Maxwell Terry

"submitted by reddit to blog." - Maxwell Terry

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki..." - Maxwell Terry

"Never, but they didn't commonly transmit evidence of it before the last decade." - Maxwell Terry

"I'm not sure you need a destructive method though. Maybe you can just boil it down to technological advantage, or even specifically superior metalworking skill. Have there been any imperialist powers that were technologically inferior to those they dominated?" - Maxwell Terry

"It's not surprising, but it's still a fallacy. And civilization without imperialism will probably be about as "lovely" as code without GOTOs." - Maxwell Terry

"I couldn't swallow it, I spit it out. It's a meaningless expression (i.e. it mentally throws an exception). If you're gonna compare 2 classes, you've gotta define the comparison method." - Maxwell Terry

"What, quantitatively, makes one culture "greater" than another?" - Maxwell Terry

"> Western Europe had lots of problems, but countries that operate in the European tradition are better places to live. But what suggests "places that operate in the European tradition" will remain better (i.e. what traits of Euro civilization are optimal given any group of humans)? What makes this expression any more meaningful than something like, "C had lots of problems, but languages in the C-family are better to work with"?" - Maxwell Terry

"Appeal to history. Just because a lot of source code is littered with GOTOs doesn't mean that approach is "how hackers roll." Imperialism's just a phase; it's already generally considered harmful." - Maxwell Terry

"I was thinking of evangelizing "twenty ten-one" through "twenty ten-nine" for the next decade. Now's the opportunity for the ideosyncratic "teens" to be deprecated. (See chapter 8.2 of Outliers.)" - Maxwell Terry

"At least when I last used it, the error reporting was lacking. Errors'd hang the page and wouldn't give accurate messages/line numbers." - Maxwell Terry

"> You need a mechanism in place to protect the property rights of individuals and corporations. Trademarks. Copyrights." - Maxwell Terry

"> ...it is the same language, but it is not the same environment. It is for me. I'm building a framework and enterprise app that just targets V8 (Node server, Chrome client). It's very liberating, to say the least. I still use Firefox (Firebug) for experimental stuff though, as Chrome's dev tools aren't up to par yet." - Maxwell Terry