Slashdot Mirror

Obligatory xkcd:
  Windows 7

What would you prefer: a smashed camera, or blatant evidence of actions which would definitely put your life in danger.

I'm assuming if you are a journalist with that task then you don't value your safety much in the first place. It's really surprising more don't just end up "missing". Anyhow the best bet in this case is to have a satellite link and dummy photos on your camera. Because I agree with you and xkcd on the security of encryption.

"[New studies] find that cell phone radiation is potentially linked with certain forms of cancer, but they're far from conclusive. The results are complex and the studies have yet to be peer-reviewed, but some of the findings are clearly important enough to warrant public discussion."

No. No, no, no, no, no, no. NO. You're sciencing wrong. Studies which are inconclusive and complex definitely do *not* warrant public discussion until they've been peer reviewed. Let the fellow scientists look over the data and methodology, maybe even try to replicate the results. If peers say, "Yup, looks like they're on to something," THEN you have findings which warrant public discussion. Until then you have bupkis. You have complex and inconclusive results that are only good for whipping the Jenny McCarthys and Gwenyth Paltrows of the world into a frenzy. You get headlines proclaiming that green jellybeans cause acne because neither the news media nor the public are going to be bothered to do the analysis themselves.

https://xkcd.com/1400/

In the last couple of decades, industrialized countries have gone from roughy zero cellphones/person, to roughly one cellphone/person, which is usually in proximity to that person 24/7. But there has been no corresponding cancer epidemic, where cancer rates in these countries suddenly soared by a factor 10x or whatever. So based on this widespread human study, we can already conclude that if cellphones cause cancer, the effect is completely negligible, and frankly, acceptable. That doesn't change because some scientists made a small-scale rat study. (Also, relevant xkcd.)

Out of interest is it your left coast thinking that leads to such mind blowing arrogance?

It appears that any field outside of your expertise su summarized entirely by the couple of random facts you happen ot know about it. Are you a physicist by any chance?

https://xkcd.com/793/

https://xkcd.com/285/

If it's contended that the words are encoded as alphagrams (e.g. the letters of the words are sorted in as specific order), all that's needed to disprove that is find a counterexample.

On the first fucking page, there's a word transcribed as "ro" followed a few lines later by a word transcribed as "chtor".

In other words, there is no consistent alphagram ordering. In one word, "r" comes before "o", while in another, "o" comes before "r".

I would be a lot more convinced if they listed their claimed alphabetical order and showed what percentage of "words" follow that order.

In short, Fuck computational linguistics. "Ooh, look at me! My field is so ill-defined, I can subscribe to any of dozens of contradictory models and still be taken seriously!"

https://xkcd.com/593/

It is obvious when you think about it...

The MPEG model until now :
- create a standard (e.g.: MPEG 1 Video, MPEG Audio Layer I).
- concentrate on making the best compression, irrespective of patent situation
- because good compression and official standard, MPEG gets extremely popular and implemented everywhere.
- all the MPEG creators who hold patents band together, form a patent pool.
- the use the popularity of the standard and their patent pool to extract as much money as possible from as many people as possible.
- re-invest the money left over after the CEO's pay into producing the next standard. (e.g.: MPEG 2 Video, MPEG Audio Layer II, etc.)
- rinse and repeat

The problem (not directly clearly stated in the summary) :
- companies realize that they can make even more money
- patent holder stay hidden for a while, they push a new standard knowing that it's patent covered
- once the standard becomes pervasive to the point it's not possible to function without it (e.g.: MPEG Audio Layer III, a.k.a MP3), suddenly the patent holder wakes up (in this case: Frauenhoffer Institute).
- the holder tries to sue the shit out of everyone to make even more money.
- rent seeking and giant money grab rots the industry.

(Historically, it's not the first time this has happened. See the holders of the LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welsh) patent and the Graphics Interchage Format - GIF)

The current situations with MPEG HEVC / H.265 is a giant patent minefield, with several patent pools and/or patent holder each going for their maximal money grab.
To the point that HEVC/H265 isn't getting as widespread support in hardware as one would have expected when looking at its predecessors.

Meanwhile, the industry is fed up with this shit :
They've decided to do their own video standard with blackjack and hookers.
Actually forget about... blackjack.

They've decided to create a video standard with the explicit target for making it patent-free so it can be implemented for free by anyone who wants to use it online.

It's not the first time such a switch of standards on the grounds of being fed up has happened.
(The older being the switch from GIF to PNG by replacing the patented LZW compression with the free deflate).

And that is what frightens the MPEG guys.

