Yes, exactly. People do ghastly things for "the greater good," sincerely believing they are improving the world. People are often horrendously wrong, too.

I think true evil would be more selfish in purpose, more sincere, and more pointless. You know, causing pain and destruction for the sake of it, because you actually enjoy to see others suffer. I don't know if Hitler liked gassing Jews, much as I don't know if Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gets lulz beheading infidels, but I think you have a better chance to find the sort of evil I'm thinking of among the people who actually carries out these acts, the ones who apply for the job and very likely enjoy it. And I'm pretty sure plenty of the same types have been, and are, in the employ of "the good guys."

Then again, "evil" is a human notion. There's no "evil" in Maths, or Physics, it's just a label we use to refer to a human behaviour, so it all depends on whatever definition you have in mind. Me, I think of evil as a mental illness, a disfunction, that causes a few individuals to act in very counter-productive ways, from the perspective of humanity at large. Which is not to say I'd want us to go easy on them, hell no, they are a big problem for humanity, and we need to keep doing our best to either "fix" them, if at all possible, or get rid of them. Along with the Hitlers and Baghdadis that create environments in which they flourish.

I'm pretty much done visiting the kerbal system. Haven't really landed on each body, but I've done the harder and chalked off the rest as "that'll be left as an exercise to the reader." Ha.

I'm fairly proud of my spaceplanes. Not that I'm a wizard kerbal craft designer or anything, but, you know, building a fat Mk3 bird, taking it to orbit with useful cargo, then bringing it back in one piece, right on the runway? I dunno. Makes me happy.

Unrelated: maybe us 12 people here could come up with challenges, like the Reddit sub does? I know I like to try my hand at those. And the thing with Reddit is, they've done everything by now, so now they're coming up with the silliest, near impossible things. Which are a bit too time-consuming for me, and often seem rather pointless. Say, "build a plane without using any part twice"... eeeh I can see we're bored, but what's the point really, haha.

But here we could start afresh, with simpler stuff? May spark more activity here?

Yikes, no. HTTP and JSON, are simple, platform- and language-agnostic, and easy to write and to understand. There's no complexity, no room to hide bugs in the transport layer. It's all at application level, where you can get at without having to become an expert in silly XML schemas, or some RPC library, or, God help us, bloody CORBA or DCOM, or whatever monstrosity these object oriented, "static typing" herberts come up with next.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with there being no batching, paging, sorting, in the transport layer. It doesn't belong there. There's nothing wrong with "reinventing JSON RPC" if you really need it -- it's dead simple. Or, if you really need XA transactions and stuff, well then use MQ or whatever for your particular fancy service. It is way better that you have to do this, than for the vast majority of us, who just need to pass a simple message through, to be forced to deal with all that rubbish.

Yeah, this bloke is off his rocker.

Haha you know, I started using Emacs in the late 80s (I was born in the 70s). Back then? The main gripe people had, the source of all Emacs jokes? It's soo bloated! Computers struggle to run that monstrosity!

Things have changed huh :D

And yes, of course, it's not that Emacs is so magic, but rather, people get used to what we learn to do and we're extremely reluctant to change. And, as you know now, of course, to be proficient in Emacs you not only have to develop spatial memory for all the weird keystrokes, but you need some understanding of Lisp, and a very good grasp of the code you're writing. As you say, no autocompletion or wizards or inline help, so you have to know your code very well, your symbol table is in your head like. And so must be the APIs you're using, and you have to know how to get to the docs on your own, quick. These days, I hardly think it's worth all that effort, learning to keep all that stuff in your head just to write code fast. Me, I did it because we had no option back then.

I'm pretty sure these days, a skilled young hacker with an IDE codes faster than I do with my Emacs. But it has to be a good one, 'cause I'm damn fast B) Haha.

Oh and yeah, js3 is magic. Seriously, I've looked, and I'm not aware of any editor that comes close to Emacs for editing Javascript (I mean, not snippets for HTML, but serious modules, for Node and such).