If methane was the harbinger of a climate apocalypse, the apocalypse should have happened long ago.
The end of the ice age involved melting through a mile-thick sheet of ice. Much of this pooled up behind a gargantuan ice dam, and when it broke loose, it scoured much of the western United States off the map in a cataclysmic torrent that flowed all the way to the Pacific Ocean. That's not a "climate apocalypse"?
Or in the nuclear context, the total harm from all failures will be the same because each failure would cause proportionally less damage (since there is proportionally less material to escape from the reactor in the event of a failure), but it will be exactly offset by the increase in the absolute number of failures.
But that's not how public perception works. *Any* nuclear accident, no matter what the size, will cause a major nationwide reaction that will disrupt the economy, overshadow other important activities, etc. (See 9/11 for an example of huge fallout from a relatively small and localized event.) Whether technically justified or not, that's how the human mind works, and anyone pushing nuclear technology needs to account for it.
If lots of little complex mechanical gadgets all worked more reliably than a few big complex mechanical gadgets, then the Soviets would have won the race to the moon with their N-1 rockets that sported 43 engines each. As it happened, their four N-1 launches achieved four explosions.
Lots of little things work OK when you need at least some of them to work (that's redundancy). But large numbers of things is not the solution when you can't afford to have *any* of them fail.
Punish drivers for the crime, actual accident which was there fault, actual impediment to the traffic, not for the achieving preconditions of what will actually happen. As long as I am concerned the driver could be sleeping on the back seat,
So by your logic, the number of road casualties should be at least as large as the number of overconfident drivers.
I don't think we have enough population to sustain that system.
I thought this is a rite of passage for anyone buying his first car and showing it off to his buddies - pop the hood and everyone stands around looking at the engine.
That's kind of pointless these days. If you open the hood on a modern car, usually all you get to see is a big piece of black plastic covering up anything of interest. I'm not sure why.
their annual party is *STILL* just as much a celebration of their birthday as it would be if it had been on the right day of the year.
Fine. But such a person doesn't have the right to claim that their birthday is the *only* thing that people should celebrate on that date, or even the main thing, or that failure to specifically mention their anniversary is a "war on my birthday!". Especially if people already had other parties going on that have nothing to do with the birthday.
If there are religious rites on that day, it's appropriate for the believers practice them among themselves in their homes and shrines. They don't need to attempt to monopolize the whole of society for a whole month.
and its celebration as a religious festival far predates any of what you've described above.
No, as you stated, Christians assigned their birthday celebration near the solstice so they could co-opt the Roman Saturnalia festivities, which already involved booze, parties, presents and shopping.
The Christian's strategy was generally successful, but they certainly shouldn't be surprised when it backfires because people continue their partying around the solstice for the same reasons they always have. If Christians really don't like it, they should move the birthday again to a more somber date.
You do realize that Java also allocates everything on the heap.
False. Java has the annoying and inelegant primitive/object dichotomy specifically to avoid that scenario. And it employs complex compiler tricks to allocate some objects on the stack if it can prove that they're unused outside the current block.
Java is also routinely criticized as being too removed from the hardware, and its performance is a mixed bag, so it's not a very good example of a counterpoint to functional bloat.
Yes, some CPUs separate the stack model into an Independent instruction or two applied to an arbitrary register. Yet no CPU has a kind of register or instruction that easily implements a closure's upvalues, nor any of the more esoteric concepts commonly found in functional languages.
All of those things work at the tiny level of shuffling around a few dozen opcodes. Moreover, all of that stuff is *completely* hidden from the programmer, and by design it's almost impossible to distinguish the resulting behavior from a strictly serial stream of CPU instructions on one or more independent CPUs. Functional languages can not and do not take advantage of the changes, nor do they map any closer to them than procedural languages.
(Some argue that functional languages will magically run N times faster on N CPUs because they lack side effects. I don't buy it. If it were true, functional languages would have dominated performance rankings years ago.)
Do you think OO programming is closer to how the hardware works?
Yes. In most languages, objects are implemented like C (or even assembly language) structures. The language just adds a hidden pointer parameter to the object's methods. Sometimes method calls are made through indirect pointers. All of this is perfectly compatible with the way real-world CPUs work, including their built-in hardware stacks.
