Calories measure only the physiologically available energy, thus the calorie intake from cotton is essentially zero.

It can, but you have to have at first a clue of what you are doing. To know how to scale back a 100 MByte code base, you have to know the 100 MByte code base first, and you have to have lots of experience from coding within the 100 MByte code base, or from coding in a similar environment and with a similar goal.

To know how to scale back a large government, you have to know first what the government is doing, how it is doing what it does and why it does what it does, at best from your own experience in this government, or from working in another government.

Some outsider with big words but no experience is very likely screwing up big time, because he has no clue about most of the very important details. Yes, sometimes you find that wunderkind who is able to pull the stunt and get a new new code base working. But it surely has coded before, it has a general idea what's the point of the whole thing, and it is able to fastly get a strong team together pulling in the same direction. And sometimes you find that person who is able to redo a government as a relative outsider, but that person needs strong experience in how to govern something, and it has to be able to get a strong team together which pulls in the same direction.

And here the parallel between the government and maintaining a code base ends. Because you can create a new codebase while the old is still running. But you can't start a new government and get it up to speed while the old one is still running.

A president who runs on a "massively cut government" platform is like the junior coder who claims to be able to redo the whole 100 MByte source code project in his spare time, and cut it down to 1.5 MByte in size.

If his spare time project will ever be more than some example routines of peripherical functions and a completely overengineered interface full of place holder code and TBDL comments, then it will take 10 years to get some preliminary modules in production, and you will end up with two codebases of 150 MByte each, partly incompatible, but so interwoven that you can't never get rid again of at least one of it.

This just in: the difference between a just formed, new planet and a planet that got hot stellar matter from its central sol is much smaller than the difference between a newly formed planet and one that circles around the quiet central star for some billions of years.

And thus it is a rejuvenation, as the planet gets more similar to its primordal state than before.

And we managed to expose hypocrisy in all other governments too, as for instance the U.S. was assuring everyone: "We don't spy on friends".

And in general, I think: Let the governments spy on each other. That's fine with me. Let them play their games with themselves. Hey, even government agencies of the same government spy on each other.

What I am not ok with is if spy agencies that are not allowed to spy on their own population do it via agencies in other countries. The german BND is not allowed wholesale data collections of german people, thus they just ask the NSA to filter it for them. On the other hand, the NSA sends the BND a list of keywords, and the BND uses its investigative power to hand the matching data over to the NSA.

In some way, all legislation around spying powers gets made obsolete if you just have that befriended agency in that befriended country which just happily will provide you with all the data you are not allowed to collect -- they are not subject to your legislation, they don't have to report to your appointed watchdog, and they will not obey the will of your people. All the bad things that are illegal for your people are just outsourced to others, to the mercenaries somewhere else, to the foreign torturers and to the shady deals everyone can deny if they grow sour.

At those places, you get warned that your license plate gets read and stored if you cross a certain line. If you are eligible to enter the restricted traffic area, you have signed a contract and opted in to have your license plate scanned, and if not, you are not allowed to drive there anyway. You still can choose not to drive there as those places have large parking areas outside, and good public transport.

It's quite different to secretly scan the license plate of everyone and compile a database.

As an European, I don't understand what you want to say, because an automatic license plate reader would be illegal in most places in Europe anyway. Automaticly compiling a database about the movements of people is mainly illegal as it runs afoul most Data Protection laws.

If you call the ability of the government to put everything into large, databases shared between all government agencies "socialism", then the U.S. is much more socialist than any EU member state. Even the data retention directive had to be pulled after the European High Court called it unconstitutional in 2014.

When people are learning a craft, there are certain levels of knowledge:

1. The apprentice.

2. Has little to no experience, learns the first tasks. Every step he takes has to be supervised and controlled.

3. The journeyman.

4. Knows how to do things, you can give him a list of task, and he will work on them until they are finished. Can supervise an apprentice.

5. The master.

6. Knows his trade. Knows how to organise task. Is able to split a project into several tasks he can either work on himself or give to a journeyman or even to an apprentice. Knows how to teach an apprentice. Knows how to differentiate between a well finished task and one you have to do over again.

What we have here is the question what you have to know in C++ to be on journeyman level.

It's not what Isaac Newton said about himself -- by quoting Bertrand of Chartres via John of Salisbury.

Isaac Newton was a dwarf, standing on the shoulder of giants -- even for his memorable quotes.

Sounds about right for the 13th century, when John of Salisbury quoted Bertrand of Chartres with "We are all dwarfs, and if I've seen further then because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."

It's called culture, where people learn from other people and use the knowledge to create new and better works.

Here: Homeopathic medical practice: Long-term results of a cohort study with 3981 patients or here: Efficacy, effectiveness, safety and costs of acupuncture for chronic pain – results of a large research initiative.

Splitting your data on language barriers doesn't work at all if people come from all over Europe. You need both Latin-1 and Latin-2 as a minimum just to spell the names of people in Europe, and that's only those who use the latin alphabet.

No. That's not what he said. The only reason we know that you can take NSA documents to the outside is because Edward Snowden actually told us that he pulled this stunt, and he could prove it to us by publishing the documents he took. As I wrote back then already: Something Edward Snowden did probably has been done before but the others didn't become public with it. We don't know how many times this has happened before, and we don't know how many documents have been leaked before, and who got them. We just know that this has been possible at the time, Edward Snowden was still working at the NSA.

From a security point of view, from the moment that Edward Snowden went public you have to operate under the premise that those leaks have happened before, and that other interested parties had and still have unencrypted access to all the documents Edward Snowden took, and to other documents Edward Snowden didn't took because he either didn't knew about them or hadn't had access to them.

Do you really think the 9/11 hijackers would have resorted to box cutters, if they could take genuine weapons on board? Sometimes I think some people seriously lack imagination, and they make up for that with silly sound bits. Yes, the argument about outlawing guns works both ways. If you don't outlaw guns, even outlaws don't have any problems to get any weapon they want.