There are a couple more necessary requirements for surveillance not to be a problem: A guarantee that the government will stay good (and not for example turn on minorities) and competency to keep accumulated safe from malicious parties come to mind.
I think it is much more likely that we will have a small number of lingua francas (right now English, Spanish and Mandarin are the top three spoken languages and serve as the lingua franca in various locations) but a plethora of local languages will remain.
Many African countries, but also Latin America, the US and Canada are examples of that. South Africa is a stark example with 11 official languages. Many South Africans grow up bilingual. English is the lingua franca there, but neither Xhosa, Zulu, nor Afrikaans will die out any time soon.
Language forms reality and vice versa. It always adapts to the needs of the speakers. Just look at English used be lawyers vs engineers. Geography is not the only factor for diverging languages. Social differences are also a factor, e.g, sociolects are specific to a socioeconomic class.
So unless human societies become a lot more homogenous, I don't see a single language emerging.
"What evidence do you have to support your claim?"
A) The evidence is in the article. It's heading towards a small number very quickly.
B) Everyone is learning to speak English. Everyone in W. Europe under 30 speaks English fairly well. It's happening in M/E and Asia as well.
Once immigrants to W. Europe who speak English + some foreign language can get services in English - there's no point in learning the local language.
There are only 12 million Swedes. 10% of them barely speak Swedish - and the number is growing rapidly.
Once young people speak English fluently and services are in English - so much work will be in English ... Swedish loses all real utility. And utility is an important thing.
'Long term' I think a diaspora of languages is important, but people make short term decisions: 'what is important in my life'?
I fear in 20 years, in Sweden, young people will equate 'Swedish' with 'old, out of touch, nationalists and racists' - which is an unfair characterization but the perception is already developing: young urbanites speak English fluently, rural, less developed communities, less so.
Ad A) It's merely a list of extinct languages, an incomplete at that since we cannot possibly know all languages that were spoken 3000 years ago. So it does not even give you a rate at which languages go extinct. But, yes, as we see more mobility (geographically and socially), languages consolidate, but a consolidation to one single language seems extremely unlikely, as I explained before.
Just because Swedish might die (which I doubt, but that's beside the point), does not mean that all languages but one will die.
Language is more than just a way to exchange facts. If you want to say "I love you" to somebody, or reach an agreement to end apartheid, you better do it in the language that is closest to the emotions, which is the language learnt within the first few years.
"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." (Nelson Mandela)
"I fear in 20 years, in Sweden, young people will equate 'Swedish' with 'old, out of touch, nationalists and racists'".
interesting angle. I doubt that Swedish will ever lose its utility, but dividing the society along language lines and typecasting native speakers as racists sounds like a natural development of current trend.
It almost certainly is the most habitable planet for life as we know it today because we and our environment co-evolved to match the conditions. Just because 2/3 of the planet (not sure how you arrived at the number / what parts are in the denominator) doesn't meant it is meaningless to what allows us to live here (e.g., oxygen and food supply from the oceans).
OTOH I disagree with the notion that we have to have a full grasp on how to sustain us on this planet before we can make other planets inhabitable for us. I think there are things we will only learn if we try. I am not saying that trying right now is feasible, though.
I agree that we have an extremely low probability of finding a planet that could host our biology as well as Earth's given that we evolved here, but I refute your absolute claim.
Invasive species don't co-evolve to exploit the ecosystems they stumble upon. They happen upon a ecological space where there are incredibly low hanging fruit that they are better equipped at taking advantage of. Imagine space-faring humans stumbling upon a world where the oceans resemble that of the Earth's as they once existed in the 1500's--a world densely populated with an abundance of marine life, ripe for harvesting.
While there is some probability that biochemistry is not 100% universal (ie. alien metabolites could be toxic to humans or cause an immune response), I imagine there are scenarios where the same set of molecules and polymers are used. The principles of biochemistry are going to be similar in a lot of places in terms of how energy is exploited and harnessed.
I think it's incredibly more likely that humans will never be interstellar travelers en masse than to say that Earth is the optimal naturally occurring human habitat in the universe. As far as we know there is an infinite space full of limitless planets. Plenty of biological solution space with which to theoretically work / exploit.
Labeling the referendum as dumb is IMHO accurate, not because of the outcome, but because of the way it was done. It takes an extremely complex matter and puts it into an simple yes no questions without discussing the consequences. What does it even mean to leave the EU? A lot of leave voters seemed to take it as stopping immigration, which will not happen (since a lot of immigration is coming from outside the EU and freedom of movement with EU states will likely not be removed).