Functional languages, OTOH, are big on closures and the like. These don't map onto hardware stacks, and there are huge numbers of elaborate hacks in functional language implementations to try to cram the high-level concepts onto the procedural machine without taking the massive performance hit of allocating every value on the heap.
A Gartner report back in 1990 or thereabouts said that something like 100 billion lines of corporate COBOL existed. By 2010, that had doubled to about 200 billion.
Gartner actually grossly underestimated the totals: Those numbers were just a count of the boilerplate declarations from the couple of dozen COBOL programs they looked at.
Maybe rats show empathy, but only if they think the other rat isn't already either dead or done for.
Then again, rats lack any form of medical treatment. So from their standpoint, maybe eating a mortally wounded or seriously ill colleague is both more humane and less wasteful than letting it slowly die.
When you create elements of a shot entirely in a computer, you have to generate everything that physics and the natural world offers you from scratch There's a richness and texture when you're working with lenses and light that can't be replicated.
Technology Bad!
In an era where science and technology are too often vilified, we believe that science-fiction should inspire us to surpass our limits and use the tools available to us to create a better future for our descendants
How does this make sense for govn't.. isn't this a Private sector issue?
It's a government issue because the government defines what overtime means in the first place.
If it were purely left up to the private sector, people would still be routinely working 12 hour shifts 7 days per week for base wages, like they did in the 19th century before governments got involved.
Arctic temperatures are *not* rising. The data is flawed because the sensors are all set up near Santa's Village, which has been experiencing massive growth over the past few decades as increasing numbers of spoiled kids get more gifts each year. The resulting urban heat island effect (amplified by primitive and inefficient elven HVAC technology) has severely skewed all the Arctic numbers, and the rising temps are just an illusion.
Because people believe the media's saber rattling and they believe Ralph Nader who said that plutonium is “the most toxic substance known to mankind.” Even though it isn't. It's just too bad Ralph didn't accept Dr. Bernard Cohen's challenge to ingest equal amounts of caffeine to plutonium.
You do realize that this RTG is powered by Pu-238, which is *completely* different from the Pu-239 found in fission reactors?
Pu-239 is mildly radioactive. Maybe you wouldn't have ill effects from eating chunks of the ceramic oxide and pooped them out within a day or two. (Notice that he didn't offer to eat it in a bioavailable form. That's kind of like claiming that chlorine is always safe because it's in table salt.)
Pu-238, OTOH, is hundreds of times more radioactive, and it glows red hot. That's a whole other ball of wax.
So please, before you go around accusing people of being idiots, get your own facts straight.
It would be a lot simpler to just have all the passengers watch old Buster Keaton movies to teach them how to jump onto a moving train with no special equipment required.
don't they use hands to carry whatever that thing they call 'ball' around? Why is it called 'football'?
Because it's the only major professional sport in the USA where the ball is *ever* allowed to touch the foot. That's how American sports are named: they go with what unique thing the ball does only a tiny fraction of the time.
Basketball gets its name because it is the only sport where the ball sometimes goes in a basket, even though 99.9% of the time it's being bounced around the court with the hands. Likewise, baseball is named after the bases, even though the ball is only very rarely actually on a base.
8? ITYM 4. The other registers are address etc. Further, zero of them are general purpose, because many (most) instructions expect/deliver input(s) and output(s) in specific registers. x86-64 has 16 actual GPRs.
You're describing the 16-bit instruction set. That was fixed a quarter century ago when the 80386 was introduced.
Three decades ago when I was in high school, they loaded our PDP-8's line printer with the the back sides of boring inventory reports from some manufacturing company.
However, now that we don't manufacturer anything in the USA any more, and our entire economy is becoming nothing more than a mix of healthcare providers and consumers, they *have* to use old health records for printer paper in schools. There's nothing else to use.
Slashdot Mirror
If methane was the harbinger of a climate apocalypse, the apocalypse should have happened long ago.
The end of the ice age involved melting through a mile-thick sheet of ice. Much of this pooled up behind a gargantuan ice dam, and when it broke loose, it scoured much of the western United States off the map in a cataclysmic torrent that flowed all the way to the Pacific Ocean. That's not a "climate apocalypse"?
