“The owners are the ones who killed our people and drank our blood,” construction worker Hussain told me three years ago outside a mansion he was building. “But at least it is providing us with work.”
Taken from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/16/drugstrade.afghanistan
I’ve no time to test this with Haddock CMS in the near future, but this seems interesting:
There are some impressive performance benefits to be had:
Why PHP running on the JVM hasn’t gotten more attention has baffled me for a while. Python and Ruby (and gazillions of other languages) have been on the JVM (and .NET for that matter) for donkeys. Of course, there are similar projects:
http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=Phalanger
PHP is (IMHO) lovable because it’s such a mongrel mutt. It tries to take the best from lots of languages and is pretty easy to work with. The benefits of using bytecode on a virtual machine are attractive.
I’m not sure why this isn’t on offer everywhere. There are a billion web hosts selling the traditional LAMP package for $7 per month (or less) with ever increasing amounts of disk space and monthly transfer. I’m not aware of any of them that sell a PHP package on the JVM or .NET. I wonder what the complication is.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080805/tuk-weapons-found-at-eco-camp-6323e80.html
Am I the only one calling for Vafanto save us?
Here’s a quote that I’ll try to remember when arguing against a Scandinavian system of taxation or windfall taxes:
It is not with much credulity I listen to any when they speak evil of those whom they are going to plunder.
– Edmund Burke
Here’s another one from Reflections…
Omnes boni nobilitati semper favemus.
From “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke:
Quod illi principi et praepotenti Deo qui omnem hunc mundum regit, nihil eorum quae quidem fiant in terris acceptius quam concilia et coetus hominum jure sociati quae civitates appellantur.
Can anyone tell me what this means or where it is from?
California has just banned trans-fats from being used in restaurants:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080725/ap_on_re_us/california_trans_fats
At the same time, the FDA has discovered the source of an outbreak of salmonella that has hospitalised more than a thousand people and killed two. The agency advised consumers to avoid raw jalepeños:
http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=93745
In my mind, the FDA has behaved sensibly with regard to the jalepeños. Even the most Randroid libertarian would be hard pushed to argue for food hygiene to be completely regulated by market pressure. Of course, consumers are going to choose to eat in restaurants that look clean, so market pressure does enforce standards of hygiene. At the same time, finding the source of a bacterial infection is not something that the typical shopper or diner can do, so government agencies and regulations have a clear role.
However, I don’t agree with a ban on trans-fats. Whether a food is infected with salmonella or not is not something that can be discerned easily. When you go into a restaurant, you hope that you are going to eat food is free from germs. If it is not, then this is not something that you do knowingly. You cannot make an informed decision. That is why government inspectors are needed. When you go into a restaurant, it is possible to know whether a food has been made with trans-fats or not. It is possible to make a decision. Therefore the ban seems unnecessary. Clear labelling would make more sense in this case.
I’ve just been trying to explain to my Italian girlfriend how the word ‘cunt’ is used in English. The following music videos explain the word quite well, I think:
“James Blunt” has even entered the language as Cockney rhyming slang…
I’m currently reading Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.
I find the text very interesting and feel that a lot of the content pertains to open source software. Repeatedly, Burke argues for gradual improvements to existing systems that have been constructed over time and shaped by actual demands rather than sudden revolutions of men of ideas but little experience. At its best, the open source movement offers software that has evolved in the gradual way, with bugs eroded over time. Something that attracts me to free software more greatly recently is that it can’t be taken off the market. Microsoft have stopped selling XP, sort of. I don’t want to be forced to move Vista. The designers of the original UNIX probably never thought that that OS would still be in such widespread use in the 21st century but here we are. Are there better systems? No doubt. Do I want to “upgrade” all my servers to anything else? Not on your nelly.
Of course, many in the open source movement might see themselves more like the revolutionaries, sweeping away a corrupt monopoly and replacing that with a free utopia. Reality doesn’t reflect that. Where the advocates of free software have presented themselves this way, they have succeeded the least.
A problem that I have encountered whilst reading has been translating the frequent quotations in Latin. Although I studied Latin for six years at school, I can’t remember much more than to parrot off “Bellum, Bellum, Bellum”. A typical problem of a language education focussed almost exclusively on syntax. I cut and paste the sentences into google but more often than not the only results returned are other copies of “Reflections” (of which there are plenty).
Does anyone know of a good repository of Latin quotations? It could make quite an interesting CRUD page (e.g. quotation, original text, original author, texts in which it appears, possible translations, votes for translations and so on). But I don’t want to build such a page as I don’t know enough Latin and I’m sure that something similar must exist already.