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These men were captured under various circumstances, held at Guantanamo Bay without charge, and then released without ever having been charged with any crime.

Humans have a strange obsession with purity – it’s often accepted that the more “pure” something is, the better it is. By way of Simon Willison, I saw this quotation from Mark Pilgrim about HTML: Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it. ...

There is a very interesting practice in the restaurant industry, where chefs do unpaid work at a restaurant in hopes of learning (and perhaps in hopes of getting a job there). The term for these placements is stage – pronounced as the French would – “stahge”. Here’s one chef’s account of a stage he’s doing. You can learn a lot more about how a stage works in this three part series by Dean McCord. ...

Here’s the bottom line: If you leave everything else the same – the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need – but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.

Today’s New York Times op-ed page features a piece by Nicolette Hahn Niman, wife of the founder of Niman Ranch, one of the big names in sustainable livestock. Her goal is to push back against the argument that to be an environmentalist you have to stop eating meat in general, and beef in particular. Her argument is, in short, that the real problem is eating food (meat or vegetable) that’s not sustainably raised is the real problem when it comes to climate change. ...

Zawinski’s law states: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. I wonder if there’s a corollary that applies to imperialism. Every empire attempts to expand until it can occupy Afghanistan. Those empires which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Brough Turner says the congestion problems on AT&T’s network may be the result of misconfigured routers: Recently I was talking with a friend whose company continuously operates (and monitors) multiple 3G data links on the Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless and Sprint PCS networks. His data shows periods when the round trip time for http requests goes over 8 seconds, on the AT&T Wireless network only! I don’t have a copy of his data that I can examine in detail, but when combined with David Reeds report, it certainly appears AT&T Wireless has configuration problems. If you read on you’ll see this may not be the result of gross stupidity, but someone at AT&T Wireless should be a little embarrassed. ...

A couple of weeks ago I posted a link to an example of steganography from the Revolutionary War. Here’s a more recent, cruder example, courtesy of the governor of California.

John Resig says Google Groups is dead: There is one area in which Google Groups continues to shine: Private, or restricted, mailing list discussions. However any attempts at using it for a public discussion medium are completely futile. The primary problem with Google Groups boils down to a systemic failure to contain and manage spam. Only a bottom-up overhaul of the Google Groups system would be able to fix the problems that every Google Group faces. ...

Amazon.com’s cloud computing service now offers MySQL 5.1 directly: Amazon RDS provides a MySQL 5.1 relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity, while managing time-consuming database administration tasks for customers. The service takes much of the hassle out of setting up and managing relational databases, such as backups and code patching, freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business Amazon RDS provides the full capabilities of a MySQL Database, which means that libraries, applications and tools that have been designed for use with MySQL can be used without modification. This makes it very simple for customers to start using Amazon RDS. As with all AWS services Amazon RDS is a scalable resource; its storage, processing power and memory usage can be adjusted on demand and the customer only pays for those resources that have been used. ...