Dear Nazanin,
How are you, my dear?
The last time we spoke – in an interview for your recently published book – you’d just married your husband, the Honourable Peter MacKay, then Minister of National Defence, now Minister of Justice and Attorney General, and in the words of this newspaper, Canada’s “Minister of Wrong Again.”
As you may have heard, your life partner and baby daddy has managed to get himself in a bit of hot water where the women of Canada are concerned. And as I read about the fallout – from both his ill-judged comments about women in the judiciary and those very strange leaked Mother and Father’s Day e-mails – I couldn’t help but think of you.
You were radiant during our chat nearly two years ago, I remember, your long dark hair swooshing across my Skype...
Lifestyle
Dear flight attendant,
I’ve printed this letter that I’m handing to you because you are asking me to stop reading during take off or landing.
We all know that commercial flying is nowadays full of idiotic rules. The « potentially dangerous bottle of water that you have to throw in a trash can because it contains more than 100ml » is one. Asking me « to switch off all electronic devices » is another.
The good old mobile phone
Mobile phones try to stay connected with the closest antenna by adjusting its transmission power. As antennas get further, the phone increases its emitting power. If you put two hundreds phones in a small volume and quickly get away from any antenna, phones will all start to send full power signals at the same time.
Is it bad? There’s no proof that it...
3,396
Dear flight attendant,
I’ve printed this letter that I’m handing to you because you are asking me to stop reading during take off or landing.
We all know that commercial flying is nowadays full of idiotic rules. The "potentially dangerous bottle of water that you have to throw in a trash can because it contains more than 100ml" is one. Asking me "to switch off all electronic devices" is another.
The good old mobile phone
Mobile phones try to stay connected with the closest antenna by adjusting its transmission power. As antennas get further, the phone increases its emitting power. If you put two hundreds phones in a small volume and quickly get away from any antenna, phones will all start to send full power signals at the same time.
Is it bad? There’s no proof that it can...
979
Dear Morrissey,
In the hope that you might consider bringing your much-rumoured memoir to The House of Eliot, I am posting this letter on the Faber website. Forlorn as this hope may be, I can only fantasise that at least you might read my letter through and consider the pleasures and prestige of being an author at Faber, the last great family-owned independent publishing house in the western hemisphere.
I have been trying to persuade you of the virtues and wisdom of this for some years now. You probably won’t remember. We even corresponded at one point via a friend of yours, an author of mine, most famous for his biography of Roxy Music which ends just as the band are getting together. You see, we love the perverse and the contrary at Faber. And we also like to think we are the...
2,375
Dear Marcel,
We were totally thrilled to see your latest interview posted on YouTube, but we’re a little concerned about some of your lifestyle choices. We are hoping you might benefit from learning about a couple of Red Cross resources, if you’ll give us a minute of your time.
When thunder roars, go indoors! Marcel, I’m afraid you need to work on this one a bit. Standing under a leaf is not going to cut it when storms roll in.
If you’re going to put yourself in precarious situations (like, say, sneezing yourself off the window ledge), we would like to offer an app for your perusal: First aid at your fingertips! Ahem, your…shoe tips?
When you’re such a little guy, you might need to brush up on your flood tips more urgently than the rest of us. You should know that if you...
2,553
Dear Twitter Management:
I have some good news for you, and some bad news.
Let’s start with the bad news first: Twitter, no matter what you do to it, will no longer ever be a hyper-growth product. That time has passed. Yes, I know public investors expect this of you, and I know that’s what all other social network companies strive for, but it won’t happen. Twitter has hit a local maxima, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of — in fact, Twitter’s mainstream success to this point is quite incredible for such a geeky, complicated, niche product. But now, messing with the feed, degrading the design, and all those other copycat changes will not solve this core growth problem.
But, this is only bad news because Twitter is responding to the wants of the outside world. It is listening to...
2,670
Dear Mike,
Thanks for taking the time to respond to us directly on your Facebook page.
Jobs With Justice is a nonprofit organization committed to activism and lifting workers’ voices, which is why we’re frustrated that you’ve written a letter directly to Ori – one of our organizational spokespeople – instead of addressing the people who emailed you or the workers who are asking to meet with you.
We can all agree that Walmart is a divisive company, as demonstrated by the many emails you’ve received from our activists, on top of the thousands of comments on your Facebook page. When we heard your voice in one of Walmart’s new ads, our genuine hope was that we could build common ground around issues facing working people in this country, and in particular, at Walmart. While we do not...
2,889
Dear Martha,
I have to hand it to you and all the people on the Pritzker committee, you guys are a very crafty bunch. Just when I thought I had you all figured out, you have now – even though only slightly – succeeded in confounding me.
From my 2011 analysis of the Pritzker, I figured that your potential pool of laureates was always a very predictable bunch. In fact anyone could look at my data and predict with reasonable certainty that the next laureate would most likely be an Asian or Caucasian male starchitect from Europe, The USA, or Japan. I further pointed out that none of your laureates have done much in the way of humanitarianism, despite the fact that the mission statement of the Pritzker also asks that the recipient should be making significant contributions to humanity. I...
2,766
Dear Richard M. Stallman,
As illustrated in a recent thread on the emacs mailing list, you are opposed to GCC dumping the AST, as you are afraid proprietary programs will be created to modify GCC's AST output, which would not be open source.
Let me put your fears to rest: nobody cares about using GCC's AST for this purpose.
If anyone wanted to do so, they would already use the non-copylefted clang and LLVM. By being stubborn about this issue, you are actually harming the copyleft cause.
You see, if someone cares about the issue enough, GCC will be forked, a fork that does exactly what you're afraid of. Remember EGCS? Remember libc5? These alone demonstrate a fork of FSF software is not only possible, but easy to promote with sufficient clout. This is not a good state of...
2,818
Dear Mr. Sinquefield,
As you well know, over the past few years, we’ve frequently found ourselves at odds. We’ve said some things. You’ve said some things. Were we trying to repair a soured relationship, this is where we’d say “sorry” for some of those things. But let’s face it, neither one of us is sorry.
We fundamentally disagree about what constitutes good public policy for the state of Missouri. You want to slash taxes, particularly for the wealthy. We look at the experience of Kansas, which followed your policies, and economic history in general, and think “trickle down” has been refuted as a serious idea.
You also believe that spending vast sums of money on political candidates — you wrote a record $1 million check for a brand new Republican candidate for lieutenant governor...
2,718