Anand Girisharadas of the New York Times addresses a weighty issue that threatens to become a regular topic on Contrarian: use of conjunction "so" to begin a sentence. He notes a National Public Radio interview in which fully one quarter of the sentences began with "so." While Girisharadas dredges up a 14th century poem in which Chaucer begins a sentence with "so," he cites scholars who trace the recent boom in introductory so's to Silicon Valley, or perhaps to Microsoft employees. In the software world, it was a tic that made sense. In immigrant-filled technology firms, it democratized talk by replacing a world of...

01 June, 2010

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know," said Google CEO Eric Smith, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Smith's cavalier assessment of browser privacy issues in an MSNBC interview so incensed the main developer of the Mozilla Firefox browser that he urged Firefox users to abandon Google for a search engine with a better privacy policy, namely Bing, by Google arch-rival Microsoft: Asa Dotzler's outburst raised eyebrows on the net, because the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, maker of Firefox and the Thunderbird email program, depends on Google for about 97 percent of its revenue. Various bloggers...

16 December, 2009

According to a New York Times report of a speech by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates in New Delhi last Friday, Canada's liberal immigration laws have led the software giant to create many jobs here. Moneyquote: [Gates] was also critical of Congress’s stance on immigration, and said he would like to see immigration exceptions for “smart people.” Canadian laws are more favorable, he said, because they allow immigrants to work if they are offered a high-paying job. Microsoft has created “a lot of jobs in Canada for that reason,” he said. Less admirably, Gates would like us all to carry government issued...

27 July, 2009