“Ultimately, the Indian government has to pull off a very tough trick, making serious changes at a time when things seem to be going very well. It needs, in other words, a clear sense of everything that can still go wrong.

“There was a time when many economists believed that post-secondary education didn’t have much impact on economic growth. The really important educational gains, they thought, came from giving rudimentary skills to large numbers of people (which India still needs to do—at least thirty per cent of the population is illiterate). They believed that, in economic terms, society got a very low rate of return on its investment in higher education. But lately that assumption has been overturned, and the social rate of return on investment in university education in India has been calculated at an impressive nine or ten per cent. In other words, every dollar India puts into higher education creates value for the economy as a whole. Yet India spends roughly three and a half per cent of its G.D.P. on education, significantly below the percentage spent by the U.S., even though India’s population is much younger, and spending on education should be proportionately higher.

“The Sri Lankans allowed only 46 in the first ten overs, and 118 in the last 16, but they lost the game in the 12 overs in between, as Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden blasted 117 at nearly ten per over.

“To be fair, a tax system must have total transparency––each taxpayer must know what s/he is paying and what everyone else is paying.

To be fair, a tax system cannot have any exceptions. One exception opens the door to those who can afford to game the system.

To be fair, a tax system must be simple. The more complex it is, the easier it is to game the system.

“Gilchrist batted with a squash ball inside his left glove, advice from Bob Meuleman in Perth that he acknowledged with a special gesture immediately after completing a 72-ball century.

“..users always want an upgrade path, even though as a rule they’ll never take it.

“Every page made by our software was generated by a program written in Rtml. We called these programs templates to make them less frightening, but they were real programs. In fact, they were Lisp programs. Users could write their own Rtml templates to describe what they wanted their pages to look like. We had a structure editor for manipulating these templates, a lot like the structure editor they had in Interlisp. Instead of typing free-form text, you cut and pasted bits of code together. This meant that it was impossible to get syntax errors. It also meant that we didn’t have to display the parentheses in the underlying s-expressions: we could show structure by indentation. By this means we made the language look a lot less threatening.

“If you build your own business on top of an API, you need a contractual relationship to ensure the service doesn’t get taken away from you. These generally cost money. The provider of your API will find it easier to implement services on top of their API than you will. Therefore you have to add something of your own that’s difficult to replicate..

“I went with the cheap cinder blocks in my garage edition, and now my place is crawling with Shi’as.

“I’ve met programmers working on interesting things who clearly think I should be more excited about the projects they’re working on than I am.. There is just nothing happening on the Web today that is anywhere near as exciting as the experience of telling people that there’s this thing called the World-Wide Web and it’s awesome and you should totally get into it.