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Yes, in theory ratios less wide than 16:9 (like the 16:10 the used to be popular back during the first wide screen LCD pannels for computer : 1280x800, 1600x1000, 1920x1200) give more screen estate for tool bars, etc.

(And despite all the criticism Ubuntu's Unity is otherwise taking, at least their idea of a side dock is definitely a good one to conserve screen estate in the vertical direction.
And why KDE-based linux distro tend nowadays to reduce the taskbar to a much thinner size.
And why "tabs and menus in the title bar" (like chromium and some firefox versions) are getting popular.)

The problem is that, for manufacturers, these resolutions are weird and unusual.
TV world has standardized on 16:9 a long time ago as the ratio for wide screen.
Keeping the same 16:9 ratio on computer monitors enables flat-screen panel makers to use the same parts in both TVs and computer screens, instead of needing to produce smaller separate runs of panels with "weird" resolutions just for the computer screen line of products.

That's why most of the common mass produced cheap computer screen use the same ratio as TV screen : reusing cheap TV parts.

Which is also the reason why most of those cheap computer screens also stick to common TV resolutions : 720p, 1080p, etc. and why until the recent "4k" TV resolution fad these computer screen were stuck at sucky low resolutions that CRTs had already surpassed a decade ago.
a.k.a the quest ion"Why are we stuck qith 1080p ? My CRT from early 2000s did already 1600x1200 !"
(you used to need to fork a significant amount for more expensive pro models to get beyond 1080p - simply because these used custom parts and not mass-produced TV pannels).

also, ob. xkcd ref.

The bigger problem is that there are four different batteries represented here: the 75kW, 85kW, 90kW, and 100 kW packs. And that's not even counting all of the silent upgrades to those batteries over time. From what I've read on the various Tesla-related forums, the early 90kW batteries lose their capacity much faster than other models.

By combining every pack version into a single number, it masks any design flaws in any single model of pack, resulting an average that doesn't reflect anyone's actual experience; if the 90D packs really are significantly worse than average, then for most users, the experience will be much better than these numbers suggest, and for those unlucky few, the experience will likely be much worse.

A more useful way to summarize this data would be something more like "X% of 90D battery packs were projected to have 90% of their life or more at XXX,000 miles." at several different mileages.

I honestly stopped caring years ago. The folks who want to oppress me have much, much better ways to do it than keep track of where I buy gas & food (and no, they don't know what you're buying, that much data isn't collected by the businesses).

Everytime I hear about privacy I think if this xkcd comic. I'm not saying we shouldn't work to stop oppression, I'm saying there's better places to spend your time and effort. For example, show up to your primary so you can get some candidates that aren't corporate sell outs.

You could have just linked the oblig

https://xkcd.com/1172/

The reason is precisely as Google has stated it. Domain fronting is a hack and arguably a symptom of a security weak point; neither should be relied upon in the long run.

We should not have more than 10% of the population on any given social media platform.

It defeats the purpose of a social media platform, which is to connect people. I don't want a https://xkcd.com/1810/ situation where you need many accounts to get in touch. The alternative to platforms are decentralized protocols but only one gained traction: e-mail.

Yep, as scummy as Facebook is I don't really want to go back to the old days of requiring half a dozen or more services and relying on something like Trillian to make it usable.

We should not have more than 10% of the population on any given social media platform.

It defeats the purpose of a social media platform, which is to connect people. I don't want a https://xkcd.com/1810/ situation where you need many accounts to get in touch. The alternative to platforms are decentralized protocols but only one gained traction: e-mail.

I'd point out - and the XKCD below also shows indirectly, that "supporting life" is hugely different than "supporting billions of humans in comfort equivalent to today where a significant fraction are super poor and oppressed". To say things aren't fragile in that sense is indeed mental. For what it's worth, I'm considered a conservative. Because a few neocons deny GW - and neocons now pollute both false-dichotomy political parties - doesn't mean we've all lost the ability to think and analyze. What are now called liberals are anything but. These "progressives" are trying to force me to think just like them, as any good totalitarian would. The so-called conservatives are nothing like the dictionary - they seem to want war, to supress a different set of rights than the "liberals" but are statist none the less, have forgotten conservative values like "look before you leap", "spend less than you make", "don't fix things that ain't broke" and "don't start wars" (well, both fake sides forgot that one - Obama, for example had more war-days * number of places we fought than anyone else in history. So much for a peace prize. I'm sure Libya is better off now, or...). I want my language back. These liars who do so to keep power over us ruin it so we can't discuss intelligently. That sucks. https://xkcd.com/1732/

Let me phrase the answer in a way you might be able to comprehend.

woosh https://xkcd.com/1627/

Obligatory XKCD reference for those that didn't get it: https://xkcd.com/221/

Is it time to mention the obligatory xkcd comic for this topic?

https://xkcd.com/320/

Links to AC's links.

