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hkolekon 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor

> Both of the replies I've received so far appear to completely misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm not saying the population will grow without limit no matter what.

Point taken. I'm sorry, and you're right, I don't disagree with anything you actually said.

hkolekon 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor

Please, for the love of god, stop with fearmongering about overpopulation already. It's pure nonsense.

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate

"The latest United Nations projections indicate that world population will nearly stabilize at just above 10 billion persons after 2062." [1]

Also recommended: The documentary "Population Boom" by Werner Boote [2][3]

[1] http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Documentation/publications.htm

[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3107706/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

[3] (German) http://www.populationboom.at/

hkolekon SteamOS: It's here

That's not true. I was one of the idiots who bought it on release day but I eventually got a (Steam credit) refund after a lot of back and forth. And there were several other people on the Egosoft forums who got a refund as well.

hkolekon The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

Interesting. I think you're on to something here. The wikia stuff seems to have been created in August 2013. The subreddit /r/cicada appears to be 11 month old, but the article implies that Eriksson discovered it in the beginning of 2012. And it's virtually empty. Hmmm...

Edit: oh well, nevermind. A google search between 1/1/2010 and 1/1/2012 returns plenty of stuff, for example a discussion [1] on the xkcd forums from January 2012.

[1] http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=79579

hkolekon Legal Weed is Hurting San Francisco's Hippies

> but most of the carcinogens should be in both

Hm, I don't think so. While it's true that inhaling burned plant material is never a good thing, there is no evidence so far that smoking cannabis causes cancer. Search for Dr. Donald Tashkin who has done extensive studies on this subject. Afaik tobacco smoke is also radioactive due to phosphate fertilizer [1][2] so I assume this is also a major factor leading to its carcinogenic properties.

[1] http://www.epa.gov/radiation/sources/tobacco.html

[2] http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/forum/218/radioactive-tobacco.20...

hkolekon Can We Trust Monsanto with Our Food?

> a world population that continues to grow by leaps and bounds

not so much: http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate

hkolekon As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

The article is conflating stuff and is just FUD. You don't need certs to apply asymmetric cryptography.

As I understand it, the NSA could insert itself as a so-called "Men in the Middle" (aka MITM Attack). See this SO question for a far better explanation than I could provide: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14907581/ssl-and-man-in-t...

hkolekon JavaScript Isn't Scheme

I am familiar with this line of reasoning and I have read the Joy of Clojure. I can't say that I agree though. The article you linked is just opinion and doesn't back up its arguments at all. Afaict, it really boils down to "it's not CL" and "it's not built on cons cells". I agree that the fact that Clojure sits on top of the Java type system is a bit of a mess but it's a language to get shit done and not satisfy some purists.

> "The Joy Of Clojure" which contains 20 line of marketing slogans for 1 line of code

> but I'm not going to perform such a tedious task for free

Well, obviously there's no point in discussing this further and we have to agree to disagree. Have a nice day anyway.

hkolekon JavaScript Isn't Scheme

I think we have already established that TCO is not necessary to be a Lisp (CL, Emacs Lisp). While it's true that Clojure doesn't have a proper numeric tower it does have bignum support and arbitrary precision math operators which will not overflow. But either way, imo this is not a defining feature of a Lisp dialect.

hkolekon JavaScript Isn't Scheme

Exactly my point. I was just using CL as example because I think it would be hard to argue that it is not a Lisp yet the standard doesn't guarantee TCO.

> What is a lisp?

It's a very good question. I think PG sums it up quite nicely in "Revenge of the Nerds" [1]. Although, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not quite sure there's any point in classifying something as a Lisp or not...

