back to article Ethics? There's an app for that

Ethically-responsible shoppers can get the help they obviously need with a new app that will scan a bar code and decide if your coffee was ethically sourced, or is actually a Compaq server. The Barcoo app is free to download for iPhone, Android, Symbian and Bada, and provides the usual price-comparison service common to such …

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  1. Chris 211

    huh

    ..Green, Ethical, I really could not give a shit, its all a load of lies anyway as "MumboJumbo coffee corp" can be as green as they like while buying cheap coffee elsewhere (3rd hand removed etc) and passing it off as ethical. The truth is 'ethical' is a luxury WE have, stop buying the cheap stuff and the children used to pick the coffee beans (yes I know they are actually seeds) will have no value and become sex workers instead, yeah, really ethical. However thats the true nature of the world, some are exploited for others by others. The moment this ends the western world will be screaming like children because suddenly we will have to pay the real cost for everything and thats much much more then the pennys extra you pay for your "Green" beans.

    1. Joe 3
      Thumb Down

      Great attitude, Chris

      Perhaps buying Fairtrade coffee means that the adults who grow the beans can send their children to school, rather than sell them into sex slavery?

      So you can't be arsed paying a bit extra for Fairtrade coffee (actually, it's sometimes cheaper) so you justify it to yourself by saying "well, if I don't exploit these people, someone else will!" That's a good way to look at things - genocide, rape, paedophilia... all human nature, it's how the world turns, so that's fine by Chris! I'm alright Jack, so screw everyone else! I guess you won't have a problem if I murder your grandma to steal her food, after all, survival of the fittest, innit?

      Some of us don't mind paying a fair price for what we buy, instead of always buying at the lowest price and feeding our greed without a thought for others. Sure, it's not fool-proof (Fairtrade guarantees a fair price for farmers, but what of their workers?) but it's better than nothing, which is your solution. It's not always easy or even possible in this post-Thatcher world, but to just wash your hands of it is disgraceful. Cameron and Thatcher would be proud of you.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        What about the ones that aren't fairtrade?

        Yea, the conditions aren't good. But the workers are getting food. Don't buy from the non-fairtrade places and they will be sold to slavery because you left the people with money in the area with no choice.

        1. Joe 3
          WTF?

          @ Anonymous Coward

          I'm not entirely sure what you're on about, but I'll try to respond anyway.

          How about we all pay a fair price for things? It means we might not each be able to fill our houses with flat screen TVs and our pockets with iPhones, but isn't peace of mind worth that?

          You seem to be trying to justify paying slave wages, and you seem to think that slavery is acceptable and inevitable. It is only the greed of people like you who make it inevitable. It is never acceptable. I refuse to be a part of it.

  2. adnim

    more fun ideas

    "It's a fun idea, though you'd want to ensure your idea of ethical behaviour [sic] matches the one that WeGreen defines."

    And your due diligence and recognition of privacy issues will ensure that none of that wonderful marketing data ever finds its way into the hands of anyone less scrupulous that yourselves.

    1. Daniel 1

      Even more fun ideas

      Flash up a message which states exactly how much of the bad karma- which you incurred in buying the device you are running the app on, in the first place - will be offset by buying the coffee... Maybe even keep a running total?

      Hooray! Only seven hundred and fifty nine more gallons of Columbian Medium, and another nine tonnes of Green & Black's "Maya Gold", to go, and I've offset the fact that I bought something made by Foxconn!

  3. adnim
    Headmaster

    Behaviour [sic] sorry ;)

    I am reading too many American-English based websites.

  4. Crazy Operations Guy
    FAIL

    Application that reports on ethics?

    Kinda odd thing to have on an iPhail...

  5. Nigel Brown

    Ethics? ETHICS??

    Bloody lout'th, I'm from Thuffolk mythelf.

  6. Lottie
    Coat

    sooo

    I guess it got confused between the different types of JAVA?

    I'll get it myself.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge
      Joke

      Not at all

      It correctly decided not to display Mac OS' Java as its future is uncertain.

  7. Gannon (J.) Dick
    Happy

    Metadata

    Yes, but if a Compaq Server was described as a Boat Anchor you might not have noticed, and that, friends, is the real moral of the story.

  8. M Gale
    Badgers

    What?

    "you wouldn't want to be caught feeding a computer into the coffee grinder again."

    AGAIN?

    Please give me a job working for you guys. I can type fast enough to be a census keyer, spell well enough for the same, and I have a silly sense of humour sometimes. I just want to be in the office on the day Simon tries to feed you all finely-ground and roasted Core 2 Quad.

    1. Doc Spock
      Joke

      Will It Blend?

      That's what happens when one of the hacks gets a BlendTec blender for a present - everything becomes instant coffee! (and it probably tastes no worse than the shit that us Brits accept in jars labeled "Coffee"...)

  9. jake Silver badge

    "you wouldn't want to be caught feeding a computer into the coffee grinder again."

    The question remains: Did it blend? And is there video of it?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    feeding computers into the coffee grinder

    I knew I wasn't the only person to decommission computers that way!

  11. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Joke

    But can it print out revised labels as well?

    Just asking. Purely for information purposes. No intent

  12. sebacoustic
    Heart

    nice coffee!

    looks like you go for excellent quality coffee at ElReg's headquarters, or is that tin reserved for CEO use?

    Looks like I need to apply for a job ar the Reg, the brew where I work is foul!

  13. ginger_tosser
    Big Brother

    jammed

    This is all assuming that the particular supermarket you are in isn't jamming your phone signal so you can't check out the competitors prices - now that isn't very fair trading!

  14. Joe Earl
    Coffee/keyboard

    Compaq DO make coffee servers (kind of)

    Whilst to most of you it may seem to be an error that the application identifies a Compaq server as serving coffee, those of us who dedicate our lives to improving coffee drinking know different.

    Computational coffee preparation is an actively researched topic - the basics were formerly declared in RFC 2324 (HTCPCP/1.0) - including the PROPFIND command required to find out meta-data about brewed resources.

    However we all know that the future of coffee lies in the cloud like everything else*, so I expect to see a specification on "large-scale distributed coffee preparation using HTCPCP" in the near future.

  15. Davidoff
    FAIL

    'Server' eh?

    A HP Compaq dx2300 is an entry-level business desktop PC, not a server. A minor detail but IMHO still embarrassing for the author not being able to distinguish between the server series (ProLiant) and simple desktop PCs from one of the biggest PC manufacturers.

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