eponeponepon

Are you in the UK and within some short distance of civilisation? If so, you very likely have a newsagent near by you and there's a surprisingly good chance they still do a paper delivery round.

Obviously if you're in a hut up a mountain or live in Norfolk then this may be less useful advice for you.

It's fine, it's worked for millennia - you simply gather your many belligerent sons, hand them large clubs and send them to batter the power company's director till he gives in.

On a long enough timescale, all of these things are dust, though.

...basically, label your axes.

The key to building an idea is inducing blind faith in others.

...imho.

Edit to expound: if you have blind faith in your idea, then when it is about to fail, you will go down with it. If you don't, and it's about to fail, you will recognise this and extract yourself in time to survive.

At that point it's up to your personal moral compass whether you help the others whose blind faith you've built to reach the escape pods.

I'm not disagreeing :-)

The Orwell comparisons may seem trite to you, but the fact is that if there's no available word for a thing, it becomes difficult for people at large to discuss it.

Some organisations conclude that if the masses can't name a thing, then it's impossible for anyone to think of it, and that this makes it go away. Personally I think this underestimates individual people's capacity to think up new names for things, and is therefore doomed to failure.

My word, but this would break _so much_. I would like to think that I've managed to keep my wits about me enough over the years that I haven't got any code needing to find both 'A.txt' and 'a.txt' in the same place... but I really wouldn't put it past past-me to've screwed that up... that guy's just the worst.

edit to add: I don't think I ever noticed Android being case-insensitive. Always something new to learn!

Email has been slowly balkanising itself for years now. By way of example, I know personally several people who run mail relays and not only refuse to relay messages from and to Google email servers but even refuse to _receive_ emails addressed to their users from GMail addresses. All of this on what is essentially a political objection.

In the fullness of time, email will fail as a communication medium because of these situations. I don't think that Google will mind terribly when it does.

It's not just Western society, it's humans in general. The rest of the world might not get so wound up about narcotics as the West does, but there are plenty of other things that the mob makes unhelpful binary judgments about.

There is never anything wrong with writing "n/a" in any kind of form. There was a long overlap during which any form that took contact details already had fields for email address and mobile phone number, but before either of those were as ubiquitous as they are today; nobody processing those forms ever ignored one with "n/a" for email address.

Granted, it might be less prudent to skip some fields than others, of course.

On the other hand, cherrypicked excerpts can be terrifyingly convincing: "What is the best way to login to my Ruby application in a browser via Perl?"

We've all been asked a question like that and had a cold dread creep over us as we try to formulate a response...

Neat. I could definitely use this for some home infrastructure I'm playing around with at the moment - will definitely give it a shot!

I don't really get the way terminal usage gets framed as outdated, or GUIs as unnecessary depending on one's preference.

They're each for very separate use cases - tasks that are easier done in a terminal belong in a terminal and those that are easier in a windowed idiom belong there.