jkn

6 ms·

1.
by jkn 6y ago
Star Trek's society is collectivist (as all societies are, to a degree), but is it authoritarian? I suspect that summarizing collectivism as authoritarian is like summarizing libertarianism as selfish: they go well together, but you ca
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by jkn 8y ago
The Data Liberation Front team was formed at Google in 2007, and released Google Takeout in 2011, worldwide, well before the other big companies had anything similar in place. http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/2011/06&
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by jkn 8y ago
Ha I thought you were wrong, but it turns out that indeed, you can disable image loading in the Gmail Web interface, in the Android app, but not on iOS: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?co=GENIE.Platf.
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by jkn 9y ago
So on one hand a "bad" company advances its strategic interests by contributing to a free and open technology. On the other hand, this technology can bring general benefits beyond the company's interest. The question is: does
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by jkn 9y ago
You could say the same of all Web technologies. Do you actually think it would be better to have software patents and royalties on every Web standard? For one thing, this would be catastrophic for open source projects (and indeed commercial
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by jkn 9y ago
No but it does grow the economy. Things you buy with the borrowed money count towards the GDP. If you have people buying and selling nothing that's going to be a small economy. If you have the same people, with the same wealth, buying
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by jkn 9y ago
I'm impressed by the lengths to which the authors must go and have gone to refute the skeptics' counter-explanations. For example, they simulated the presence of a potentially observing competitor using an audio recording of a com
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by jkn 9y ago
The main idea is to have every line of text fall on an evenly spaced grid. Here's an example where the middle paragraph is not grid aligned: https://i.stack.imgur.com/XskJu.png Generally you also want the baseline of t
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by jkn 9y ago
I'm typesetting a series of novels with LaTeX and memoir and I share your pain. I didn't have much trouble with fonts (fontspec is pretty awesome compared to the old TeX way), but things like typesetting on a grid, that was diffic
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by jkn 9y ago
Indeed... From the article: "He definitely goes where there is government money". In other words, he definitely goes where we wish more people would go.
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by jkn 9y ago
This reminds me of Cloud Atlas... There is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do not fare well. The natural order is the law of the jungle. The strong eats/exploits the weak. Would you agree that this is the
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by jkn 9y ago
It's too bad the vision depicted at the beginning of the article (full texts potentially available in all libraries), didn't come true. But I feel that the public did get the most important benefit from the project: the ability to
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by jkn 9y ago
If you consider Nature in general, nothing is good or bad. Colder is better for organisms that prefer cold, warmer for those that prefer warm. No life at all might be best for the geological (or should I say areological) wonders on Mars. Et
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by jkn 9y ago
The BSD license is developer-centered. It's awesome for developers, mostly avoiding any licensing headache. The GPL is user-centered. It's not designed to be nice to developers, but to protect the user's freedoms. So to a fir
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by jkn 9y ago
we saw this throughout the Obama tenure as well, more executive orders... Number of executive orders per president, per year in office[1]: Theodore Roosevelt 144.7 William Howard Taft 181.0 Woodrow Wilson 225.4 Warre
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by jkn 10y ago
All the data I have seen point to "altruism" [1] more than a war with Microsoft. Consider the list of Project Zero reports where the deadline was exceeded (thanks to brainfog for the URL): https://bugs.chromium.org&#x2F
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by jkn 10y ago
This a pretty magical solution. - Backward compatible. No API change. - Naive, idiomatic and wrong use of the API automatically becomes naive, idiomatic and correct: Existing code that was using wall-clock time will now be using monotonic t
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by jkn 10y ago
On Unix, an empty file is a working implementation of the "true" command (provided that is in the PATH and set as executable). This is because it is interpreted as a shell script, and an empty script of course exits successfully.
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by jkn 10y ago
IIRC you could resize the standard cmd console easily, just type "mode 160" (or whatever width you want). I don't have a Windows installation around to check it, but maybe someone can confirm?
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by jkn 10y ago
You're right of course about the GC metrics. And there was some disappointing increase of GC CPU usage with the 1.8 changes (I don't now the current status). But some of the items you mention (package management, mature optimizati
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by jkn 10y ago
Indeed. But looking at the GC improvements in Go 1.8 ("typical" GC pauses of less than 100us), the set of cases where you can't use the language might be shrinking significantly. Now if only they could turn that in some sort
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by jkn 10y ago
I don't think this is right. The energy of a photon is h multiplied by the frequency, but the frequency itself can be anything. Even if the process creating the photon is inherently quantized (e.g. bound electron with quantized energ
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by jkn 10y ago
So beautiful and upsetting at the same time. Is there any way we can donate to this lawyer and these refugees? The last thing, about the Oliver Stone movie, what a shame.
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by jkn 10y ago
Thanks, impressive foresight in the last paragraph (as of today; the picture might yet get bigger of course): The drive for the Euro has been motivated by politics not economics. The aim has been to link Germany and France so closely as to
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by jkn 10y ago
Or do you just disagree with his methods? What do you mean with "just"? The methods employed to reach a goal can have downsides (side effects) that dwarf the benefits of reaching the goal.
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by jkn 10y ago
At least they eat their own dog food.
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by jkn 10y ago
Are they at war with the Taliban? The US haven't formally been at war with anyone since WWII[1], so we must rely on an informal definition of war (otherwise even Vietnam would be excluded). A middle-ground definition of war that requir
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by jkn 10y ago
Mandatory health insurance is another good example:[1] In 1890 the constitution was changed by popular vote to give the federal government the authority and duty to establish a health care system, either voluntary or mandatory. A project fo
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by jkn 10y ago
It wasn't even really a case (like say, Samba) where copying was necessary to interoperate with a closed, proprietary system. Davlik isn't drop-in compatible with the JVM anyway. I have seen this argument a lot but it doesn&#x27
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by jkn 10y ago
It's quite a stretch to say that the FSF supported Oracle before the Supreme Court. Also you seem to think that the FSF supports API copyrightability as a means of making free software more attractive to developers. This is not at all

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