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...

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...

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:

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).

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?

Finally, vaporware we can actually use.

FTFM: Make that six.

Corollary: Base sixteen is just like base ten...if you've got four extra fingers.

You may be onto something. To be fair, maybe it was simply aimed at a younger audience than Star Trek.

This reminds me of a line from the song New Math by Tom Lehrer:

    Hooray for New Math,
    New-hoo-hoo Math,
    It won't do you a bit of good to review math.
    It's so simple,
    So very simple,
    That only a child can do it!

For those of you who are too young to have experienced New Math, Professor Lehrer introduces it by saying, "Some of you who have small children may have perhaps been put in the embarrassing position of being unable to do your child's arithmetic homework because of the current revolution in mathematics teaching known as the New Math....In the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer."

Right. To be specific, Battlestar Galactica was very badly written, whereas Star Trek was well written. If each episode of Galactica really "cost 'well over' $1 million", that illustrates the problem. Good writing, meaning good stories and good characters, isn't easy to do, but it doesn't cost much.

When the original Galactica came on, I was already a Star Trek fan, so it seemed like a very good thing. But try as I might, I just couldn't like it. The stories weren't interesting, the characters were shallow, and it wasn't even well cast - it's hard to relate to Lorne Green as a sci-fi patriarch after having run been a cowboy patriarch in Bonanza.

Knowing what I know now, it seems as if they were trying to compensate for a lack of writing with a lot of flash. No wonder it cost too much to support the hopeful, though ultimately disappointed, audience that it drew.

My experience has been that the biggest factor in how my boss affects my happiness is the boss's people skills. After that, there's resource management, and technical competance probably comes about third. Let's look at these individually:

People skills: Obviously, somebody who doesn't manage people well shouldn't be a boss. This sometimes gets overlooked during promotion, when they promote someone who is technically smart (or else just a good politician) but who lacks people skills. It's always a disaster. A primary part of being a good boss is making people feel respected and valued. Many technical geniuses simply don't think that way.

Resource management: This has to do with boring stuff like schedules, budgets, equipment, etc. Aside from being treated badly personally, few things can make technical people unhappier than having an unrealistic schedule and not being given what they need to do the job.

Technical skills: It can be very bad to have a technical boss who doesn't understand technical stuff. In my experience, the best bosses have been people who were good - but not necessarily great - at the technical stuff. If they're completely incompetent, that's a red flag for the Dilbert Principle. Conversely, someone who is a technical genius is probably happier doing what they're best at: being a technical genius. The very worst case is someone who isn't very good and knows that (as everybody else does), and is insecure about it. That's real trouble. I once left a job precisely because of one such boss.

With those categories covered, everything else is round-off error.