spauldo

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Maybe at the south pole. There's little to no snow around where I was in northern Greenland. It gets above freezing up there during the summer and it almost never snows, so what accumulation you do get is actually from snow being blown off the ice cap rather than down from the sky. So it takes a while to build back up in the winter.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (4 children)

What do you mean? The Trump fans tell me all the time that he's banging his granddaughter.

(/s for the oblivious)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Oh, how I miss the days when the president getting a blow job from an intern was the big news.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 2 years ago (14 children)

It likely feels warmer. Antarctica is almost entirely desert. The "dry heat" argument works for cold, too.

I've been outside in a t-shirt and jeans in northern Greenland (also polar desert) when it was below freezing and was completely comfortable. I could have hung around out there all day if the day wasn't four months long. I like the cold and I've got extra mass to keep me warm, though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm not an anime guy, but I loved the manga (except Marika). How's the anime compare?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Economic reasons are the best reasons. They're the reasons that work.

I don't think it matters why we move away from oil, as long as we do.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

If I remember right, it was sponsored by DARPA. It was in the early 80s, so it would have been on VAX. It wasn't the first implementation (there were several prototypes), but it's the design that stuck; all the major OS implementations of TCP/IP today use the sockets API (if not the source code directly; several identical network vulnerabilities on different OSs are due to the fact that BSD code was free to use and copy).

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Ah, DEC. Some really cool stuff came out of Maynard, MA.

A few notable things about DEC:

  • They made computers that were affordable by smaller businesses and universities.
  • The PDP-10 - one of DEC's only mainframes - was where the bulk of early Lisp development occurred, mostly for AI research.
  • UNIX originated on DEC hardware (before VMS).
  • The team that developed the Alpha (the successor to the VAX) was hired by AMD to develop the 64-bit Athlon architecture (what became X86_64 - i.e. what your computer is probably based on).
  • Intel chose a little-endian architecture for the 8086 because that's what the VAX used.
  • TCP/IP was developed on UNIX running on a VAX.
  • After the minicomputer market crashed, DEC was bought by Compaq, taken out behind the woodshed, and shot like a dog.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

It's fun! And it pays well. Get your engineering or comp sci degree and give me a call.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

That's a valid way of looking at it, too.

Realistically, the concept of "purpose" doesn't exist in the universe outside of our imagination any more than justice, beauty, or morality. Things just are what they are and follow the laws of physics.

If we're making it all up as we go along, there aren't any wrong answers. I claim the purpose of living things is to reproduce, but it's true that living things reproduce because that's what living things do (otherwise we'd have run out of them by now). Kind of a chicken/egg thing there.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (7 children)

The only objective purpose in life is to spread your genes. You share that same purpose with every other living thing.

Other than that, it's up to you. My purpose in life is to keep my girlfriend happy and destroy as many jobs as I can. My career in industrial automation is the key to both.

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