I've never balanced taxes. Is this a new thing?

Oh, you mean balance checkbooks and pay taxes. There's much better software to do that these days.

And there are much better ways to teach programming. For a very long time there has been a movement to bring programming to the masses, as if, somehow, everyone would be able to write beautiful, intricate code to solve their most complex problems. Most people can barely match their clothing (note to the reading-impaired: that was hyperbole); why should we expect them to be able to write code?

Writing programs requires clear, linear thought. It requires thinking in terms of structures and systems. The push in the greater population has been toward valuing non-linear thought (although that baffles me), so there's a big mismatch to overcome. Yes, there are plenty of graphical programming languages that reduce the need for precise syntax, but they only REDUCE it, not eliminate it, and they still require procedural thinking which, ultimately, presents an insurmountable difficulty for many people.

Not everyone can or should be a programmer: Not everyone is a writer, Not everyone is a photographer, Not everyone is a painter. Sure, everyone should be given basic skills in writing, and perhaps in drawing or painting as a child, and so perhaps everyone should be given basic skills in programming, but beyond that, why? Not everyone is able to understand calculus; why should we automatically expect that everyone should be able to write Java, Python, or whathaveyou?

I always have my appointment book with me in my briefcase, right next to my laptop and phone. When I'm in my office, it's open in front of me. The only time that it isn't nearby is when I've intentionally left it aside.

My scheduling isn't as interdependent as yours. Meeting times are negotiated via email. My schedule has only 2-3 meetings per week, and most of the entries in my book are for allocation of time to work on one project or another. Perhaps it also helps that I'm the boss.

Use the right tool for the job -- for your application, the best tool appears to be electronic. Not so for mine.

Pen and paper have some very serious advantages that should not be overlooked when distracted by the new and shiny. Use the right tool for the job.

Personally, I keep my appointment book with paper and pencil. I can access it anywhere, at any time, whether or not I remembered to bring a charger, whether I'm on a plane or in a meeting (and in a meeting, no one can accuse me of playing with my phone instead of paying attention). I also keep a personal journal in acid-free paper and fade-resistant ink so that my grandchildren can enjoy learning about me when I'm long dead and hold a cherished physical object that I held, just as I have enjoyed learning about my grandmother decades after she passed away, and cherish being able to touch something she touched.

But, the right tool for the job also means that I do most of my writing electronically, often switching between multiple virtual desktops. I keep my phone book electronically (although I do periodically dump to printed paper for disaster recovery). My most recent publication will only be made available in an electronic version.

New does not automatically mean better. Use the right tool for the job.

Higher quality here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Seems to explain the effect where a little knowledge in a field appears to make one reckless and dangerous, whereas deeper knowledge makes one cautious.

And that should have been part of my posting above that asked the question -- these fragments dock with other cells, inject the RNA, and that RNA causes the cells to become cancerous, which, in turn creates more of these little RNA capsulettes.

I'm sure there are some differences between these and classical virus structure, in some way, but given my ignorance of the subject, they walk and talk like viruses.

A small encapsulatory structure containing a fragment of RNA. I'm not a microbiologist, so can someone tell me how these things are different from a virus?

It wasn't the chemicals, as you point out, but the penetrating object that killed her. She bled out. If she hadn't bled out, she would have likely suffered severe brain damage as skull and projectile fragments entered her cranium.

The relevance being, also as you point out, that shooting anything into the face is a bad idea when non-lethality is the intent. But any chemical that is going to be delivered in such a way has exactly that potential, as do rubber bullets (have you seen what those do? non-lethal does not mean non-damaging).

Any chemical means to convince a highly agitated crowd to cease and disperse is going to have extraordinarily strong effects, even when used correctly, with some suffering the effects more than others. Some fraction of the population is always going to be sufficiently vulnerable for lethality.

Ultimately, I think we're agreed: The very idea of a non-lethal chemical weapon is absurd.

In 2004, VIctoria Snelgrove was hit in the eye with a pepper spray bullet by the Boston Police as part of crowd control (for a non-riotous crowd that was not responding to their commands). She subsequently died of her injury.

Non-lethal ICA? No such thing.

Thank you for that very clear and succinct assessment of my intellectual capacity after reading a full paragraph of my writing. Touche. You perfectly hit the nail on the head. I am totally and utterly lacking in intellectual capacity, despite any evidence to the contrary.

Now, if you'd care to engage in a rational debate without ad hominem attacks, I'd be happy to respond. If not, please go away.

DING, DING, DING! And we have our winner! Money and votes are the only motivations here. Nothing else makes sense. Money, some manufacturer is going to get a juicy multi-year exclusive contract. Votes, some MP is going to be able to say, "look how many jobs I brought into our district!"

More GMail tricks, that may help you: when you have account

someaccountname@gmail.com

all email of the form

someaccountname+anysuffix@gmail.com

goes to your account. The plus sign is a literal character, not a concatenation operator. The only downside to this is that some email validation suites don't allow plus signs in user IDs, even though RFC 5322 allows them. Sometimes I use the format

someaccountname+onlinestore@gmail.com

when giving my email address to OnlineStore.com so that it's clear from where particular messages should originate.

In contrast, as a normal person, I've used EUR 100 and EUR 500 bills regularly to take care of, well, large transactions that need to be confirmed and delivered faster than a bank transfer would allow (and when the people involved rile at paying 3% for credit card fees, or aren't set up to take credit cards in the first place), like paying vendors, or hotel bills outside of big cities.

But GMail does, to my understanding, use a personalized filter, in addition to the global filters. I get some legitimate email in a foreign language (not Chinese, but one with a non-latin alphabet), and some spam in that language as well. GMail gets them 100% right. Alphabet is just another feature that you perform Bayesian analysis on.

What any big message processing service has that a single user won't, is access to the content of messages across users, and the collective action by its users. So, for example, if a new spam campaign starts up, once the 10th (or so) user has clicked "this is spam", the rest of the recipients' versions of that same message get automatically re-classified. I used to be responsible for fighting spam at a mid-sized social networking site (that no longer exists, unfortunately), and believe me, simply looking for multiple copies of a given message is a strong tool for fighting spam. The back-end service operators get access to that, the users don't.

I have found that essentially every time I give my email to a legitimate retailer, they automatically assume that this means they can send me marketing email on nearly a daily basis. However, most retailers also honor the unsubscribe requests, and if you are vigilant about clicking through unsubscribe and marking real spam as such, GMail does a really very good job. Also, I've found that when I unsubscribe to lists that I really don't read (including marketing email that I might have thought could be interesting but no longer want), the total volume of spam goes down.

I cannot explain the OP's experience, as it runs completely counter to mine.