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mtts
searching PlanetScale…
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181.
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by
mtts
13y ago
Not a bad guess. The literacy rate at the end of the Chinese civil war (1949) was only about 11% or so. That can't possibly have been good.
182.
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mtts
13y ago
It's an interesting topic - but this article is wrong on so many factual counts it's probably not worth bothering with. Here's three of them: > The British Empire acquired the then nearly barren island of Hong Kong as a ba
183.
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mtts
13y ago
Typical self-congratulatory anglo-conservative clap trap. No one outside of a very small group of wealthy Britons and Americans (and, alright, some wealthy educated descendants from the former colonies) could possibly share such an immensel
184.
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mtts
13y ago
> But the government, in an effort to make sure there was absolutely no risk, mistakes, or accountability associated with software development, started adding more and more mandatory forms that had to be completed each time a developer
185.
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mtts
13y ago
Ok, I see where you're coming from. But I disagree that this puts Jared Diamond in the same category as the other three. I think the fact that he is, for the most part, not wrong, clearly sets him apart from Gladwell, Lehrer and Freak
186.
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mtts
13y ago
Jared Diamond counter-intuitive? I'm with you on the other three but Guns Germs & Steel always struck me as very "D'uh".
187.
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mtts
13y ago
Learned something today. Thanks. Didn't know what a "Pigouvian tax" was. Somewhat more on topic: in the interview I saw Lomborg didn't talk about earmarking or anything like that, he merely said the money would be bette
188.
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by
mtts
13y ago
Your #2 reminds me of something Bjorn Lomborg (yeah yeah, I'm not a fan either - nor a hater, in fact, I just don't know enough about the nuances of the issues involved to have an opinion that's well thought out enough to def
189.
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mtts
13y ago
W3Schools is nothing more than a simple to use (google) and navigate (google) collection of pages with tons of reminders to jog your memory about what exactly it was that a specific css selector or html tag did again. If you use it to learn
190.
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mtts
13y ago
Jameson, aka the whisk(e)y for people who don't like whisk(e)y. It's smooth, soft and pleasant, nothing like the nasty, grating stuff they produce in Scotland. A favorite of mine, for sure.
191.
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mtts
13y ago
There's no such thing. Tequila is nasty poor man's liquor, only made palatable to yuppy palates by insisting you can only enjoy it by inbibing in a taste bud numbing cocktail of salt and lime juice before you drink it. That said,
192.
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mtts
13y ago
Maybe that's exactly the point - they're consumer OSes. And while Android already does this, with intents, I doubt most consumers are very happy with this feature (if they even know it exists). You want to do something with an ima
193.
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mtts
13y ago
Wack job ideological frenzy: the cultural revolution Increase population growth: One of Mao's slogans was "The more people we are, the stronger we are". Some graphs here: http://www.slideshare.net/isc/chi
194.
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mtts
13y ago
> Necessity is the mother of innovation. It is, but it is not the driver of it. China was an agrarian country with insane population growth before Deng Xiaoping took office and yet the remedy of the government at that time was to increas
195.
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mtts
13y ago
> The state is a mixed bag. No argument there :-) > They currently take 15% of my income to pay for my "retirement" when if I had been able to save that I'd end up far more secure in my retirement than I will with soci
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mtts
13y ago
Starting position is Maastricht? You sneaky bastard ;-) (For non-Dutch people: Maastricht is one of the oldest continuously urban centers in the Netherlands, which makes it nice to show off this kind of technology but it's also very fa
197.
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mtts
13y ago
This was actually somewhat of a weak point in the story: Chinese people do not leave the heater off out of frugality but because they think it's unhealthy to have a large temperature difference between the outside of a container (a hou
198.
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mtts
13y ago
I'm from Europe myself, but I'm only marginally crushed to see it go. The feature provided you with an offline map of an area, to be sure, but you couldn't navigate using it as calculating routes is done online. On a small ph
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mtts
13y ago
> I bet the number of people that actually used the offline feature was a small percentage anyway. So do I, because it was impossibly difficult to find. Otherwise, it was quite a useful feature. For Europeans, on holiday, where they'
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mtts
13y ago
Thanks for the tip!
201.
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mtts
13y ago
I'm bored, so I'll bite. Yes, officially, Mandarin is the native language of the vast majority of China's 1.3 billion people. Unofficially, however, at most a large minority in China speak it natively. What is called a "
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mtts
13y ago
Moral of the story: before you shut down a service, run it by the PR department first.
203.
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mtts
13y ago
Well, yes, but if you read the result of his tests even with syncing turned off Dropbox is still eating about 500 mAh. And that is, I would say, rather strange.
204.
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mtts
13y ago
Modern ones. Checking for "Mozilla" is one (admittedly not very good) way to check if you're dealing with a browser or with some other kind of user agent, such as a search engine bot or something like that.
205.
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mtts
13y ago
Urdu, I'm told by someone who speaks the language, is Hindi written in Arabic script.
206.
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mtts
13y ago
Just use Indonesian. It's very non-weird, both according to the article and according to my own experience.
207.
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mtts
13y ago
If Afrikaans is a non-weird language that would be because it's a creole (indiginous African and Dutch). Don't know about Hindi, but since it's used as a lingua franca of sorts that might also be the reason behind its normaln
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mtts
13y ago
Actually, what I think they've tested is wine snobbery, not whether there's a difference between red and white wine. That's what I meant by "bullshit". Look at the setup of their experiment. They made people say stu
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mtts
13y ago
I call bullshit. There are some red wines that can work where you'd normally go for a white, such as Pinot Noir. I'm willing to accept someone can mistake a full bodied white for a thin Pinot Noir if food coloring was involved. Mi
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mtts
13y ago
Price does indicate quality, however. In Europe, there's a big difference between EUR 3 wine and EUR 8 wine. Usually. And only if neither wine has a reputation. A EUR 8 Bourgogne is pretty much guaranteed to be crap: you're payi
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