Or in the nuclear context, the total harm from all failures will be the same because each failure would cause proportionally less damage (since there is proportionally less material to escape from the reactor in the event of a failure), but it will be exactly offset by the increase in the absolute number of failures.
But that's not how public perception works. *Any* nuclear accident, no matter what the size, will cause a major nationwide reaction that will disrupt the economy, overshadow other important activities, etc. (See 9/11 for an example of huge fallout from a relatively small and localized event.) Whether technically justified or not, that's how the human mind works, and anyone pushing nuclear technology needs to account for it.
Wrong idea.
If lots of little complex mechanical gadgets all worked more reliably than a few big complex mechanical gadgets, then the Soviets would have won the race to the moon with their N-1 rockets that sported 43 engines each. As it happened, their four N-1 launches achieved four explosions.
Lots of little things work OK when you need at least some of them to work (that's redundancy). But large numbers of things is not the solution when you can't afford to have *any* of them fail.
Punish drivers for the crime, actual accident which was there fault, actual impediment to the traffic, not for the achieving preconditions of what will actually happen. As long as I am concerned the driver could be sleeping on the back seat,
So by your logic, the number of road casualties should be at least as large as the number of overconfident drivers.
I don't think we have enough population to sustain that system.
I thought this is a rite of passage for anyone buying his first car and showing it off to his buddies - pop the hood and everyone stands around looking at the engine.
That's kind of pointless these days. If you open the hood on a modern car, usually all you get to see is a big piece of black plastic covering up anything of interest. I'm not sure why.
if Christians are trying to monopolize Christmas as an exclusively religious holiday, that effort is failing miserably.
It may be failing, but that's not stopping the loud and persistent whining from the large numbers of people who still want to monopolize the season.
their annual party is *STILL* just as much a celebration of their birthday as it would be if it had been on the right day of the year.
Fine. But such a person doesn't have the right to claim that their birthday is the *only* thing that people should celebrate on that date, or even the main thing, or that failure to specifically mention their anniversary is a "war on my birthday!". Especially if people already had other parties going on that have nothing to do with the birthday.
If there are religious rites on that day, it's appropriate for the believers practice them among themselves in their homes and shrines. They don't need to attempt to monopolize the whole of society for a whole month.
and its celebration as a religious festival far predates any of what you've described above.
No, as you stated, Christians assigned their birthday celebration near the solstice so they could co-opt the Roman Saturnalia festivities, which already involved booze, parties, presents and shopping.
The Christian's strategy was generally successful, but they certainly shouldn't be surprised when it backfires because people continue their partying around the solstice for the same reasons they always have. If Christians really don't like it, they should move the birthday again to a more somber date.
So what about general-purpose registers makes it difficult for them to implement those concepts
It takes more than a register and one instruction to implement heap allocation, lifetime management and garbage collection.
You do realize that Java also allocates everything on the heap.
False. Java has the annoying and inelegant primitive/object dichotomy specifically to avoid that scenario. And it employs complex compiler tricks to allocate some objects on the stack if it can prove that they're unused outside the current block.
Java is also routinely criticized as being too removed from the hardware, and its performance is a mixed bag, so it's not a very good example of a counterpoint to functional bloat.
Yes, some CPUs separate the stack model into an Independent instruction or two applied to an arbitrary register. Yet no CPU has a kind of register or instruction that easily implements a closure's upvalues, nor any of the more esoteric concepts commonly found in functional languages.
All of those things work at the tiny level of shuffling around a few dozen opcodes. Moreover, all of that stuff is *completely* hidden from the programmer, and by design it's almost impossible to distinguish the resulting behavior from a strictly serial stream of CPU instructions on one or more independent CPUs. Functional languages can not and do not take advantage of the changes, nor do they map any closer to them than procedural languages.
(Some argue that functional languages will magically run N times faster on N CPUs because they lack side effects. I don't buy it. If it were true, functional languages would have dominated performance rankings years ago.)
Do you think OO programming is closer to how the hardware works?
Yes. In most languages, objects are implemented like C (or even assembly language) structures. The language just adds a hidden pointer parameter to the object's methods. Sometimes method calls are made through indirect pointers. All of this is perfectly compatible with the way real-world CPUs work, including their built-in hardware stacks.
