mtts

Nice try, but no. In fact at the time even the Belgians couldn't get away with what they did. When word came out about what the Belgians were doing in the Congo it caused an uproar throughout Western Europe and it stopped.

> There's a big, important difference between piracy and trade

Not really. What the British called "free trade" seemed pretty much like piracy to the Egyptians, the Indians and the Chinese they imposed it on.

And lest you think trade has become more civilized since the nineteenth century: I'm sure farmers in Jamaica are none too fond of having their livelyhood destroyed because their country imports cheap European dairy in the name of free trade. Which is just one example out of many.

Heck, even free trade loving Americans complain about their country getting swamped with cheap Chinese products.

As with most things, it's complicated.

The period since the Italian Renaissance is actually more interesting than "pretty spiffy". While science improved by leaps and bounds, living conditions for ordinary people (in Europe) deteriorated quite significantly. Crop yields plummeted, leading to starvation, disease and decreasing populations all over Europe. Only in the 19th century did things improve again.

The moral of the story being, I guess, that improvements in science and technology, do not necessarily go hand in hand with improvements in living standards.

Not just by force. IE 4 and 5 were better than what Netscape had on offer during that time. They were faster and had fewer JavaScript quirks.

I've come to the conclusion this isn't actually a problem. If you don't think of your to do list as a tool for organizing projects but merely of a list of things you need to do, you don't actually need sub tasks.

But you do, of course, need to block some time every now and then to take a bird's eye view of where your projects stand.

This works for my, but YMMV of course.

The idea behind todo.txt is pretty neat, but in its basic form it's missing a few features. Luckily it's easily extendable.

I hacked up (and I do mean hacked up) two python scripts that add two bits of functionality that are essential for me:

- Timed tasks: add a date to a task and when that date rolls around, the task gets assigned top priority.

- Repeating tasks: add a human readable marker to a task that indicates it needs to be repeated every X days and every X days a copy of that task is assigned top priority. Another copy of the task is set to pop up in the set X number of days.

For me, these make the rather simple todo.txt the perfect todo list / note keeping setup. Unfortunately the todo.txt Android app doesn't work with my extensions so I have no use for it (I just look through the txt file in the Dropbox app if I need to see it on the go).

> Ruby feels like a “more than one way” type of language more closely related to Perl.

Gem issues aside, which Perl doesn't tend to have because CPAN is so rock solid, that was exactly the reason I didn't continue with Ruby when I checked it out, somewhat in depth, a few years ago: Ruby is Perl with OO done right, which is nice, but if you use Perl professionally, Ruby will not provide you with an alternative way of thinking the way Python does.

No, I agree with the OP. If you want to install some interesting Ruby app or library you quickly find yourself installing all sorts of interdependent gems to get it to work. This is, of course, a matter of YMMV, but I can see where he's coming from.

And with Python, BTW, it's a lot easier, probably because of all the batteries that are included.

They've always been absurdly expensive. Maybe you didn't notice it in the US before since the dollar was so strong, but over here in Europe it's always been pricey stuff.

A native English speaking work force at lower salaries than in the UK helps too :-)

FWIW all the points mentioned elsewhere in this thread about this having been known for a long time among cognoscenti of Bletchley Park is duly noted

but

to me it was news. So as far as I'm concerned the Polish government raising a stink about this, however much a symptom of Polish persecution complex it is, is a good thing. I learned something today (among others, after a few diversions on Wikpedia, about Wojzek the Bear - how cool is that?)

"7. Use vi-mode in Your Shell"

Tried this and gave it up. Your shell may be (somewhat) vi compatible but the applications you use mostly are not so you'll have to break out of the vi mindset at all sorts of inopportune moments. That, and modal editing, while perfectly alright for text editing, maps rather lousily to command line operations. You're much better off getting used to some basic Emacs-style key bindings that work consistently across a wide number of applications (including OS X text fields, IIRC).

Maybe someone will do some research on this at some point, but yes, it seems fishing is indeed the western male's (it's usually western males that do fishing for leisure, no?) version of meditation. It's not about catching fish, surely.

Dunno. I've found purposefully sitting still is much more effective than walking dogs or taking a shower, during which your mind may calm down, but may very well not as well.

Weight lifting could be mindfulness, but only if you don't "put on headphones with fast, heavy music". Those headphones are a distraction.

Freshly squeezed oranges are not what most people consume when they consume juice. A sterilized, overly processed concoction of fructose and acid, which, yes, originated in fruit, is.

Juice is for most intents and purposes no healthier dan soda. It's mostly sugar and acid. The fact that said sugar and acid used to reside in a piece of fruit makes no difference at all.

If you want the health benefits of fruit, eat a piece of fruit.

Downvoted because "this will virtually never happen" is, uhm, for want of a better term, incredibly stupid.

Allow what you want to allow and disallow everything else.

Exporting views to code has been shaky at best. And worse: once it's exported to code, there is no way to only import the bits that have changed. You must recreate the whole thing anew.

That's not version control, that's an export function.

That, and even core-ish modules are maintained in a manner that's just plain unprofessional (I'm looking at you, Ubercart / Drupal Commerce): "Hey, there's a new version of Drupal Core! Let's drop development of (and support for) the current version of Ubercart that people are actually using and start writing a completely new cart system from scratch!"

"That means that it can scale from anywhere from something like a 16 year-old's shared-host fanfiction site to say Whitehouse.gov."

Scaling to Whitehouse.gov is not impressive at all. Like a 16 year-old's shared-host fanfiction site whitehouse.gov really is nothing more than a content site, albeit a very large one.

The problem is Drupal isn't content to simply be a CMS. It has to pretend to be a framework for developing web apps as well, and for that it's just plain terrible.

Typical Drupal FUD.

"Configuration lives in configuration tables" : the OP's point exactly. Configuration should live in a VCS

Bear in mind also that "configuration" van be so complex with Drupal it's often more along the lines of being "an application". A non-trivial view is hugely complicated and yet all its settings and code live in the database entirely, with no way to either back it up in a VCS or deploy it from a development environment to a live environment without manually copying the settings from one to the other.

When shared hosting was the norm. mod_php was much faster than CGI and a lot safer to use because usually processes in one virtual host did not affect processes in another unlike with mod_perl and the like.

PHP is itself a template engine.

Bolting a template engine on top of that makes no sense whatsoever.

You always need to move away from using Drupal for "highly customized web applications". Drupal is a CMS with something vaguely resembling a framework bolted on.

It's not even always relevant in painting. The impressionists (who invented the hatred of black, AFAIK) were obsessed with painting light effects, so to them it was important. Their academic colleagues and to the painters that preceded them didn't care about photorealism and so used black liberally to emphasize depth and contrast.

No they're not. They're a method for ensuring that what is meant to go into some field in some database actually ends up there and does not start doing things it should not be doing.

It's probably a bit late, agreed, but it seems to me this problem is just as much the fault of the encoding itself as it is the fault of PHP : Turkish i and I may look like Western European i and I but they're entirely different characters.

Yes. IE9 was an optional update.

He probably didn't have a long term position. More likely he was hired through a job agency or on a 0 hour contract in which case yes, you can be (effectively) fired on the spot. Same for his supervisor.

A lot of things stink about this story, but this isn't one of them.