There was plenty of discussion of the consequences, heck, the remain campaign focused more or less ONLY on the consequences of the EU's economic retaliation.
Leaving the EU will absolutely allow immigration to be pushed down, though likely not to the "tens of thousands per year" figure that seems to have been arbitrarily chosen simply because that'd result in too many very useful and in-demand people being excluded. But the type of immigration that has caused so much malcontent in the regions can absolutely be close to eliminated, i.e. poor unskilled workers coming from eastern Europe and undercutting the wages of the locals.
Are you asking how I would do the referendum? Certainly not with a 16 page manifesto and basically asking "Wanna leave the EU?" It should have included considerations what would happen with Northern Ireland, Scotland and Gibraltar.
How will leaving the EU push immigration down? As I pointed out, a good deal of immigration coming from outside the EU. And the EU part will probably not be affected by Brexit either, because free movement is tied to free trade. Or do you think that the UK will give up free trade with the EU?
Free trade and free movement are unrelated, as evidenced by the fact that the EU is trying to sign free trade deals with Canada and the United States. It's only countries geographically in Europe that are told they must accept both or neither.
The EU will either sign a free trade deal with the UK of some sort (possibly not as free as within the single market), or it will simply fuel its own collapse.
Actually, you and the parent are not quite right on the free trade issue v movement of people issue. It is the single market in services that is tied to notions of free movement of people. The free trade and restrictions on movement of people is not controversial.
You claim many reasons, but offer only one: Innovating without interference from the EU. This is however far from reality. The UK even once it leaves for real, will still be affected by EU regulations, but now without being able to directly influence them. At this point it is unclear what kind of trade agreements the UK will have with the EU, but even if it will do a radical separation (i.e., remove free trade) it will still be affected by EU regulations if there is to be any economic relations.
I fully expect UK companies to ignore the EU GPDR assuming it's not passed into law due to Brexit, and gain significant competitive advantage over EU software firms as a result. I expect the EU will react by not really enforcing it to try and win back the firms that will leave.
It looks like a nice project, but I wonder about the use case. It is limited to HTML output and usage from Rust. Hence, limiting the projects where it can be used.
HTML syntax has its problems, but when you work with the web, you have to know it anyways. Why would I want to deal with yet another syntax? It also means that as a user of the templating system you have to hope that the system can deal with all the quirks that HTML has (e.g., <br> in HTML 4, <br/> in XHTML and both in HTML 5).
It would be interesting so see an FAQ that explains where the advantages are over other templating solutions like Handlebars.
I have to say, my first (and rather uncharitable) thought when I saw this was, "Does the world really need another templating language?" I've been really happy with Haml for years now, and have reached moderate levels of satisfaction with Jade when I can't use Haml.
Are you referring to Sivak's report[1]? The problem there is that it compares average trips and not trips where car vs plane is actually an option, according to the ThinkProgress article [2].
I have not read the report itself and I don't know how credible ThinkProgress is. The Yale Climate Connection article [3] points out similar issues. Bottom line seems to be that flying is better than driving alone, but as soon as you have more than one passenger, the car looks more attractive (still depending on the efficiency of the car).
Interesting though that the train is not looking so good in the statistics in these articles. My hunch here is that the numbers would look very different in Europe.
Actually that's probably not accurate now that I think about it. Python is mostly used by quants and people figuring out what trades to make, as well as for some of the internal business tools. Whereas the people building the actual exchanges are probably using Java or C++.
"Finance" is such a broad term with respect to IT - you'll find anything if you look hard enough. The following is based on my experience only - I'm sure there will be lots on here with different experiences:
* I've seen more C++/Java/C# than anything else, with a large legacy base of COBOL/RPG (yes, GMI, we're looking at you...).
* Industrial-grade quant libs (for risk, P&L, models that need regulatory approval) tend to be in C++, with the infrastructure to run them increasingly in Java.
* Lots of VBA on the desktop. Every department runs on Excel...
* Python is making inroads (see Quartz at BofA, Athena at JPM), but I suspect that it's still vastly outnumbered (by whatever measure) by C++/Java.
Some firms (and departments in bigger shops) embrace new technology agressively - at my firm I know of large Scala projects, python, big data (mainly Mongo/Hadoop), R and some Haskell.
That said, on my first job in the UK for a large insurance firm, we employed a team that wrote custom CICS machine code for Z-series mainframes. Beat that with yer fancy functional languages...
I hear BofA are back pedalling on Quartz. Kirat has left, and there's some new senior IT mgmt who don't want to put all their eggs in one basket. Just gossip, would be interested in any confirmation/refutation...