So, the temperature in the lake increased by 1 Coulomb. Whoa nelly, that's ... actually not a lot. Or anything really.

That said, it is curious that Slashdot (and probably also "folio.ca" from the article links) support Ç and Ç — (and even the emdash!) but not the humble degree symbol.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But I guess it's at least still a bit better than the lake rising by 1c. That would end ugly.
- https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

The Earth's climate has changed far more radically and far quicker to more extreme states many times in the past and yet here we and all other life are going about living, the silly humans

This XKCD comic makes it quite clear why "silly humans" are right to be concerned about the current warming trend, even if it has "changed far more radically... many times in the past".

https://xkcd.com/1732/

https://xkcd.com/378/

Yeah we all know that the climate has changed before. This is not news to anyone. But when people say the temperature has changed before, this is what they mean:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Obligaary XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/1968/

(the number of the strip is interesting, BTW)

The "deep learning" currently done by AI researchers, and the type of "strong-AI" in the Terminator, really have little to do with each other. Hollywoodesque strong-AI is still science fiction, and will be for a while.

Here's some good advice about what to worry about: https://xkcd.com/1968

https://xkcd.com/1968/

Also isn't "this weekend" referred in TFS the wrong one for the vast majority (if not the entirety) of the world?

A new standard? Obligatory xkcd

That's actually one of many identified potential problems of self-driving cars: Attackers pull the vehicle over with blinking lights then go after the occupant with whatever attack they want.

Hacking is another major concern. These folks have published a bunch of attacks on more traditional cars with fancy computer parts. Accelerators, brakes, changing gears (they only did the safe gear changes in their demos), and cranked the steering while traveling at highway speeds. With fully autonomous vehicles every component is available for a digital attack.

Then you've got physical issues. Medical problems with the driver, remotely delivering a bomb, intentionally disabling sensors at a critical moment, and so many more.

Another major side effect will be the drop in organ transplants since car crashes account for about 1/5 of all organ donations, which has been discussed in depth on /. several times.

Plus This classic shown in XKCD.

Actually, emoji might seem frivolous, but I see it as the very beginning of the English language transforming to include pictographs, which is quite interesting. In 100 to 1000 years the language will be quite unrecognizable, I think.

Anyway, obXKCD: https://xkcd.com/1709/

One major problem with Facebook (and other social media sites) is that they are built to be centralized. If you want to connect with someone on Facebook then you also need to be on Facebook. What we need is a decentralized social media platform built on open protocol specifications that can be implemented and reimplemented by different companies. That's how the web works. If the web had been built the way Facebook was built, you would need Facebook's special browser to view Facebook, Google's special browser to view Google sites, Amazon's special browser to view Amazon, etc. But because the web is built on open standards, I can run whatever browser I want to view their sites, whether it be Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, or any other browser that implements the standard base of HTML, CSS, and Javascript functionality. And if I decide I don't like my browser I can switch to another and still access the web. Email also works this way. Don't like your email provider? Find another one and you will still be able to communicate with your friends. Sure you'll need a new email address, but it will still work. Or if you're technically inclined, run your own email server. That's what I do and I love it. But I could never run my own Facebook server because there are no options for me to be able to do that, nor would Facebook ever allow such a thing to exist because their entire business model is based on having complete control over your data.

Having a common standard for social media would also go a long way toward eliminating the fragmentation in social media. Obligatory xkcd.

They likely will bring the hammer as well to help things out.

All countries do this. In the UK, a judge can demand the SSL/TLS ephemeral session keys (the ones that are used for a single time and tosses), then give someone four years in the clink, per key. No trial, no way to protest this. Germany also has laws taking someone directly to prison without trial if they don't cough up a key, even if they don't know it, or will never know it.

https://xkcd.com/1348/

Bananas are not radioactive.
There might be a region where bananas suck in Cesium ... but if the soil where they grow have no such Cesium, they can not suck it in.
In other words: the Cesium is radioactive. Would be the same with cow milk from the same area.