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

hkolekon JavaScript Isn't Scheme

But afaik TCO is only a requirement for Scheme implementations, not for e.g. Common Lisp (i.e. you don't need to implement TCO to satisfy the Common Lisp standard). I don't see how the lack of TCO prevents it from being a valid Lisp dialect.

hkolekon JavaScript Isn't Scheme

I agree, but I'm wondering what you think is missing or broken in Clojure to prevent it from being a Lisp? Sure, it sits on top of the Java type system and one major thing I can think of that is lacking is the condition system (although, isn't this a only Common Lisp thing?). I don't think it has to be Lisp all the way down to be a Lisp dialect, if that's what you're getting at.

hkolekon Elon Musk's mission to Mars

FWIW, in the case of Solar City he consistently emphasizes in his interviews that he has to basically "just show up at board meetings and hear the good news" and that most of the credit goes to the guys in charge there. But anyway, I'm deeply impressed by this guy, especially since he is not only CEO but also Chief Designer at SpaceX and Product Architect at Tesla.

hkolekon The Decline In Male Fertility

what a crock of shit. THC levels are not rising.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/marijuana5.htm

http://www.420magazine.com/forums/cannabis-facts-information...

also watch http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1039647/

> Smoking cannabis is a double whammy, because tobacco

What? You can smoke cannabis without tobacco.

hkolekon Verbal abuse on LKML

I think he means the git talk at google [1] where he defines a few things at the start, among them "wrong, stupid: people who disagree with linus" and states that therefore, during the talk, by definition everyone who disagrees with him is stupid and butt-ugly.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4Xp...

hkolekon Hubble Finds New Neptune Moon

> This little guy has a width less than the length of Manhattan, so I was surprised to hear it being called a moon.

Phobos and Deimos are far smaller.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_(moon) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deimos_(moon)

hkolekon The Smears Against Edward Snowden Have Begun

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

John Swinton, 1880 [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_(journalist)

hkolekon Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken [pdf]

I don't understand. Why is this funny? Are you all 5 year olds or am I missing something?

hkolekon RMS lifestyle

> I'd need some sort of evidence showing their existence to change my mind.

Here you go, seems pretty well sourced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_listening_device#Remotel...

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

hkolekon 10,000 Hours of Practice Won’t Make You an Expert

I know nothing about the piano but this sounds exactly the same like reading any language. At first you have to struggle to recognize every single letter, but after enough practice you can identify whole words immediately and later even whole phrases.

hkolekon Teenagers Hate Facebook, but They're Not Logging Off

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_advertising#Targeting_y...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_advertising#Advertiseme...

hkolekon I was struck by lightning yesterday—and boy am I sore

I was always told that here (Austria) if you call the ambulance but are not in actual danger you have to pay for it, and that it's very expensive. But you can call an emergency physician if you're not sure if somethings wrong which is free in any case afaik. They will examine you and make a determination if you need to go the hospital. My mother once called them because she was concentrating so hard on her heartbeat while trying to sleep that she started to panic because she thought it wasn't beating normally. The emergency physician examined her and deemed everything normal, made her calm down, and then just left. I was told if she had called the ambulance it would have cost a lot.

hkolekon Brain work may be going the way of manual work

It's wrong. It's not the computer power that's doubling, it's the number of transistors. Big difference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law

hkolekon Dear American Consumers: Please don’t start eating healthfully

Sure there's enough talk about satiety. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18703413

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptin

hkolekon How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners

Not to my knowledge. I always use Emacs in terminal mode even when I have a window system available and I have never encountered anything that would only work with a GUI. I think there are some extensions that work only with a GUI but that's not an inherent limitation of Emacs and there are usually a ton of alternatives.

hkolekon The Tragic Beauty of Google+

> for example, Google now prevents Google search terms for logged-in Google Accounts users from getting passed in the referrer for search traffic.

But if you buy Google Ads you still get that information. That speaks volumes.

hkolekon Click on the "I" and the "O"

I got OOIOIOIO which leads to https://developers.google.com/events/io/experiment-space

hkolekon The PyCon Incident

3. Penis Envy.

hkolekon Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

> you can sell excess electricity supplies to other cities, lend them public services such as police or fire protection, build mass transit like commuter rail between cities, etc.

That was already possible in Sim City 4. Even in older versions (Sim City 2000 iirc) you had neighbor cities and could buy and sell utilities. Those features work just as well when controlled by AI. There is just no reason not to implement it aside from the DRM benefit.

hkolekon LayerVault Sends DMCA Takedown Letter re Flat-UI

Similarity is completely irrelevant. If we independently arrive at the same original work then that is not copyright violation. That's not what copyright is about. We then each hold the copyright of our respective works, even if they're completely identical (in practice it will probably be hard to proof that you didn't just copy the other work if they're really identical).

IANAL, but that's what I was told by a law student.