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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SP
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  • 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.

  • 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).

  • 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.
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • There is a shortage of cheap oil.

    Time was you could find it bubbling up on the surface. Then you had to dig for it. Then you had to frack. Then oil was expensive enough to justify going back to the old oilfields and pumping water down some of them to push it into the others.

    Sure, there's oil there, but it's harder and harder to get. That's why protected areas that still have easy oil are a target for the oil companies.

  • I had a guy from Florida tell me that the oil wells just fill up again after you empty them, so the whole oil shortage is a scam.

    I mean, they do, for a while anyway... but it's like that last little bit of a milkshake that you never quite get through a straw. There's no new oil - it's just the stuff that is just now making it into the well. He thought you just waited a handful of years and you'd have another gusher.

  • Not necessarily. Chemical weapons have been off the table for a long time. They've got all the stigma of nukes but without MAD to justify them. Militaries tend to be conservative about weapons, though - they don't want to throw away a working weapon just in case it's needed.

    My guess - the existing weapons are probably outdated and it makes little sense to develop new ones given that it's highly unlikely they'll be used. It's not like we fight the kind of wars where they'd be effective (think WWI here) anymore.

  • Sometimes NSFW images are appropriate in otherwise SFW communities. For instance, imagine a community on exterior design that had a post with a picture of that building in Germany with the five-story-high penis on it. Or a community for desktop themes that has a post with nudes wallpaper. Or a community about a certain celebrity that posts pictures of her car wreck.

  • I Love Lucy started in '51. Les Paul & Mary Ford at Home started in '54 (shorts, music & skits). The Honeymooners started in '56. The Donna Reed Show started in '58. Dobie Gillis started in '59.

    Bear in mind that TV shows in that period usually displayed a highly idealized way of life (The Honeymooners less than the others). If you want to know what life was like in that period, Leave it to Beaver isn't going to help you. Books are your friend there.