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It's completely bogus! He said something completely different, but they were too politically correct to admit it.

He said: "Holy living fuck... Are you fucking believing this? Over.
I abso-fucking-lutely am standing on the surface of the fucking moon!"

Here's the paper from that day that confirms it.:-)

http://www.doobybrain.com/2009/07/18/the-onion-holy-shit-man-walks-on-fucking-moon/

You could read through a bland paragraph stating that the Greeks are desperate to eject from the Euro mess that they've gotten themselves into, but with Germany calling the shots they're finding it very difficult. Or you could just have a shuftie at this. Which gets the point across quicker?

Your one sentence summary. Your one sentence summary didn't have a pop-up trying to get me to subscribe to your newsletter, and I didn't have to download several kb of graphic to start with. Then figure out that "Ms. Merkel" refers to Angela Merkel of Germany, and then try to figure out why everyone wasn't jumping the "bus".

It takes a lot of skill to get information summarized into visually digestible forms, and it's a much more efficient way of communicating.

It does take skill, but more efficient? A four panel editorial cartoon is more efficient than one sentence? I guess if you can't read it would be.

It's the same as how a company's logo is more instantly recognizable than just the company name printed in plain text.

Not really. Behind every iconic icon there is a pre-existing ad campaign designed to make that connection. That company logo is also not intended to convey complex concepts like economics and politics, either.

Try this as an experiment. Take the test. The ones I knew were only because of years of advertising. I have no idea what the "blue frazzled U" represents. I would probably recognize the name of the company if you wrote it out.

http://www.doobybrain.com/blah/blah/blah

Please link the original XKCD comic instead of some random blog. In addition to being more respectful to the original author, it preserves the mouseover text which is relevant to the conversation at hand.

How does your browser calculate remaining download time?

Mine does it ok, but some people get approximately this experience:
http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/windows-time-dialog.jpg

" there is no indication whatsoever on the hardware or the packaging (or the manual!) that the player is region locked and to what region"

As much as I think that region-encoding is lame and somewhat evil, that statement is false. Almost all DVD players I've seen have a region indicator (on the box at least).
The Blu-ray player I recently bought indicated both the regions for DVD and blu-ray (and actually, the Blu-ray region is a lot "bigger" than the DVD region).

Cheap brands may not have any such indicators, but often enough the cheaper brands don't have region-locking (or unskippable ads... wish I could have found a BD player like that).

Really? Holy shit!

I specifically said "shuttle engines", as opposed to booster engines, used to get the shuttle into high atmosphere/low orbit. Shuttle engines. Ignited, and extinquished, repeatedly, I believe. Let me find some kind of a reference, alright?

The first thing I find, using the search terms that I chose to use, refers to the Apollo flights, where engines were repeatedly ignited and extinquished. Let's remember - the fuel has to be pumped to the engines. Extinguishing an engine is at least somewhat like shutting off a diesel engine - cut off the fuel, the fire goes out!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8

But, I started out looking for the shuttle engines - so here I go again . . .

Oh - those external ignition sparks? Not ignition at all:

http://www.doobybrain.com/2008/05/18/space-shuttle-engine-ignition-in-slow-motion/

Read the comments, for a better explanation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Orbital_Maneuvering_System

That last link is about the best I can find so far, and I'm running out of imagination and patience to search further. Enter your own terms, as you see fit, and I'm quite certain that you can find more instances of rocket engines being shut off, then restarted - all without an external ignition source.

Have you ever taken a flourescent tube and held it under high power transmission lines? Something like this.

You mean something like this?

I have a friend who works at a large bakery. They use big microwave ovens to make cookies. One of his favorite tricks, before all glass was banned from the floor, was carry a fluorescent tube around near the ovens to scare the new guy. I guess they light up pretty brilliantly. :)

definitely measurable...

http://www.doobybrain.com/2008/02/03/electromagnetic-fields-cause-fluorescent-bulbs-to-glow/

I know it's no longer accurate, but for the longest geneticists thought humans and chimps were 99% similar genetically.... but there does seem to be a gulf...

OTOH, in unrelated cow developments, (not new) is the Super Cow

know your meme
http://www.doobybrain.com/2009/03/06/xzibit-says-yo-dawg/

You're that early to mid-40s guy at the office that completely makes a mess of things like this aren't you?

amirite?

That one I can answer.

Folders are only so useful at organizing things and we are rapidly approaching the point in our digital lives where we can accumulate far more than we'll ever realisticly be able to handle using the "folder" method.

The unfortunate part, as others have pointed out, is that without some sort of significant AI involvement, semantic anything is unlikely to ever reach critical mass.

If you have 25 gigs of family videos and pictures, it's highly unlikely that if you don't have the time to seperate and sort it into the individual folders most suited to each file, you definately don't have the time to intelligently analysis and tag each file with approrpiate values.

On the other hand, despite the horrible ad campaigns concerning racism and underage threesomes, or the outcry concering privacy, it sounds as if we are getting to the point where AI actually can make a useful contribution to the system.