mtts

In this case it's not engineering prowess, however, it's just dumb luck: they had plenty of volcanic ash to work with, we don't.

Another example is Roman pottery. By sheer coincidence the clay they used was of exceptionally high quality (extremely fine particles, IIRC) so Roman pottery is extremely hard and durable, much harder and durable than we can make pottery today. Unfortunately, there was only one source of this clay (somewhere on the coast of Italy) and the Romans depleted it.

The irony here is of course that those strong and virile Romans the fascists sought to emulate were themselves quite often homosexual, or at least not averse to homosexual sex every now and then.

Off the top of my head I can think of Julius Caesar (derided, that much is true, by his enemies, for enjoying taking the passive role every now and then - but not for having sex with males per se) and Augustus, but I'm sure there were others.

> Also, if anyone is wondering, this article is actually from one of the most respectable Dutch newspapers.

Nope, it isn't. It is from the website of what used to be a respectable newspaper, which is in fact run independently from the newspaper itself.

And, as has been mentioned elsewhere, all this article is doing is quoting from a highly disrespectable tabloid.

Nothing respectable about this report at all

(though it's probably not untrue either).

The Singapore government an evil regime? Wow.

I doubt this is really an issue. Maybe some knee jerk anti-American types might spew nonsense like this but Europeans with a little more sense and insight and who actually care about this stuff are well aware that:

1. By law all European telecom providers, including ISPs, are required to provide a backdoor for everything that goes on on their networks (the infamous Data Retention Directive)

and

2. All European security agencies cooperate quite willingly with their American counterparts. Some more so than others (the ones from the former Eastern Block are particularly notorious in this regard) so if an American three letter agency wants your data, it'll get it.

Ok. So how's about this. Istanbul is, and always has been, the most secular city in Turkey. Not Erdogan's base of power at all. Erdogan proposes to tear down a park near a location the inhabitants of Istanbul consider to be central to their identity as secular westerners (Taksim square). Revolt ensues, police reaction is excessive. Awful, of course, but hardly an event that will change the course of Turkish history.

Isn't this what is going on? Terrible if you're a native of Istanbul, but hardly something to worry about if you're one of the 50 million Turks that doesn't live in Istanbul and doesn't share that city's liberal standards?

It's this reason, more than any other, that's brought me to clean up my language as I've gotten older. Calling someone a motherf* is easy. Being able to point out their promiscuity would make an 18th century French libertine blush, now that takes, if not skill, at least the effort of reading some 18th century French libertine literature.

Oh, it's definitely true. When Brits riot, they throw "stones". Americans think the word reminds them of testicles and so throw "rocks" instead.

Which to Brits is ridiculous as to them "rocks" are rather larger bits of stone that are pretty hard to pick up, let alone throw.

I'm told. Not being a native speaker of either British or American English I wouldn't know if this is true or not, but I thought the story was amusing enough to share.

Yeah, I meant soldiers. They travelled far, came into close contact with large numbers of other soldiers and then brought back the flu with them to their home communities when they were repatriated.

Modern mass tourism is pretty bad as well, but it's a far cry from having all of the young men in your town getting shipped out and back in again.

However, the Spanish Flu had some things going for it that were rather unique and unlikely to ever occur again: vast displacements of vast numbers of people, vast numbers of people in poor health due to years of deprivation as a result of food shortages and young adults being in especially poor health (Normally men of fighting age are the healthiest members of a population. After four years in the trenches, not so much).

The Spanish Flu clouds the issue somewhat, as it's always the first thing people think of when they hear the words "flu epidemic" but it's also the most unusual of all such epidemics.

Ridiculous. Poor software is unusable. Poor restaurant food, on the other hand, is mostly just "meh" and only very, very rarely, unedible.

Fine dining is about paying huge sums of money to go from "good" to "really, really good". There's no equivalent in the software world whatsoever (Mac fans: shut up)

> WP and Wordpress picked the wrong implementation language.

No they didn't. PHP makes sure you can deploy them just about everywhere for very cheap and without really knowing what you're doing.

WSDL is an object notation for objects that describe what a web service should do. This could just as well be done in JSON. It would be marginally less verbose, too :-)

Oh, and it's perfectly feasible to translate a well formed HTML document into some sort of JSON object. After all, HTML is just a set of tags with values, no?

XML is human readable. It was meant to be (this is why it's text instead of some binary format). It's just really, really verbose, which is what this JSON spec is going to end up being once it's dealt with all imaginable edge cases.

Yes it would. Because making it universal enough makes it incredibly verbose and nasty to work with. JSON became popular because it was simpler than Web Services which became popular because it was simpler than CORBA which became popular because it was simpler than just talking over raw sockets using some sort of protocol ... oh, wait.

