Ogio Metro is a nice backpack that usually costs ~ $70US, which is (IMHO) far too expensive. However, Amazon recently had a sale and Ogio Metros were going for half-price (much more reasonable) with free shipping. Since I needed a new backpack, I bought a black Metro (it also comes in “indigo” blue and […]
A fascinating article in the Guardian (May 5, 2005; Now that’s what I call democracy) about the difference between American and British elections. The anglophile author convincingly argues that while American election campaigns are cheezy, carefully and artificially orchestrated affairs, British ones are calmer and more honest. British politicians are willing to handle tough questions […]
A few days ago, a character of the Diesel Sweeties webcomic couldn’t figure out how Michigan sucks. Had he waited a few days, he would have had no such difficulties: today, Jennifer Granholm, the (Democratic) governor of Michigan, has announced that she will sign a new bill regulating video games. The bill will make selling […]
The US administration is proposing a policy of first nuclear strike against enemies — both states and non-states — that are “intending to use WMD” against US or allied targets. Besides the immorality of such a policy, the fact is that the current administration has consistently misled the US public about other nations’ WMD capabilities. […]
The British government uses terrorism as an excuse to roll back civil rights by a century. The Home Office wants to be able to deport people to countries with strong torture records (apparently, following the lead of America — which has in several documented cases sent terror suspects captured in America straight to police torture […]
Anandtech benchmarked Apache and MySQL performance on OSX (on a dual G5), Yellowdog (on a dual G5), and SUSE (on dual Opteron and dual Xeon). Results are quite interesting. First, gcc 4 apparently is able to output much better floating point code on the G5 than older versions of gcc; if one uses gcc 4, […]
While browsing the July 23rd-27th edition of The Economist (I know, it’s pretty old), I noticed an interesting advertisement on page 87. Among all the ads offering MBA’s and offshore accounts, I noticed the following gem:
HM Ambassador to the Holy See
Salary range: £42,640-£60,405
Apparently, the British government paid Capita Resourcing to find them a replacement […]