berntb

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241.
by berntb 10y ago
News to me, despite that I think Dawkins is soft on religion. :-) Which Christians -- and where -- are calling for the blood of their enemy because of Christianity? How many are killed? Google tells me it was eight people in total regardi
242.
by berntb 10y ago
Lots of things disappeared around Christianity -- the Dionysos cult and all the Roman/Greek worship, the druids, the Asa religion, Catharism, etc, etc. The Christians stopped supporting that type of thing after they lost most of their
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by berntb 10y ago
Uh, in which country have the organized criminality ever been over 1%? 3%? :D Regarding Lithuania we talk about getting rid of 15% not of the "ethnic minority" but of the "ethnic majority", then replacing them with a mor
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by berntb 10y ago
1. I am not Romanian, be careful with personal details in personal attacks. 2. Most of the world's countries will be weaker than some neighbour. USA have not gotten enough credit, I'll agree with that, but I'll also dismiss y
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by berntb 10y ago
How many percent of the population forced out and/or sent to prison camps do you think is a serious limit? Lithuania was at ~ 15% after WWII. Or does it have to be mass murders of a large fraction of the population? (And yes, 'gri
246.
by berntb 10y ago
Soviet literally sent most of a troublesome population (and large parts of others) to Siberia. After 1945, a few percent in prison with torture was mild. Troublesome countries/populations could be permanently cured. You really write
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by berntb 10y ago
I thought so too, until I saw things like these about one of the "nicer" occupations. They broke the resistance with brutality -- then the population suffered silently until it was clear no Soviet tanks would roll in if they threw
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by berntb 10y ago
In principle I agree for the 1940s, a pan European brotherhood was probably not so important at the time. [Edit: And when they saw what they had done, it was a MAD world...] But Yugoslavia was a special case, there the new government didn&#
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by berntb 10y ago
The point is -- Eastern Europe was in practice left under occupation by one of history's worst dictators as part of signing the peace after the 2nd world war. It is shocking, when you read up on the subject and see how many percent of
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by berntb 10y ago
I don't think I've even seen that key since I was a student... "Das Keyboard" have that? Should order. (Just got the best feel I could find in the stores. I paid 70 Euros, maybe not cheap but fram from extreme. I only pl
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by berntb 10y ago
Come on now, we real metaprogramming wimps carry our own keyboards with us and don't even bother to complain about the one provided. :-) Otoh, as an Emacs user my mouse costs about as much as one of the black espressos I exclusively
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by berntb 10y ago
This rings a bell right now. :-) Last week I integrated with a service using (shudder) SOAP. I tried the XML call with curl and couldn't get it to work. I cursed, I frothed. The reply error was some Java dump, not helpful. It took me
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by berntb 10y ago
The Swedish state demands the money back, because they were the insurer and this is part of that process. (Are state insurance policies for export sales fair competition? I really don't know.)
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by berntb 10y ago
Come on, there were lots of cases in Eastern Europe where previous owners wanted compensation for property that was stolen by the communists. (This gets extra weight when demands come from inside the EU when the country wants to join the EU
255.
by berntb 10y ago
I'd recommend Dawkins' Selfish Gene for a good non mathematical introduction. It really changed mine and lots of other people's worldview.
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by berntb 10y ago
For the non Scandinavians: Denmark is an old trade nation. When you do business with them, some innocent paragraphs in the contract usually end up with them earning lots more. And they think that is a bit too funny. At least, that is how th
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by berntb 10y ago
You _almost_ got the joke, better than expected for a Norwegian. :-) For people outside of this mutual admiration society: This is funny since I'm Swedish -- Swedes/Norwegians used to tell bad "racist" jokes about each o
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by berntb 10y ago
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there really aren't those (diseases) out to get you... Alternatively -- are you paranoid enough ? (Ah, this is the same old news first published last year, iirc. This was from Januar
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by berntb 10y ago
I thought so too, it was surprising to see intelligent people struggle for years with the simpler parts of programming. Maybe those guys were just unmotivated? Or they were hardworking idiots which had gotten a good math background by sheer
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by berntb 10y ago
How do you find people like that? How can you trust them? They aren't so common I'd imagine -- but I sadly know far too few professional cooks. :-) Edit: According to my googling, it seems even experts often fail the taste testing
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by berntb 10y ago
So you can't criticize Putin's wars... I don't know of any reputable political party or media which support invasion wars and annexations in Europe today. (No, Putin's own media are not reputable. :-) ) Elections with
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by berntb 10y ago
I'll believe that there is a correlation of more than 0.5 to 0.7 between good at software development and good at abstract math. But hardly higher -- there are also some other talents needed, I don't know what. I saw a few people
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by berntb 10y ago
Does that include olive oil? I am not certain I'd know the difference... :-(
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by berntb 10y ago
Is this an opportunity for a startup? Help crowdsource payments for random DNA tests of the food at local stores. Fish and olive oil, to start. If a group of people know everyone involved and do a round robin for who collects the samples an
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by berntb 10y ago
Interesting, do you have some serious references? I've seen the argument that as the general economy increases for an industrialized society, democracy becomes a necessity? (What seems scary is that with increasing 1984 Big Brother tec
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by berntb 10y ago
>> Apparently, none of our clothes or electronics are being fabricated by (economic) slaves. You know the full argument as well as I do, I'd think? For a country to get rich, it walks up a staircase. It starts with simple industr
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by berntb 10y ago
s/relative/just subjective/
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by berntb 10y ago
For people dependent on nicotine, check snus. It is cheap to make yourself. Google "home made snus". There are Youtube videos. It is not healthy -- still tobacco. You will be as dependent on this nicotine source as any other. That
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by berntb 10y ago
Why do you care? You claim -- just like Putin's employees -- that there are no real differences between dictatorships and democracies anyway. And you won't touch if human rights, freedom, media freedom and so on are irrelevant...
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by berntb 10y ago
>> There is no objective yardstick because the ethical conditions are subjective. So the yardsticks measuring differences between dictatorships and dictators are relative..? THAT is an uncommon claim these days -- it was common before

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