Actually not having a "universal" spec helps: it forces every provider to give some thought to how to make his API as lean as possible. Hopefully.

Well, to be fair, JSON is at least a lot less verbose than WSDL. So there's that.

> But ~300ms server response times is nothing if your end user has to wait 5-6 seconds for the page to render due to suboptimal frontend code.

True for a single request, but once you start getting lots of concurrent requests all those ~300ms server response times start adding up quite quickly.

When Twitter started out, their use of ROR wasn't a problem. Once the service started to become popular, however, it was.

Not the parent, but I work the same way, and I tend to allocate 2GB RAM per VM. I haven't really used my Windows 7 guest yet, so I don't know if that one needs more, but for everything else it's enough.

I used VMWare. And no, just attaching the "new" USB hardware to the guest was not enough. iTunes only saw the iPhone if the Linux host did not have the USB modules loaded (and in fact had them blacklisted so they wouldn't be loaded automatically either).

It is (or was, don't know, this was about two years ago) a known problem: http://www.ivankuznetsov.com/2009/10/upgrading-iphone-firmwa...

>> "Then there's my phone. How do you use one of these things without a computer upon which to sync your data and backups?" >> Windows VM?

That only works when you disable USB on the host (which makes USB keyboards and mice temporarily unusable) while the Windows VM is running. And even then it sometimes just stops working after a while.

It's one of the reasons I ditched my iPhone and got an Android device.

Almost, but not quite. o opens a new window with the selected file, while nerdtree opens the file in the most recently used non-nerdtree window.

Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to tell netrw to create a vertical split rather than a horizontal split, which is inconvenient on modern wide screen monitors.

One thing NERDTree does that netrw doesn't (IIRC, haven't looked very deeply into this) is open files you select in a different window than the one that contains the file listing. I happen to find that convenient, YMMV, of course.

That's one way of putting it.

Another, more correct way, would be to state North Korea invaded South Korea and the US (and its allies) stepped in to stop them. They did this not to "free North Korea" but to prevent "communism" from overrunning one of its allies.

(They were also so succesful at it they pushed back North Korea almost all the way up to the Chinese border, which got China very nervous, leading to them getting involved as well).

"Ballpark favorite Cracker Jack will soon come as Cracker Jack’d—2-oz packages of the familiar candy-coated kernels jammed, in certain flavors, with 70 mg of caffeine from coffee."

WTF?

The problem I've found is I've become so used to no "waste time memorizing stuff" I've forgotten how to memorize things.

Which is a problem when I need to learn things that can't just be looked up online when you need them, like a new language. When I try to learn new vocabulary or something my brain just refuses to leave its default lazy "aww, just look it up on Google" mode. It's annoying.

This is a problem even if you don't buy pre-built. You're going to be buying similarly specced drives at similar times and you're probably buying from vendors from the same rough geographical area so chances are you're buying drives from the same batch anyway.

It used to be worse: all the drives in a RAID setup had to have the exact same specifications or the thing wouldn't work, which pretty much guaranteed near simultaneous failure of multiple drives, but even today, with somewhat more flexible software raid setups, it's still a problem.

At a place I used to work we used to joke that a drive failure warning from a RAID controller was nothing more than a signal to get out the backup tapes and start building a new server.

For the technical improvements, maybe, but for the improvements in living standards, not so much.

Living standards for commoners improved (vastly) during the 15th century, as a result of depopulation due to the Black Death in the 14th and the increased negotiating power of commoners that caused. Improved farming methods helped as well.

Unfortunately these improved living standards led to overpopulation and a subsequent decrease in living standards that only bottomed out during the late 17th century and that was exacerbated further by constant religious war and by climate change (the "little ice age"). Recovery was slow (partly because the "little ice age" lasted until the early 19th century) and only towards the end of that century do we find peasants better off than their 15th century forebears.

The evidence for this is in archives all over Europe and has been extensively written about by people like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladury. While the rich and educated were busy improving science and conquering the world, the poor suffered.

Even the people who lived through actual battles (where technology and tactics would be relevant) tend to tell stories that are mostly about hunger, deprivation and being cold. Shooting people and executing strategic plans hardly ever figure in them.

And this makes sense: most soldiers spend most of their time waiting around for battles or marching from one battle to the next. The actual battles themselves take up very little of their time (even if they're extremely stressful).

The stories of those that lived through wars as civilians (the vast majority of people) of course never talk about technology and tactics as they had nothing to do with them.

As confronting as it is, most of these seem to me spot on. Most of European history is indeed about war. Most of the African and Asian history that is written about is indeed about who colonized what.

It's a great map: it provides an easily digestible visualization of the limitations of history writing.

That would be because it has a long, long history that's traditionally divided into many periods.

So it makes sense :-)