----

As a note, a new standard won't necessarily devolve into the xkcd joke.

Each time, such switch have managed to actually succeed if :
- there is an actual push for the standard by the industry (e.g.: browser have started supporting PNG)
- the new standard is at least as good or even better that the old one (e.g.: PNG supports much more color schemes than the up to 256-palette of GIF. It also supports alpha channels, and the deflate compression is better).

The AV-1 is frightening the MPEG guys even more on these grounds.
- it's a coordinated effort by most of the industry big players including browser vendor, hardware vendor, server solution makers, etc. (i.e.: most of the company who make money by *using* video, as opposed to *selling the patents on the video* are in and pouring resources into it)
- it's a new gen codec, so of course it compresses somewhat better than the older standards.

And among the names of the companies involved, you see names who have been successful in deploying standards in the past :
- Google who have pushed their VPx series of codec.
- Xiph who have had relative success in the past:
- already with Vorbis against MP3 and WMA. It didn't get widely known by the general users, but it got a niche success : nearly all no-name asian media players supports it, it's used by several older audio streaming web companies - like Spotify and the completely free implementation have seen success in being used in various applications and engines - like game music)
- they did it again being among the company that contributed to OPUS, the free codec that currently beat everything else (including AAC) and is currently used by nearly any app/software on the

Best non-car analogy ever.

I didn't start the Jewelry store analogy, the parent poster did.

And now let's try a car analogy ! (But let's not repeat what xkcd).

It's all about you car trying to be more clever than you. So it's fitting to take self driving car as a metaphore.

Speculative execution :

When you arrive at an intersection, the car doesn't wait for you to take a decision where you want to go.
It makes its best guess and start driving in that direction.

When it was invented, it wasn't even considered problematic, because if you actually make a different decision and the car's best guess turned out to be wrong, the car will go back at the intersection (= CPU thows away all the work and doesn't commit into the memory/register) and start driving the other way around.

But it's deemed useful, because if the car guessed right, by the time you make your decision, the car has already progressed in the correct decision.
(= if the CPU guess right, it will have advanced a bit of work instead of the whole pipeline stalling and waiting for the outcome of the dependence).

Spectre variant 1 - "bound check bypass" :

It turns out that even if the car leaves in case of wrong guess, there might some effect remaining even after the car left, like trace of tires on the ground, the ground still being warm from the car's presence, pigeons frightened by the car would have taken off, ...
(= they are still side effect that can be measured of CPU execution, like pages of memory being fetched in the cache).

And actually, modern cars are so fast, that by the time you made up your mind, the car is already 3-4 intersections further down the road.
(= there quite a lot of instruction that are kept in-flight in the CPU pipeline)

By carefully watching when pigeons took off, and where you see tire traces, you can correctly infere that the car steered to avoid a pedestrian, even if the car nor the pedestrian aren't there any more
(= it's possible to organise the speculated instructions in such way, the the side effect will depends on something that was access past the a check, like a boundary check)

But still the car is only travelling in the same city as usual.
(= This Spectre only access data that the application has already full access to, to begin with. So very few exploit where you actually manage to get something new. Mostly situations involving JIT)

By now nearly all car have this auto-driving "feature" built in them.

Meltdown

All cars of the brand "Intel" have something really weird : they show up on the other side of walls.
It's as if the wall didn't matter any more.
The cars shows up in restricted area of the city where it shouldn't be.
(= speculative execution on Intel CPU happens to go past security limits like memory protection, because the actual security check is done way to late)
Walls won't protect the reserved parts of the city.
(= the kernel isn't protected anymore).

You have to move the prison complex into another city.
(=KPTI)

Spectre variant 2 - "Branch Target Injection"

It gets even weirder :
The car shows up in the New York Underground network.
And inside the vaults of Fort Knox.
You're definitely toast on this one.
(= Influence the execution of completely unrelated program. Execution happens were it couldn't possible happens. Your Hypervisor is toast).

But the thing is that this extremely dependent on the exact type of bolts and nuts which are used in the car.
It's proven to work with a few specific bolts and nuts used in Intel cars.
AMD cars are now proven to also use bolts and nuts, but nobody knows if you can actually manage to make a magically teleporting car out of them.

Meltdown and Spectre v2 are actually as weird as their car metaphor sound.
That's why lots of specialist are specifically mad at I

It is easier than debugging and fixing the problem.

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1495/

Wait, there were sequels to The Matrix?

https://xkcd.com/566/

Obigatory XKCD "Purity"!

