is like swatting an apartment, and generally taxes make sense to be paid, although most places also have several unfair tax codes, so I understand the common perception of taxes as "highway robbery".

dbl9on IRS Requests Bitcoin Buyer Records in Broad Tax Evasion Case

When I visited Istanbul, I passed through a district with an endless number of exchange shops, and it seemed like a place where you could easily wash money without any bank account involved. I believe Turkey isn't alone in having such a culture of buying/selling US dollars by tracking the USD rate.

Do the IRS and say Turkey's tax office tracks these as well? Assuming that you don't try to deposit the exchanged for bills in a bank.

Couldn't someone offer Bitcoin exchange in existing currency shops or the same service via Bitcoin ATMs? How would the IRS and its equivalents track that without requiring identification and registration before use? I suppose a small amount would be allowed for the tourist aspect but then you could use a group of friends or employees to wash small amounts. If you require ID for that, including tourists, then you can track it.