“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely
challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn
betwen a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This
makes it hard to plan the day.”
E.B. White

Speaking of Tim O’Reilly on Why Scripting Languages Matter covers some of the same points as his talk.
“The reason why dynamic languages like Perl, Python, and PHP are so important is key to understanding the paradigm shift. Unlike applications from the previous paradigm, web applications are not released in one to three year cycles. They are updated every day, sometimes every hour.” I discovered this in reverse after moving from a web to a traditional application development environment. Losing the freedom to update as often as I wanted to was a big adjustment.
Another of his points was that Linux’s killer apps aren’t the Gimp, or Open Office but google, Amazon and Yahoo. “People are so stuck in the personal computer paradigm that they don’t recognize that the nature of applications has undergone a profound change in the last decade, with most of the new killer apps running on what has been called the LAMP platform (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP|Perl|Python).”

“Hopes are rising that Europe’s marine life may soon start enjoying the better protection it was promised years ago.
Environment ministers are expected soon to announce measures to stop the decline of many creatures.
They will probably include protection for several bird and fish species, and a network of marine protected areas.” (BBC)

“Modern business’s addiction to buzz words and jargon is losing firms millions of pounds a year, according to Deloitte Consulting.

Deloitte has devised a computer program which it claims can seek out and destroy corporate double-speak and pointless jargon, helping businesspeople to express themselves more clearly.” (BBC)