Functional languages, OTOH, are big on closures and the like. These don't map onto hardware stacks, and there are huge numbers of elaborate hacks in functional language implementations to try to cram the high-level concepts onto the procedural machine without taking the massive performance hit of allocating every value on the heap.
A Gartner report back in 1990 or thereabouts said that something like 100 billion lines of corporate COBOL existed. By 2010, that had doubled to about 200 billion.
Gartner actually grossly underestimated the totals: Those numbers were just a count of the boilerplate declarations from the couple of dozen COBOL programs they looked at.
Maybe rats show empathy, but only if they think the other rat isn't already either dead or done for.
Then again, rats lack any form of medical treatment. So from their standpoint, maybe eating a mortally wounded or seriously ill colleague is both more humane and less wasteful than letting it slowly die.
When you create elements of a shot entirely in a computer, you have to generate everything that physics and the natural world offers you from scratch There's a richness and texture when you're working with lenses and light that can't be replicated.
Technology Bad!
In an era where science and technology are too often vilified, we believe that science-fiction should inspire us to surpass our limits and use the tools available to us to create a better future for our descendants
No wait...
Technology Good!
How does this make sense for govn't.. isn't this a Private sector issue?
It's a government issue because the government defines what overtime means in the first place.
If it were purely left up to the private sector, people would still be routinely working 12 hour shifts 7 days per week for base wages, like they did in the 19th century before governments got involved.
Arctic temperatures are *not* rising. The data is flawed because the sensors are all set up near Santa's Village, which has been experiencing massive growth over the past few decades as increasing numbers of spoiled kids get more gifts each year. The resulting urban heat island effect (amplified by primitive and inefficient elven HVAC technology) has severely skewed all the Arctic numbers, and the rising temps are just an illusion.
Probably because spreadsheets and PowerPoint solve most of the same problems, but in a fashion that PHBs and MBAs are more comfortable with.
Besides it was an off hand comment. The point was that the public doesn't care, all they know is plutonium is bad and will kill you.
I think the real point is that your off hand comment shows that you didn't actually know any more about plutonium than "the public".
Because people believe the media's saber rattling and they believe Ralph Nader who said that plutonium is “the most toxic substance known to mankind.” Even though it isn't. It's just too bad Ralph didn't accept Dr. Bernard Cohen's challenge to ingest equal amounts of caffeine to plutonium.
You do realize that this RTG is powered by Pu-238, which is *completely* different from the Pu-239 found in fission reactors?
Pu-239 is mildly radioactive. Maybe you wouldn't have ill effects from eating chunks of the ceramic oxide and pooped them out within a day or two. (Notice that he didn't offer to eat it in a bioavailable form. That's kind of like claiming that chlorine is always safe because it's in table salt.)
Pu-238, OTOH, is hundreds of times more radioactive, and it glows red hot. That's a whole other ball of wax.
So please, before you go around accusing people of being idiots, get your own facts straight.
It would be a lot simpler to just have all the passengers watch old Buster Keaton movies to teach them how to jump onto a moving train with no special equipment required.
don't they use hands to carry whatever that thing they call 'ball' around? Why is it called 'football'?
Because it's the only major professional sport in the USA where the ball is *ever* allowed to touch the foot. That's how American sports are named: they go with what unique thing the ball does only a tiny fraction of the time.
Basketball gets its name because it is the only sport where the ball sometimes goes in a basket, even though 99.9% of the time it's being bounced around the court with the hands. Likewise, baseball is named after the bases, even though the ball is only very rarely actually on a base.
8? ITYM 4. The other registers are address etc. Further, zero of them are general purpose, because many (most) instructions expect/deliver input(s) and output(s) in specific registers. x86-64 has 16 actual GPRs.
You're describing the 16-bit instruction set. That was fixed a quarter century ago when the 80386 was introduced.
Three decades ago when I was in high school, they loaded our PDP-8's line printer with the the back sides of boring inventory reports from some manufacturing company.
However, now that we don't manufacturer anything in the USA any more, and our entire economy is becoming nothing more than a mix of healthcare providers and consumers, they *have* to use old health records for printer paper in schools. There's nothing else to use.