In the real world, techniques that work for nobodies with nothing are laughable when the pros smell a 9 figure jackpot, e.g. https://xkcd.com/538/

Obligatory xkcd

https://xkcd.com/1105/

Disabling animated GIFs is no harder than disabling video. Just don't start playback until the user clicks.

And then the abusers move on to a giant image with sprite animation, but to get a big enough size, the image is huge, so you detect ridiculously large resources and add a placeholder so that the user has to click on the image to make it load. With the image offscreen, the user can't click on it, so it never gets loaded.

And then the abusers move on, fetching each frame as a separate image, and you make changes to watch for updates to IMG tags and/or creation of new IMG tags, detecting an excessive rate of frequent updates or creations that does not stop within two seconds, and immediately throttling all further repaints on the nearest non-replaced ancestor container, allowing only one repaint per second until the page is reloaded, and discarding any intermediate changes that occur within that container during each one-second interval.

And then, they give up and start creating movies with thumbnails that are compelling enough to make people want to click them. Mission f**king accomplished.

What security hole? I'm more worried about my user data than about some imagined security hole, and blocking root apps won't protect the user data.

Obligatory xkcd - https://xkcd.com/1200/

There's apparently more of us. He seems to be one of the many US artists I've never heard of, and most likely never will. Also, this.

I don't typically quote XKCD, but this illustration on the masses of land animals does a really good job portraying exactly how bizarre the ecosystem is: https://xkcd.com/1338/. E.g., most of land mammalian are something we are raising to eat. The plants that we eat require a lot of fertilizer, typically synthetic (extremely energy intensive). The animals that we eat require a lot more plants than directly eating plants. Yes, this is complicated, and more complicated than I am portraying--which is why people do research to try to understand the impact of the Entire Product Lifecycle. I personally am interested in reading more into the article.

That's exactly what the article is about- and why it's worth reading, and not dismissing outright because "all things eat and shit"

Living things on this planet breathe. They exhale. Sometimes we humans kill and eat them.
If all those animals were left alive, breathing out CO2, farting methane, eating up all the good grass and taking the jobs of other animals whose consumption have fallen out of popularity, their carbon footprint would be even worse.

This xkcd is relevant.

The actual animals that normally live around on the planet are actually an insignificant small speck, compared to the impact... ...of all the specially human-created species that we raise on purpose to feed ourselves.
These are not animal that normal roam this planet.
This are animal specially raised by the human agriculture for the the specific purpose of answering the demand.

There is currently that much CO2, that much methane farting, and that much depletion of normal flora for the sole purpose of providing grazing, because we need to answer the meet eating habits (mostly of the developed world).
We want (as a specie) to eat meat, that's why we raise an insane amount of cattle.

Save the environment - stop eating plants that absorb CO2 and eat more meat.

If we actually massively stopped eating meat (e.g.: if the developed world slowed down on meat and started eating food containing a higher mix of vegetable like the rest of the world), we would actually be needing to raise *a lot less* animals, and thus a lot less impact on the environment.

Your whole argument sounds like : "Stop using trains, there are cars out there anyway". Huh no. We build cars to fulfill the needs of those who want cars and refuse to take public transportation. And the same we raise animal on insane scale just to fulfill the needs of those who insist on eating animal.

It's just his autocorrection: https://xkcd.com/1834/ Philipp

Yes I know about all of those, and I think we're too old to be having Google Fights. So we're starting with a sample size of 4, but should it really be 4? The story about the Trump campaign getting early access to the DNC emails was a typo, so it's not really fair to suggest any bias played a part there. And it might turn out to be accidentally correct anyway.

Next, to assume that there is some biased intent in making mistakes in a consistent way, you first have to believe in the idea of a Kamikaze Journalist, one who will sacrifice their career in pursuit of affecting some political influence with an erroneous news story that will soon be retracted. These people were all disciplined after all, mostly by firing. The idea of a Kamikaze Journalist is plainly ridiculous.

Finally, the "direction" of the mistakes and the journalists' motivations can be explained by the potential payoff. A lack of evidence isn't a big story - that's pretty much the status quo, but new evidence is, being the first to break the story of new evidence would be a career-defining win for any journalist. That's why they're jumping at shadows of big news in ways that put their careers at risk: not partisanship, just fame, glory, and capital.

What you see as political motive is a combination of a failure to recognize the actual motive and extrapolation from a small data set.

We should create a new standard that covers 23.976, 29.97, and Flicks.

