Comment What happen? (Score 1) 185
Someone set up us the block!
Screen on.
Hello, gentleman.
All your site belong to us.
You have no chance.
Make your deal . . .
Screen on.
Hello, gentleman.
All your site belong to us.
You have no chance.
Make your deal . . .
I don't use mythology in a perjorative sense that this is all pretend or wishful nonsense. I use it in the best Joseph Campbell-Hero-With-Many-Faces sense, of a dim recollection of The Way Stuff Used to Be. This is a way of communicating an Underlying Truth about the Human Condition.
Apparently there was this era of things such as this Smalltalk that you allude to. Another version of this I hear from tales is Common Lisp. And Lisp Machines, specialized hardware and expensive workstations on which these "live images" would reside. So maybe these tales of direct, personal communication with the gods taking place with the Bronze Age Greek heros was not made up?
I guess there was this Barbarian Invasion of Bearded Men from the land called "New Jersey", especially a high place among the rolling plains they called "Murray Hill"? There is this piece of non-canonical scripture that our elders have been trying to supress known as the Unix Hater's Handbook explaining how we came to our present age and how this Golden Age entered into myth. Our elders warn against reading this heretical tract as dangerous to our souls.
As Jerry Pournelle describes the intervening Dark Age between now and that heroic or Golden Age, it isn't so much that people forgot how to develop and maintain a live image programming system such as Smalltalk or Common Lisp, it was that people forgot that such a thing could exist, and we attribute such things to gods or space aliens.
But then again, just as there is talk of ancient creatures in deep lakes in Scotland or in the remote sections of Zaire or Southeast Asia, there are accounts that Smalltalk or Common Lisp are still in use . . .
Owing to its composition of greenhouse gases, the atmosphere at sea level pressure is mostly opaque to infrared, and heat is transmitted through the air largely through circulation and convection, accounting for weather. The "radiative thermosphere", that altitude where the air temperature is determined by radiative equilibrium with space, occurs when the air gets thin enough. That altitude is a little bit below the "flight levels" where aircraft with pressurized cabins operate.
The warmer temps "down here" are the result of compression heating of air as it circulates in relation to the thinner air at the radiative equilibrium boundary. What CO2 does is it raises the altitude of thermal equilibrium, increasing surface temps through increase compression heating.
The atmospheric pressure at the surface of Venus is very high, but the air pressure diminishes with altitude just like on Earth, and that even with the high CO2 content of its atmosphere, the pressure altitude where Venus is in radiative equilibrium with space isn't that much difference as that for Earth. What makes Venus not simply hot but hellishly hot is not just the CO2 atmosphere or being closer to the sun, but the very thick atmosphere, raising the temps to these high levels at the surface.
That doesn't mean you cannot construct a narrative for a runaway greenhouse on Venus. CO2 plus proximity to the sun could have raised temps to liberate more CO2 from rocks in a positive feedback until the atmosphere became incredibly thick, but it is the thick atmosphere operating through compression heating that accounts of the melts-lead surface temps.
A post offers reprocessing as a solution to the reactor waste problem, and a proper counter to that argument is that reprocessing has a waste problem all its own. The total amount of long-lived waste may be reduced, but the "hot" shorter lived waste get spread around into corrosive liquid effluents?
Could a a person remind Slashdot readers of this tradeoff without suggesting that the original post was made by an untutored fool? Or is it important to label someone suggesting reprocessing as a foolish person, to offer a (mild) public scolding of their idea because reprocessing is a bad enough policy that shaming is merited?
The clerk finally shows up after numerous pages on the store loudspeaker, opens the case, and then there is a lot of pointing and pantomine as I try to explain, no, not the 16 gauge, I need 20 gauge, and no, not the 8-shot, I need the 6-shot, until we zero in on the right ammo. Out in the country, you can't let Mr. Romney's "varmints and critters" dig holes in your shingles and bust into the attic. Mr. Romney got a lot of flack from Real Men about not being a Real Gun Owner, but those of us who own property in the sticks know what he was talking about.
The clerk asks, "Um, how many boxes do you want?"
I say "just one", saying to myself, "How bad a shot do you think I am?"
My original version was . . . Your brother-in-law suggests using a shotgun to remove tree branches beyond your ladder . . . and you think it is a great idea!
They tell me with one of those babies, you can cut the lawn in one quarter the time at get more of the Pre-Game Show.
Couldn't there be some kind of Common Core -- for Public Health reasons, we want your kid to have the vaccines for Polio, Diptheria-Pertusis, Measles, Rubella, and Chicken Pox, or is the list much, much longer?
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
