matroosberg

There are a couple more necessary requirements for surveillance not to be a problem: A guarantee that the government will stay good (and not for example turn on minorities) and competency to keep accumulated safe from malicious parties come to mind.

Ad A) It's merely a list of extinct languages, an incomplete at that since we cannot possibly know all languages that were spoken 3000 years ago. So it does not even give you a rate at which languages go extinct. But, yes, as we see more mobility (geographically and socially), languages consolidate, but a consolidation to one single language seems extremely unlikely, as I explained before.

Just because Swedish might die (which I doubt, but that's beside the point), does not mean that all languages but one will die.

Ad B) While English is probably gaining importance (speculating, I don't have a source), it is number 2 in total speakers after Mandarin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num.... Even Everyone in W. Europe under 30 speaking English is an overestimation. If you look in less well educated groups, you will find more people not speaking English. Even Sweden shows ~5% of "Younger" not speaking English in http://languageknowledge.eu/countries/sweden. Austria even shows only 52.35% speaking English natively or learned: http://languageknowledge.eu/countries/austria

What evidence do you have to support your claim?

I think it is much more likely that we will have a small number of lingua francas (right now English, Spanish and Mandarin are the top three spoken languages and serve as the lingua franca in various locations) but a plethora of local languages will remain.

Many African countries, but also Latin America, the US and Canada are examples of that. South Africa is a stark example with 11 official languages. Many South Africans grow up bilingual. English is the lingua franca there, but neither Xhosa, Zulu, nor Afrikaans will die out any time soon.

Language forms reality and vice versa. It always adapts to the needs of the speakers. Just look at English used be lawyers vs engineers. Geography is not the only factor for diverging languages. Social differences are also a factor, e.g, sociolects are specific to a socioeconomic class.

So unless human societies become a lot more homogenous, I don't see a single language emerging.

It almost certainly is the most habitable planet for life as we know it today because we and our environment co-evolved to match the conditions. Just because 2/3 of the planet (not sure how you arrived at the number / what parts are in the denominator) doesn't meant it is meaningless to what allows us to live here (e.g., oxygen and food supply from the oceans).

OTOH I disagree with the notion that we have to have a full grasp on how to sustain us on this planet before we can make other planets inhabitable for us. I think there are things we will only learn if we try. I am not saying that trying right now is feasible, though.

Thanks for the correction.

> The "complete unknown" is not actually unknown. [...] The exact details of a relationship post-Brexit are impossible to know.

I'm confused. Do you agree or disagree with zb that the referendum pitted a well known against a complete unknown?

Are you asking how I would do the referendum? Certainly not with a 16 page manifesto and basically asking "Wanna leave the EU?" It should have included considerations what would happen with Northern Ireland, Scotland and Gibraltar.

How will leaving the EU push immigration down? As I pointed out, a good deal of immigration coming from outside the EU. And the EU part will probably not be affected by Brexit either, because free movement is tied to free trade. Or do you think that the UK will give up free trade with the EU?

Labeling the referendum as dumb is IMHO accurate, not because of the outcome, but because of the way it was done. It takes an extremely complex matter and puts it into an simple yes no questions without discussing the consequences. What does it even mean to leave the EU? A lot of leave voters seemed to take it as stopping immigration, which will not happen (since a lot of immigration is coming from outside the EU and freedom of movement with EU states will likely not be removed).

In comparision, the Scotish referendum was more detailed and got a lot more debate. The blog article "Brexit was a con" explains that in the first part: https://medium.com/@kirstymhall/brexit-was-a-con-67532113a7c...

You claim many reasons, but offer only one: Innovating without interference from the EU. This is however far from reality. The UK even once it leaves for real, will still be affected by EU regulations, but now without being able to directly influence them. At this point it is unclear what kind of trade agreements the UK will have with the EU, but even if it will do a radical separation (i.e., remove free trade) it will still be affected by EU regulations if there is to be any economic relations.

The cookie law is of course utter nonsense, but it will not go away with the Brexit: https://www.cookielaw.org/blog/2016/6/27/brexit-and-the-cook...

React does not require you to use JSX. Writing views with React.DOM is actually a quite nice alternative. This article gives an explanation: https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/using-reactjs-without...

However, newer React and Babel versions no longer compile JSX to React.DOM methods as the article shows, but other methods. Example for Babel: https://babeljs.io/repl/#?experimental=false&evaluate=true&l...

It looks like a nice project, but I wonder about the use case. It is limited to HTML output and usage from Rust. Hence, limiting the projects where it can be used.

HTML syntax has its problems, but when you work with the web, you have to know it anyways. Why would I want to deal with yet another syntax? It also means that as a user of the templating system you have to hope that the system can deal with all the quirks that HTML has (e.g., <br> in HTML 4, <br/> in XHTML and both in HTML 5).

It would be interesting so see an FAQ that explains where the advantages are over other templating solutions like Handlebars.

Are you referring to Sivak's report[1]? The problem there is that it compares average trips and not trips where car vs plane is actually an option, according to the ThinkProgress article [2].

I have not read the report itself and I don't know how credible ThinkProgress is. The Yale Climate Connection article [3] points out similar issues. Bottom line seems to be that flying is better than driving alone, but as soon as you have more than one passenger, the car looks more attractive (still depending on the efficiency of the car).

Interesting though that the train is not looking so good in the statistics in these articles. My hunch here is that the numbers would look very different in Europe.

[1] http://www.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/UMTRI-2015-14_Abstract_En... [2] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/29/3652505/driving-... [3] http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-clima...

Completely dominant in finance? Do you have a source for that claim?

Prof. Tao himself links to the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_%28logic%29 which uses this as an example for Common Logic.

These are not simulating a Turing Machine, they are computationally equivalent to a Turing Machine (for practical purposes). I am adding the practical purposes disclaimer because an x86 has limited memory which makes it actually just computationally equivalent to a finite state automaton.

How is that clear? Where is the data that backs up your claim?

The studies cited in http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/02/having-a... certainly point the other direction.

No, it did not just look at one side of the equation.

"We enrolled 677 case participants that had been shot in an assault and 684 population-based control participants within Philadelphia, PA, from 2003 to 2006. We adjusted odds ratios for confounding variables."

How does this only look at people carrying a gun?

Yes, it is unreasonable to want a gun for this situation because you only escalate the situation with a gun present.

Carrying a gun increases your risk to get shot: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17922-carrying-a-gun-i... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759797/

Saying that the cat is out of the bag so you need a gun is cold war logic were you need to be able to kill the other more times. So you rather want to escalate the situation further instead of trying e.g., what Australia did by implementing gun control?