I was going to write something about French culture in relation to Charlie Hebdo and in fact had started it, but this is better.

Basically, don’t listen to anyone writing about the whole affair who doesn’t know anything about French culture.

They will (and have been) getting it wrong. Very, very wrong.

I can’t fucking believe we have to defend secularism and free speech against “liberals,” but there you go.

You know I used to believe that the Right was utterly fucking crazy when they talked about how the liberals tend to embrace objective evil if it’s cloaked in the veil of oppression. But now that I’ve seen the liberal reactions to Muslim oppression of women and now Charlie Hebdo and secularism, you know what?

The Right was fucking, well, right  — a little, at least.

Claiming that the attacks in Paris had nothing to do with Islam or religion is as deluded as claiming that the Christians here murdering abortion doctors has nothing to do with Christianity.

Just utterly fucking wrong.

Of course, both actions have a lot to do with a lot of others things, too — but ignoring the role and culpability of religion as fuel on the fire (and sometimes the main fuel) is like pretending a detonator has absolutely nothing to do with setting off a bomb.

People want to ignore, to minimize, what scares them. What they fear might be true, or might not. And that’s fine for them.

Not for me.

Ah, the sounds of someone who has never done any work with regular, technically illiterate users and has probably never dealt with a high-volume, multiply-forwarded email environment.

Two main reasons to include your email address in your email signature: many users have no clue how to find your email address in the email client. I’d say 30-40% don’t, from having supported users in the past.

And depending on how the sender’s email server and client is set up, and how your email server and client is set up, forwarded email is sometimes stripped of the email address so you can only see the person’s name. If the original sender or senders’ info is not in your address book or GAL (etc.), then you have no idea of anyone’s address beyond the closest-proximity email.

So yes, in a business environment it is always smart to include your email address in your signature. It helps technically-illiterate users and it is a dependable way to ensure that even email forwarded to others always contains your email address.

Now that 4K monitors and TVs are on the verge of a popularity explosion, I have to look back and laugh at all the people (geeks included) who absolutely assured me 5-6 years ago that we’d never need more than 3-4Mbs of bandwidth for home use.

That that was enough for anyone. That anything else was just ridiculous and wasteful extravagance.

A 4K stream not compressed all to hell requires about 15Mbs.

Of course these naysayers weren’t everyone, but a significant minority or my guess is a small majority.

They remind me people on BBSes back in the day moaning and complaining when 800×600 and 1024×768 monitors started coming out (in the time where 640×480 was HUGE) that no one would ever, ever need such a huge screen and it just made computers slower and blah blah blah….

Next will be 3-D and VR, which will happen in the next 5-15 years. It’ll require 10-100x the bandwidth, which many will insist we “don’t need.”

Until we do.

Of course this ignores the fact that having an at-first “purposeless” higher resolution and higher bandwidth is what allows innovation to happen (which is why the cable companies oppose upgrading their networks).

Many people are persistently, stubbornly short-sighted.