hechang1997

> It's easy to forget how different the Middle East looked before the conquest of Islam starting in 600 AD.

It’s easy to forget because it’s a fabricated perspective. Islamic/Arabian conquest of MENA isn’t really that different from what Romans or Persians did. That region is literally the source of human civilization (in the Old World at least) and had seen empires come and go ever since the Bronze Age, and along with them all sorts of cultures and religions. What fundamentally changed the dynamics of the region is not the islamic conquest but the shift of the center of the global trade away from Middle East and the Mediterranean to the Western Europe.

It's YouTube that's the perpetrator of the tragedy of the commons here. There must be a mandatory expiration of any intellectual property into the public domain after a set amount of time and/or after the owner died and the state should first and foremost protect the intellectual property of the public domain, that is, prevent any party from claiming it exclusively and punish any offenders.

I would go so far as saying people are born racist and can only grow out of it.

Not sure how this could work geopolitically. You need to able to build it to prevent a country from having the ability to hold another country hostage by cutting another country out of the network.

Ops... Brain just shortcut

Yes, currently the 2nd amendment only guarentees that no censorship comes from government. We need a stronger guarantee: no censorship on any public discourse from any party. Not any kind, because even well intentioned censorship causes problems! Using reddit as an example: suppose there is a subreddit A that discuss news and politics, and the mods ban racist comments. If you are a racist, will you change your racist way if you found your post banned? No, of course not. You would just be indignant and find/make another subreddit B that is more tolerant of racism. The subreddit B is provided the same tools subreddit A uses for censoring racist posts, and abuse these tools to censor any voices that argue against racism. You can no longer be convinced to abandon racism because you are stuck in your comfort zone and anyone who argue against racism are just SJW or special snowflakes in your eyes and their opinions are automatically dismissed by your brain.

I saw posts on r/rust talking about making a rust-like language for non system programming. I think Swift fits exactly that purpose, only frustrated by Apple giving it Windows support a decade after it's creation.

That depends though. In Java/C# dereferencing a null reference is a runtime error and you can pinpoint exactly where it happened. In C++/Rust, dereferencing null pointers is undefined behavior since the compiler makes assumptions that a dereferenced pointer cannot be null.

Agreed. I think schools that turns bad students into good ones deserve more funding and publicity than schools that turns good students into excellent ones.

The law is unjust. The anti-defammation law was used to stifle press freedom and suppress journalists. It doesn't matter whether it's lawful in Thailand or not, freedom of speech without the fear of persecution is a part of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. (Whether you think it has a legal basis or not, it's the only thing we can look up to when authoritarian governments can pass whatever stipulation they want and call it legal.) In this case, I believe the owner of the resort has no ill intention, however, it is using an unjust instrument to inflict a questionable punishment on other people.

Not in China. Please use a forward proxy if you were to use Tor in China.

I used it quite a bit for simple scripting before I learned python.

If you use electric motor, the noise of an internal combustion engine can be eliminated, although the propellers themselves make huge noise too.