Bananas are radioactive, mostly from the potassium 40. They aren't very radioactive, which is why the "banana-equivalent dose" is more than just a joke: it helps put radiation exposure in context.

Alexa is only useful for buying creamed corn by the ton

There's going to be kids that are going to see videos and attempt to recreate any flaw - just like there's plenty of pennies smashed on train tracks over the years (not really dangerous, but if kids could be jailed for intent...), there's going to be flaws in any automated system by random folks you can't "teach a lesson to."

One of the biggest purposes of having an automated system approaching computerization ("robot", if that's what gets clicks), is that you can spot flaws, and ALTER the system to better adapt to changing needs, rather than rely on pure punishment to cover faults.

Related Obligitory XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/1958/

Folks can use the power of misleading information to kill eachother in a lot of ways, poison and war being classic examples - and yeah, those should be punished, but they should also be used to make systems that work better.

Overall, these things still make the world better, and less randomly susceptible to harm. The analogue equivalent has more holes in virtually every case, we're just more used to them. From almost all past technology (non-weapon) , we're better off after going through the learning process than if we feared it forever, or remained only conservative in our approach.

So yeah - punish folks that have actual intent to harm just like anything, but you can't stop folks from playing with the world around them, and the new stuff in it.

Ryan Fenton

Obligatory xkcd

"Those things would also work on human drivers. What's stopping people now?

ObXKCD

Engineering has worked despite nobody in the world knowing the underlying science.

What is your point? Even pure science doesn't have a perfect grasp of the world so I'm not really sure where you are going with your argument. Science is at its core a method of investigation rather than a body of knowledge. The body of knowledge that results is a second order effect of the process. Engineering IS a branch of science because it follows the scientific method. It would not work if it did not. One does not have to have a conscious awareness of what the scientific method is to follow the scientific method.

You can make a bridge by trial and error, and that's pretty much how engineering worked for most of its existence.

Trial and error is still science as long as you learn from the errors. You form a hypothesis (design a bridge), perform an experiment to test it (build a bridge), and refine your model based on the results (did it fall down?) and repeat the experiment as necessary. That is science in it's most basic form. Understanding every last detail of what is going on is not required for the process to follow the scientific method.

Relevant

How was this not the first post?

You can't steal a password off someone's body, dead or alive.

It's most definitely possible to get passwords out of someone who's alive.

I think it's indisputable that a small number of people create the majority of chaos in any social circle. However, I've observed an increasing percentage of online participants that cannot ignore anything they disagree with (yes, this is a behavior with a long and glorious tradition https://xkcd.com/386/ ).

Everyone seems to be so damn serious these days and no incursion against our beliefs can remain unchallenged (exacerbated by the fact that sarcasm is easily missed when it's in written form). The 1% want drama and we give it to them. The oldest counsel is best: Don't Feed The Trolls.

I don't want passive authentication. I want active.

Why? FaceID is active when needed (like for conformation of a purchase). But the rest to the time, it works instantly when it knows you are the one looking at the phone.

And I don't want Apple or Google having access to biometric info that I can't change.

Right there with you! Luckily FaceID data is only held on the device (in the Secure Enclave where it remains encrypted) and does not leave it. Apple does not get any biometric data from you.

I'll keep my long passcode, thanks very much

That is more secure than any biometric system, just a lot more annoying. It means you turn off other things like notification text blocking or have larger purchase unlock timeframes because you don't want to have to enter passcodes as often...

And even then, I'm not sure passcodes are realistically more secure.

I mean, realistically how much are you willing to suffer - either physically or legally - before you unlock your phone by whatever means you have? The realistic reason why you have a passcode is so that someone can't unlock your phone you leave on a table by accident, or lose in a cab. In that case FaceID works every bit as well as a long passcode, and is far more convenient the 99.999999999% of the time you have not left your phone in a cab.

Fingerprint scanners are pretty good but with a 1 in 50k chance that someone else's fingerprint will unlock your phone is it more possible some random person might unlock it.

One would think that if any of that was legally relevant, one of the courts involved might mention it. Did they?

And the obligatory xkcd addressing your conspiracy theory: https://xkcd.com/932/

Oblig. : https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/

tl;dr
No, but you breathed dinosaur farts.

Can someone familiar with these methodologies explain the criteria for statistical significance of these numbers?

Basically it's big enough to have a p value greater than 0.05 which implies statistical significance. But this doesn't mean much. Obligatory XKCD.

What is the hypothetical mechanism for low-level non-ionizing radiation to cause tumors?

