The issue isn't about anything moral or bullshit like that. The issue is can our modern worldwide civilization survive the changes that global warming/climate change will cause. If we want to preserve this civilization we need to do something about that. Humans won't go extinct but we might have a massive collapse of population and have civilization fall back to a 19th or even 18th century level just because there won't be enough people to support the kind of civilization we have now.

Skepticism is one thing but when the same old argument has been refuted thousands of times it's no longer skepticism but denial. A true skeptic is willing to listen to the arguments from all sides and consider which is more credible. No matter how skeptical you may be you can't change the physical reality.

No one with scientific credibility in the field ever said that. You're listening to the wrong people.

No you don't remember because it never happened. Nobody with any scientific credibility said NYC would be underwater by 2022. The might have said that they will be washed over by a storm surge like that which Sandy gave them but not that it would remain underwater. Mostly where you get that is some hyperbolic statement by someone trying to whip up fools like you who buy it lock. stock and barrel.

Modern science didn't really get going until maybe the 1600s or 1700s. There was lots of low hanging fruit to discover that could be understood with the relatively crude instrumentation of the time (although good thermometers have been available for about 300 years). Nowadays we're getting more into the details and there are fewer and fewer fundamental things to discover, just things built on those fundamentals. It's like the development of the airplane. Once the Wright brothers got their airplane flying there was rapid advancement in the field for 30 or 40 years but how much has the basic outlines of an airplane changed since then? Once the jet turbine was discovered it's just mostly a lot of refinement on the basic concept.

I meant to say "one of the top 2 or existential threats".

Considering that global warming/climate change is probably one of the top 2 or 3 threats to our global civilization it's probably worth putting money into it. I know a lot of you don't think it's that big a deal but you can deny the physics behind it and you're going to have to deal with it in the future.

This comment is redundant but who would want to live in Oklahoma. It certainly wouldn't be me. If I wasn't retired and was working remotely I can think of a thousand other places I'd rather live than Oklahoma. I guess if you're just getting started on your career it could be kind of attractive but you usually don't get the privilege of working remotely until you've proven yourself.

Yes, my memory had failed me a bit. Wordmark is the correct term and you are correct that the addressing didn't start at 0. Funny how that happens as you age but I haven't done anything with a 1401 since about 1984. I know bytes is not the correct term but I think it's more relatable to most people here to denote the set of bits that make up a character.

As far as hardware multiply/divide we didn't have that on the one I worked on. As I said it was purchased for the school I attended by an old ex-IBM guy who was teaching on it and he was pretty old school and didn't have a big budget to work with. Our system only had 4K of memory and IIRC you could get up to 16K for the 1401.

The machine was used at the school to teach the students about the basic internal working of a computer and being decimal it was more user friendly to the many students who started from ground zero (I was a bit more advanced than most of them being in my early 30s at the time and having written some FORTRAN and Basic programs earlier in my life).

In a production environment I'm sure you had all sorts of standardized things like a card loader but we didn't have any of that for our classes. As I said below we wrote our programs, put the deck in the reader and pushed start then we were on our own. So the first card in the deck would for example copy the contents of memory addresses 41-80 up to memory addresses 501-540 then do a card read and branch back to address 1 for the next card which would repeat a similar sequence until the program was fully loaded. Once that was done the last cards of the deck then consisted of the data being input to the program.

I never worked in a production environment for a 1401.

Hmm, you stumped me. Neither of those ring a bell but it's been 35 years since I worked on one. Usually the first part of the cards in my deck was to move my program code toward the end of the card into memory starting at address 500 then read the next card and branch to 0 for the next bit of program. Of course the 1401 wasn't binary but decimal.

In my real work life I was sys admin for VAX VMS systems (I loved VMS) and Solaris with Oracle DB and a large ERP system. I left work 3 years ago to a comfortable retirement in a home I own free and clear and no debt. No diapers for me yet. Eat your heart out sonny.

This story brings back fond memories for me. In my first term of "data processing" we did our work on an IBM 1401 (circa 1982). The teacher was an old IBM guy who brought it to the school. As the story says, 6 bit "bytes" with a parity bit and a checkmark bit. You had to write your code to bootstrap your program in. The "OS" consisted of loading your card deck in the reader and punching the start button. It would read the first card into memory from address 0 to 79 then start executing at address 0. After that you were on your own. Output was to a card punch (address 100-179) or the 1403 printer (address 200-331). The rest of the total of 4K of memory we had was available for use. The word length was defined by the checkmark bit. You could put in two thousand digit numbers and add or subtract them. It was humorous sometimes when someone would make a programing error during the printing part of their program and get in a fast loop of page feeds. The 1403 printer could shoot the paper to the ceiling when it was feeding the paper that fast and the best solution was to put your foot on the top of the box of paper to rip the paper and stop the feed.

The last program we wrote was a fairly complex inventory problem. The 1401 only did add and subtract and the input data had one item that needed multiplying by a large number in the 200,000 range. You could tell when we ran the program who had written multiply routines in their programs and who just wrote a loop to do that many additions. The multiply routines would finish in a second or two but the add loops took over a minute to complete. I had great fun running and programming that thing.

A lot of good points there. Thanks for filling in the details.

That's true but so what? More UV at the surface would be extremely bad news for life on the surface.

Yah, it's possible there could be land life but it wouldn't look anything like what we have now. It would have to be seriously hardened against the effects of UV radiation.