"In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language." - Mark Twain

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Today's Today headlines (as on the website):

"Make jail mandatory for NS evaders

Standing up to stare hate down"


How ironic.

[Addendum: Someone observed that those in favour of more lenient penalties were the younger MPs, who'd been slaves before, while those pressing for harsher penalties were older MPs, who hadn't.

Draw your own conclusions about the "very strong support" we have for slavery - people support it so much that they want everyone else to go through it.]

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Someone on Dune:

"Admittedly, much of my disaffection for Dune probably stems from the fact that I could never quite wrap my head entirely around what was supposed to be going on, or why. I'm supposed to accept that all this hullaballoo is on account of the spice melange, a vastly potent substance that gives the human mind the power to transcend space, time and death. If so, then the administration and supervision of this resource as presented in the book seems, to put it mildly, whacked-out in the extreme. Every single power bloc in the Empire relies absolutely on melange, and yet the Emperor seemed entirely content to entrust a relatively unsupervised, squabbling assortment of petty backstabbing officials to guarantee the availability of this precious source of all life and commerce, instead of turning Arrakis into the largest Sardukar garrison in the universe and living there himself. Somehow I think Renaissance politics would have been significantly different if Milan was the only place in the world that gunpowder could be made."

I prefer the Book-A-Minute summary:

"Frank Herbert: I'm lots smarter than you are. I challenge you to understand evenone of my paragraphs!

Reader: Gee, Frank Herbert is smart. I can't even find the plot.

THE END"

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School where Chinese is compulsory - "A leading public school is making Mandarin Chinese compulsory for new pupils in recognition of the country’s growing economic influence. All 140 boys and girls entering Brighton College from September will study the language alongside a more traditional fare of French, Spanish and Latin for at least a year."
Ugh.

My Little Secret LLC - "It has a computer chip inside that produces CD quality sound to let you customize and maximize your personal experience. It’s a revolution that’s been a long time in coming. No pun intended."
This is quite creepy.

XUL Apps > Tabbrowser Extensions > Advantage and Disadvantage - "Less maintenancibility by huge codes: Virtually, now no one can update TBE codes, excluding me. Its codes are like as entwined spaghetti. Many unknown bugs are maybe there, many known problems (with unknown reasons) too... My opinion: First, I'm the primary-targeted user of TBE, and I'm still using TBE"
Heh heh