TFTFY. :-)

https://xkcd.com/927/

https://xkcd.com/927/

try all you want. it took *twenty fucking years* for PNG to get what usage it does see today.. and that was with silly patent trolls on the loose for other formats or compression schemes.

another format simply won't "stick". period. /endofdebate.

optimize your fucking images. nobody wants to download a 20 megabyte logo when they load up your web page or app.

if it's a logo. it should be optimized.
if it's a spot graphic. it should be optimized.
if it's a heading or article picture. optimize it; it's small enough, it won't matter if you use jpg.
if you're sending truly high quality images. you're sending tiff or raw anyway. for anything and everything else, jpg is good enough... if it's not, the recipient can ask for something 'better'.

and newsflash: nobody fucking cares if you have 'truer hues' or some other bullshit in your app or web site images. 99% won't even care, or even notice, if you use a higher compression on jpg.. digital tv (especially cable and satellite) is full of compression artifacts and those same people don't see it there either.

Then use PNG for those types of images.

PNG has its own set of deficiencies, and not every image fits cleanly into "better as a JPEG" or "better as a PNG". Many images are way smaller using wavlet compression, but also need transparency, which JPEG doesn't support. But if you convert to PNG, you get a file size 10 or even a 100 times larger, because PNG is lossless.

It would be much better to have one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases, a single format that allows a mixture of wavelets, rasters, and vector graphics, as well as alpha transparency.

One of my favorite XKCD strips is Knuth-related: https://xkcd.com/163/

obligatory XKCD what-if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/15/

Summary: even with twice Tsar-bomb level yields, trying to create a wave dangerous to cities is a waste of a good nuke. Instead just nuke a city with ordinary sized nukes, it'll ruin inhabitant's day in a much worse manner

When you see a claim that a common drug or vitamin "kills cancer cells in petri dish," keep in mind: so does a handgun.

Yeah, I know - this apparently works in mice models so it's a little different. Still feels relevant.

Mandatory XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/451/.

I wish someone would just develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Obligatory xkcd.

All that CO2 we released may have just staved off that experience and prevented Paris from becoming a glacier.

And typing those words might have saved your life. It's about as likely there was a flash flood under that sock puppet's bridge.

One look at https://xkcd.com/1732/ is enough to kill that trolling bullshit.

Since no one else has.....

XKCD

that red in the middle of the country is mostly all empty space. land shouldn't get a vote, only people should. the electoral college sucks.

rural areas are the opposite of powerless - rural areas disproportionally affect the outcome of the house, senate, and presidential elections.

you want an accurate election results map? obligatory XKCD - https://www.xkcd.com/1939/

It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook were founded by college students living on daddy's dime.

You have picked two examples out of millions around the world. That is by definition a coincidence.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1827/ Survivorship Bias.

Of course, you know there's an xkcd for that.

The billionaires on this planet has unlimited funds for keeping YOU out of their wallets

This is an important point. Billionaires become billionaires in no small part because of their ability to form social networks with political leaders, who also are highly capable social networkers. This has led to the de facto legalization of bribery for politicians ("if money is speech, corporations and the wealthy have a lot more of it than you"), and selective blindness after the Financial Crisis of 2008, to the crimes of the financial sector (no financial sector executive went to jail for any deceptive and unethical behavior related to the crisis).

It's like that XKCD comic of a crypto-nerd's dream of a secure system. The social engineering aspect of the donor class plus politicians cannot be ignored. They would work, as they do now, to boost each other. And it's no small stretch to consider they would work to undermine any secure voting system, in order to preserve the status quo. That the status quo was preserved after something as cataclysmic as the Financial Crisis, a once in a century event, is a testament to their power.

Climate changes have never been even remotely as quick (i.e. destructive) as they are now. For evolutionary adaptation, multiple generations are needed, and the current changes are just too damn fast to adapt to. For a timeline reference, please see https://xkcd.com/1732/

I also think those four common words don't have entropy exceeding maybe 30,000^4, or about 60 bits.

44 bits actually..

Learn not to speak Esperanto

tl;dr: Esperanto is badly designed, with a lot of irregularity and Eastern European-isms built into it, especially the choice of phonemes.

Also this: https://xkcd.com/927/

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/

Obligatory XKCD

You can say "it won't happen", you can say "nobody would do that", you can say "you just need to pick people carefully", etc. but the fact is that at the end of the day some small group of Apple employees have some method of access to every Apple device on the planet. To suggest that this could never be misused would be false.

https://xkcd.com/538/

Just replace 'user' with 'kidnapped Apple developer'.

I'm not sure how much a 10% price increase would effect sales though.

I think you mean "affect", not "effect."

You can affect an effect, but you can't effect an affect, unless you're in the same business as Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro.

But then again...

Did they brought it from ebay?

Why are you worried? You still have this method, don't you?