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The Quebec government has passed laws which forbid French speakers and immigrants to send their children to English-language schools; compel businesses with more than fifty employees to be run in French; and ban English commercial signs. So, if your ancestors were French you, too, must by government fiat speak French whatever your personal wishes may [...]

I’m hesitant to agree with Paul Graham’s definitions:

‘Wise’ and ’smart’ are both ways of saying someone knows what to do.

I would say that wisdom is moderation and decisiveness over time, which does keep the spirit of Paul’s definition, but that intelligence or “smarts” are simply the capacity or aptitude for problem solving.
That said, applied [...]

…if you call yourself a “web developer” you have absolutely no excuse for not knowing JavaScript. And if you don’t know JavaScript, you have absolutely no right to call yourself a “web developer”. [sic]James Bennett
I came across a post from James Bennett written last year that is absolutely brilliant. His points are right on the [...]

I’ve been reading a lot about design lately; specifically information architecture, interface design and industrial design. It seems that design comes in at a specific point in a given production process. In software, a developer is able to create a program, script or application that solves some specific problem; namely that of accomplishing some set [...]

Like most other students, I long accepted the excuses from academia regarding its high barrier to entry and flat out pretentious use of language. “The jargon of the field is necessary to be technically accurate” they would tell me. Proponents of the academy allude to some benevolent purpose behind the absolutely ridiculous babble [...]

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the popularization of useful techniques in any field, but the process by which this takes place has profound implications for the overall comprehension of knowledge and the quality of the products produced in that field. The explosion of attention toward the web applications arena was inevitable and has produced numerous [...]

People assured me that it was only “the MySpace crowd” or the teenage girls spouting off nonsense like “omg ur teh bst frd in wrdl!!11″. I believed them, telling myself that it’s just a phase that people will go through and grow out of. It’s just a series of shortcuts, right? They still know how [...]

Why?
The most relevant standards body for the internet, the W3C, has stated the purpose of the World Wide Web as, “a network of information resources. The Web relies on mechanisms to make these resources readily available to the widest possible audience.” Most important in that statement are the phrases “information resources”, “readily available”, and “widest [...]

It seems that most of the people who “go insane” while thinking too much and who become too absorbed by questions, or those who get engulfed in MMORPGs just fail to establish and adhere to a set of basic ground rules.
If you want to think abstractly about the meaning of the word “is” or what [...]

A very common practice among people speaking the English language is the use of the phrase “different than”. I had never paid much attention to its use and was guilty myself of using it from time to time. Now that I am aware of its erroneous nature, I cringe when I hear people say it.
The [...]