I've only recently gotten a smartphone, after being a holdout for a long time. Before that, one of my beefs with smartphone users was that they were always reaching for their phones whenever they might otherwise have been bored. It seemed to me that they had lost something valuable: time to contemplate.
However, now that I have a smartphone, I no longer think about that.
Reagan famously reminded Gorbachev of the old Russian proverb, "Trust but verify." Here's a corollary for the modern age: "Trust but encrypt."
I have one question about the so-called "fright" of the electric companies: were they - or were they not - specifically observed quaking in their boots? If they were not, please don't expect an indictment from the Grand Jury.
Personally, I thought my joke was better.
They must look pretty darn good - otherwise, the folks who would pay $1000 for a flashlight must not be too bright...
For one thing, they don't kill each other for no good reason. Waitasecond...OK, maybe they are human.
Sir, no disrespect or nothing, but can I defeat him using Ti Kwan Leap? I got the pajamas.
They fail to understand the purpose of e-mail, and as such we would never ever get the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders.
That's a primary reason I stuck with Yahoo email for way too long: I didn't like the labeling system that Gmail provides as an alternative to folders. ("When all you have is a search engine hammer, everything looks like a search nail.") Finally, I decided to give in and use Gmail as my primary email service, labels and all. Why? Partly because Yahoo forced a new user interface on me that I didn't like, by shutting down the old version after initially allowing the old and new versions to coexist.
(Which makes Google's "Inbox" sound like deja vu all over again...)
I've tried Inbox a bit but haven't really given it a fair chance yet. My initial impression, though, is a bit negative: basically, it seems to be trying to solve a problem that I don't need solved. And with all the "improvements" it offers, it still doesn't even have folders...
Read on a bit more. By paragraph 10 he points to increased wages for jobs requiring skill, by paragraph 20 he's getting into jobs requiring trust.
What skill? I've been writing Python for over 10 years. Sure, it took a little while to learn to think Pythonically, but the main selling point is that Python is truly easy. Oh, except for those folks who can't live without braces. And compared to regular dentists, don't orthodontists get paid extra to use braces?...
...and if so, it's cheap at just $2.99. Heck, how many times have you paid more than that to go through an art gallery, only to find the inevitable "Painting with Single Dot in the Middle"? Better yet, this art is both multimedia and interactive.
He has a cat? Now you've got me wondering if he eats his cat's toejam...
Openwashing? Is that actually a term now?
Not yet, but if it ever catches on, we can look forward to Richard Stallman trying to rebrand it as "freewashing". And please don't confuse "open" as in laundromat with "free" as Mom's laundry room.
(Note to moderators: it's just a joke.)
For the best reasons to learn Python, see The Zen of Python. If Python happens to pay more, that's just gravy.
That said, it seems hard to believe that people would get paid extra to work in such a pleasant language. If so, maybe Adam Smith had it all wrong when he said:
First, The wages of labour vary with the ease or hardship, the cleanliness or dirtiness, the honourableness or dishonourableness of the employment...The most detestable of all employments, that of public executioner, is, in proportion to the quantity of work done, better paid than any common trade whatever.
Perhaps florists soon will be making more money than plumbers. Which would really stink.
Another way to put this (as I understand it - IANAL) is that the corporation shields individuals from civil liability (getting sued) but not from criminal liability (going to jail).
Riddell's algorithm begins with the Wikipedia entries of all authors in the English language edition (PDF)—more than a million of them. His algorithm extracts information such as the article length, article age, estimated views per day, time elapsed since last revision, and so on....Others highly ranked include Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill, and Malcolm X.
For folks like Winston Churchill and Malcom X who had notable careers outside of writing, I wonder how they distinguish what part of their Wikipedia stats is due to their writing and what part comes from the rest of their careers?
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra
