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http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883

I think this presents a rather interesting perspective on that idea of culture dictating why there are less females in techie sort of areas.

Obligatory? http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=49

That's true for only some. There are plenty of idiots* in government too & the ones with different goals are all to happy to abuse those idiots.

* Doesn't mean they have to be stupid about everything. But a lot of them are arrogant to the point of stupidity:

You couldn't be more wrong.

A)Socialism/Communism
Not comparable, not the same thing, and don't belong link together like that.

B) "In practice it would require that the society in question be bereft of ..."
No, it wouldn't.

You need to learn the difference between social policy and economic policy. You can have a free market and socialism.

You need to read up some more so you get past "Mount stupid":
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2475

There is a huge chasm of a difference between observing day to day problems with the way things are running, and then crafting a persuasive argument to support a concrete change. It is a specialized skill that is hard to develop and if you don't even appreciate that there is a skill there, you may want to reconsider.

I would love to lay claim to the word, but has sprung from the mind of Zach Weiner, one of the most unfortunately named webcomic artists in the world.

Zorblaxians are SMBC's stock "green aliens with black eyes and a big head" species.

I thought the interpretation in this comic was good.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2281#comic

This comic outlines the best way to achieve that: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2366.

Of course, the serious answer is to grow up and stop expecting the government to protect you from everything that might harm you. Look up the numbers sometime of the amount of money to prevent death, versus the estimates of how many people are saved. Between hospitals, the NHTSA and the TSA who do you think is the most effective in terms of dollars per life saved?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=565#comic

It can actually be done for much cheaper than this!

It's like my new super hero is kicking arse and taking names and has a big B&N crest in his chest.

Well played, Barnes and Noble!

We can only hope for this:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2404#comic

Macromedia/Adobe got/gets designers, and too many people don't realise that.

Even assuming this is entirely correct, Adobe is planning to produce authoring tools for HTML5 directly. As for existing content...

You may not be interested in it, but there are some gems buried in NewGrounds along with all the crap.

NewGrounds is hardly the reason Flash won't die. If it was just Newgrounds, well, hey, there are some gems buried in platform-specific native game binaries -- and not all of these are Windows, mind you, there are some real gems which ran on Mac OS 9. It's an issue, but it's not a point against moving forward to a viable replacement -- especially something like HTML, which is going to be a hello f a lot more future-proof than Flash.

Flash will die, and this kind of creative content will die with it until a new challenger appears; or more likely, Flash will just refuse to dies, and the geek elite just won't understand why.

So, of this, option one is a lot more likely. Flash refuses to die right now largely because of video, and it's being steadily replaced there. There are a few niche places where Flash can still do things HTML5 can't -- right now, audio strikes me as most likely, and even that is being addressed -- but it will eventually die.

In the mean time...

None of the other solutions are accessible to designer types the way Flash is.

If you're more than a one-man Newgrounds operation, it doesn't actually matter that much. You know what designers are good at? Designing. There's a reason Flash has a reputation for being slow and buggy as hell, a constant CPU drain, etc. Some of this is Flash's own fault, I'm sure, and I can back this up by comparing YouTube's performance with Flash versus any native player on the same video file. Most of it is enabling designers to attempt to program, with similar results to enabling executives to attempt to program in Excel.

The same tools will eventually come to HTML5, and I'm alright with that. Please don't take this as an elitist stance of, "Leave programming to the professionals." All I'm saying is that if the existing stuff isn't accessible to you, some of that is because it's overly complex, but a lot of it is because you aren't a programmer. There's no reason you couldn't be, and many designers do make that leap (or simply team up with a programmer). But you do have to invest some time in learning something about how computers actually think.

To put it another way, I don't think I would be taken seriously if I attempted to do serious design work with MS Paint. There are tools which let me easily throw together a comic, but I don't think this compares with this or this. These aren't the best examples of either, but honestly, if the ragecomics went up in smoke, I really couldn't care. That's kind of how I feel about Flash, especially when it's used by designers.

If you're neither willing to learn some real programming or work with a real programmer, then I'm not sure I will miss the loss of your content. If you are willing to do either, then I have to imagine that Flash vs HTML5 isn't a huge issue.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2234#comic

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic.

Theodicy. Explained by SMBC.

This philosophical problem is neither new nor unexplored. I think the short version of the common response is that humans and God do not agree on the definition of "evil".

Ahem:
[morbo voice]
Induction does not work that way. http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2386#comic
[/morbo voice]

"I see no conflict whatsoever between the Big Bang and my faith. Between evolution and my faith. When I see Darwin's evolution, I see God's hand behind it."

I've recently started working back through the SMBC archives and came across this one today which seems relevant to this comment. I wonder what your science teacher priest would say about it.

Where's superman when you need him?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1873#comic

I've seen the true colors of the "Republicans."

So you're drawing conclusions about the entire populace of these so-called "Republicans" based on your experience at your University? That sounds a bit like what your complaining about, no? All the following is from my University experience: I have had more than my share of headbutts with hillbilly republicans. My biggest beef with them is that the majority of them only hold those political views because their Mothers did and their Mothers did...etc... Completely closed minded just cuz that's the way it was always done. Inbred swine... I've also had trouble with die hard Liberals. Completely closed minded and get ridiculously aggressive with any questioning, as in red-in-the face spitting mad. To be honest , I rarely get a straight answer from one. I mean come on....jeez And then again I've had fair debates with both sides where everyone kept it civil. (I'm a vindictive little schmuck....I argue with everyone) So it's just like anything else, you always have your dicks in a group. Sometimes they're concentrated in an area too... Like so: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2339 I don't like them either, but this sounds more like an angry rant versus a non-biased conclusion.

We had to find an automated way to handle these sorts of issues so that the human engineers could focus on solving and preventing the larger, more complex outages.

Given how glitchy Facebook was in the past, I can't help but be reminded of this comic.

Reminds me so much of this comic

Obligatory:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2366#comic

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2366#comic

Here's the real reason. http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2088#comic

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2362#comic

It's all just busy work.

Another appropriate link. http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2331#comic

Doubt in science has likely been around a lot longer than global warming.

Because it's AWESOME!

And perhaps you should know that it may not be the best idea all the time.

Obligatory SMBC.

Saturday morning breakfast cereal, for a change.

That's a common misconception.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2320#comic

Actually No.

This explains it better : http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2320#comic

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2320

Oblig:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2320#comic

Obligatory:

When I was going up things were better! You didn't have to work hard just to pay your bills! You could poop wherever you liked and people would clean it up! And whenever you screamed someone put boobs in your face and FOOD came out of them!

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2323#comic

Really bad at math, don't care about the math, or are -really- good at math.

might be a while .

If this was an xkcd it would be obligatory, but it's smbc, so I don't think it counts...
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=001#comic

How can you prove something exists?

Lookin'.

Obligatory

The future is one step closer: courtesy of SMBC.

Reminds me of this SMBC comic on the difference between a science fan and a scientist.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1777

Hey, if Superman can be put to work as a clean energy source, then SuperBee can be put to work pollinating our crops.

The article reminds me of this comic.

... is not even a week old. http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2286#comic

Playing videos on my laptop without killing battery life and burning my lap would be interesting. Granted, that's Flash's fault, not the kernel's fault, but still.

But some examples:

I just played Angry Birds in Chrome -- I don't have a smartphone. Before JavaScript got fast (thank you, v8!), the choices would've been Flash (which is even slower on Linux than elsewhere, and 32-bit), Silverlight (really only works well on Windows and Mac, other OSes get screwed), or a downloadable binary (more work to port, so who knows if it'd even support the Mac). I also didn't actually have to install anything -- I did install the "Chrome app" anyway, but it worked just fine, much easier than buying an app or downloading an installer.

And as a game, I don't care if it or any data I've associated with it are up in the air.

But until Chrome shook things up with V8, this wasn't possible. JavaScript, even with Canvas, was simply too slow for something like this to be practical, which also discouraged people from adding interesting features or developing interesting things for it.

So it does fit what you described. It's "good enough" -- as far as I know, it didn't require a browser plugin, or Google's "native client", or any hacks like that. JavaScript is good enough now. But it wasn't before, and making it faster only means more options open up.

That's one example. I'm sure you can think of more. There seems to be this recurring cycle where we think we have enough performance in some area, and that more is just making things faster -- or in the case of games, just giving you a bigger e-dick by having hundreds more frames per second when your monitor can only handle 60 anyway. And then we get just enough that something which wasn't possible before, or which we had to fake or work around before, now becomes a real possibility.

Take Doom 3, for example. Previous games had mostly static shadows -- Quake 3 had this interesting trick where every fan you saw was synchronized to a spinning shadow texture on the wall behind the fan, all of which was pre-computed so it didn't have to do any sort of shadow stuff in realtime. Doom 3, we finally had enough hardware to give the player a flashlight and let them make their own shadows.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

The same is not true of penises, by the way. There may be an ideal size, and it may be bigger than yours, but there is such a thing as too big.

But on the other hand, SMBC http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1904

The sad fact is, attempt to hold up climate science to the standards of other exact sciences, like physics, and nothing remains.

You mean like this? (Climate science is physics, by the way).

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=693