They don't know and that is why nobody should get excited about this. Weird correlations happen all the time between unrelated events. Until they can show a causal mechanism for the cancer then the only conclusion you can draw from this research is that more research is warranted.

Given that they're engaging in P hacking, you could put the rats 10,000 miles away from the antenna and probably get similar results. Or just get rid of the antennas entirely. Either way, if you test for enough things you're going to get at least one "significant" result.

Xkcd explains:
https://xkcd.com/882/

Here is the data on brain cancer. Here is their data on heart cancer. I see no correlation in this data (but someone with a better statistics skill than me might be able to explain it to me). What I see is that if you divide your data into enough groups, one of the groups is likely to show a correlation (this is the relevant explanation)

Most nntp servers have hooks for hooks to check content.

Just make sure that every post is at an 8th grade reading level.

Offer paid 'moderation services'. For $1/month you can get a 'white list' of comments to fetch and read and all of the spam gets modded immediately at -10 because they don't.

Or this: https://xkcd.com/810/

Obligatory: XKCD

The list of vulnerabilities require administrator access. I doubt real security researchers would even consider that a vulnerability.

It's a vulnerability, it's just not one that warrants much concern. This comic comes to mind, though the caption should be "they can install drivers, replace the entire system, read any file they want, sniff all my packets, login to my facebook, my email, etc.. but at least they can't replace my BIOS, or read super-secret areas of the CPU!"

Or, as said by XKCD, this: Licence Plate

I just wanted to elaborate on the parent, with regard to how "broadcast" messages are implemented in bitmessage:

Addresses in bitmessage are a text representation of a user's public key. User can generate as many private/public key pairs (and hence addresses) as they want. Every user receives every message, and brute-force tries decrypting them with each public key, to see if it was addressed to them. This was designed to work like email: one-to-one messages. If you wanted to send to multiple different people, then you sent a separate copy of the message to each of them. A proof-of-work (hashcash) system is used to make the cost of sending each one of these messages high(ish), to try and discourage spam.

Being limited to one-to-one messaging is annoying, so initially, bitmessage had a centralized mailing list system. These had 1 address (private/public key pair) associated with them. Any messages sent to this address were resent to the addresses of anyone who had registered with the mailing list. Becasue of the proof-of-work system,running a centralized mailing lists had a significant cost to the operator.

However, in bitmessage, you also have the option to specify the random seed to use to generate keys, in case you want an easy way to recover the keys from a different machine without needing to memorize them or copy files (just use any sufficiently random but memorable string as a seed).

If multiple users use the same random seed, then they all generate the same set of keys, and can use them to receive any messages sent to the corresponding address. So, for example, anyone who uses the "test" string to generate keys would get the same private key, and by extension they would be able to read any messages sent to the address associated with the "test" public key. Now users who want to discuss some niche topic can replace "test" with whatever topic they want, and suddenly they have a distributed uncensored anonymous forum in which to discuss it, with no public registry that the forum exists (though the seed can still be spread by word of mouth or posted publicly). Awesome on paper, but there are enough terrible real people to make this a nightmare, and as the parent said this kinda kills plausible deniability.

There are scalability issues with this approach. Everyone-receives-everything falls apart as soon as you gain a significant number of users, which manifests as eating up a lot of bandwidth and disk space. Which means it's pretty much only useful to crypto enthusiasts who want to play with it, and people who actually have something to hide. If the majority if people who use an anonymous thing are doing something criminal with it (be it child abuse or something less morally reprehensible, like using the word "square" in china), then anonymity kinda goes out the door, since the mere use of it becomes probable cause that someone is up to something.

This is in contrast with Tor, where things at least sort-of scale. You'll never get "normal" people to use a thing in mass if performance gets killed when you try to scale up the user base, and a large population of normal users is needed to provide cover traffic to anyone who does have something to hide (this is ostensibly why the US government released it to the public--an anonymous network does you no good if your intelligence assets incriminate themselves merely by using it).

tl;dr bitmessage is pretty cool on paper, but IMO you shouldn't actually use it in its current state.

There's an XKCD for that.

I think you are confusing Linux with Unix.

You missed the point. Those "cloned features" existed long before Windows was even an OS. GNU's Not Unix was designed using Unix as a model, not by looking at anything Microsoft was doing in its graphical DOS shell.

kernel panics, crashes, and lack of software combined with lack of drivers and poor documentation

Well, it's better than Windows.

Uber developers are still following Facebook's discarded motto.

Ob xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1428/