Israeli Guy: Why they are proud of suicide bombings

“Our industry is weak, almost nonexistent. I write with a pen made in Japan, on a paper manufactured in Finland, wear clothes that were sewed in China and eat food from abroad. It’s not surprising that we are proud in the human bombs that were created by Arabs. At least there is one thing that is an original and effective product.”

  

Minister without Portfolio

While reading through an article in the Jerusalem Post, I saw a mention of so and so, a minister-without-portfolio. Huh? What's that?

Turns out that there are lots of ministers without portfolio, so I actually had to hit the next button a few times in Google. Man life is tough. Finally, I found a direct definition:

Minister without Portfolio n.
government minister not in charge of a specific department of State.

I guess it's a parliamentary thing. When you form a government, you appoint various members of parliament to handle what we in the US would call Cabinet posts. These "ministers" handle different aspects of governance. The Finance Minister would probably do what the US Secretary of the Treasury does, the Foreign Minister mirrors our Secretary of State.

I suspect that when one builds a coalition government, you need to appoint Cabinet Ministers from lots of different parties -- maybe even more ministers than you have departments. This probably works much better than creating artificial fiefdoms. You don't have to pretend that a minister without portfolio has any particular power or responsibility.

So is Tom Ridge a minister without portfolio or a portfolio without a minister? We may never know.  

i18n. Where'd they get that?

The story goes as follows:

A DEC employee named Jan Scherpenhuizen was given an email account of S12n by a system administrator, since his name was too long to be an account name. This approach to abbreviating long names was intended to be humorous and became generalized at DEC. The convention was applied to "internationalization" at DEC which was using the numeronym by 1985.

via Guide to ease

Never heard the term while I was at Microsoft, though I did a lot of work on internationalization and localization for the Small Business Edition of Office (i18n and l10n 4 O8 SBE & O9 SBE).