Slashdot Mirror

People are losing their shit because of this, but not Twitter's announcement that they are planning to monitor users' off site behavior and weigh it against whether to let them stay.

This is why I can no longer get worked up about Net Neutrality. Comcast is not going to throttle small web sites unless they enter into private deals. Twitter, a vocal proponent of Net Neutrality, however, has no problem actively discriminating about who can use their platform.

So again, the people who like to use this XKCD cartoon can take their argument and shove it up their asses. Net Neutrality is looking more and more like a case of projection (in the psychological sense) by highly censorious people who are attempting a bait and switch that just so happens to line their pockets more.

You complain about “people” a lot, while not actually offering any insight to which way you stand on common carrier status.

Is CC something that should ALSO be applied to outfits such as Twitter, or is it something that should be done away with? Somewhere in the middle? Do you actually have a reasoned opinion in the matter or do you just attack “people” straw men like a “deplorable” caricature?

People are losing their shit because of this, but not Twitter's announcement that they are planning to monitor users' off site behavior and weigh it against whether to let them stay.

This is why I can no longer get worked up about Net Neutrality. Comcast is not going to throttle small web sites unless they enter into private deals. Twitter, a vocal proponent of Net Neutrality, however, has no problem actively discriminating about who can use their platform.

So again, the people who like to use this XKCD cartoon can take their argument and shove it up their asses. Net Neutrality is looking more and more like a case of projection (in the psychological sense) by highly censorious people who are attempting a bait and switch that just so happens to line their pockets more.

14389 is a prime with uneven digits in even positions

In a zero-based position counting, yes; but this is the convention only in some (well, most of) programming languages. In an informal chat, the most common interpretation is to assume 1-based positions. Anyway, I was evidently joking: all the numbers are equally secure and random, except 4. LOL.

Stop this false equivalence nonsense between private censorship and government censorship. Stop it.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Love him, hate him or don't give a damn about him, Weev made some great points against the policy, the best one of which is: Many of the companies screaming the loudest are the biggest advocates of censorship. (Then there is the fact that as he rightly points out no one is stopping state and local monopolistic practices)

Of course they don't call it that. They pretend that it's some balance to protect civility, feelings and ensure that cowards are not driven to silence by hearing disagreement, but that is precisely what it is. Censorship.

And one of the greatest ironies of the whole issue is that the sort of people who love to throw this XKCD comic out there are the ones shitting themselves the hardest at the idea that ISPs might take their platform away, but when it is GoogleFacebookTwitterYouTube doing it we are invited to a lecture on how we are not entitled to a soapbox.

You need more upvotes. I cannot give it to you but I can reinforce the message:

The largest censors are fighting for this rule. On general principle alone they should be denied.

You are free to speak, no one is forced to give you a platform. You are free to build your own platform.

Love him, hate him or don't give a damn about him, Weev made some great points against the policy, the best one of which is: Many of the companies screaming the loudest are the biggest advocates of censorship. (Then there is the fact that as he rightly points out no one is stopping state and local monopolistic practices)

Of course they don't call it that. They pretend that it's some balance to protect civility, feelings and ensure that cowards are not driven to silence by hearing disagreement, but that is precisely what it is. Censorship.

And one of the greatest ironies of the whole issue is that the sort of people who love to throw this XKCD comic out there are the ones shitting themselves the hardest at the idea that ISPs might take their platform away, but when it is GoogleFacebookTwitterYouTube doing it we are invited to a lecture on how we are not entitled to a soapbox.

If strawberries are too expensive because of the labor to pick them, the solution is not to grow 5lb mutant strawberries, the solution is to invent methods of growing and harvesting that lend themselves to automation or sell growing kits for people to grow their own in a small green house or some other of a thousand options.

unless, of course, it IS the solution, and study bears that out. Stating that it is "wrong" doesn't mean it's not worth investigating.

obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1901/

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/c... Letâ(TM)s be glad the article goes further than the headline. Thatâ(TM)s becoming rare stuff these days.

required xkcd https://xkcd.com/1667/

Sure, in the sense that everything humans do is basically applied biology.

Evident inapplicability here aside, I like that sentence and will use applied law (stealing) to use it in the future as mine. LOL. Relevant xkcd.

https://xkcd.com/1838/

sorry, couldn't resist.

So the hardware can do it, but the software is incapable? Sounds like the ideal car for Apple fans

Or linux users.

https://xkcd.com/644/

Publish your own ideas on your own web server at your DSL line.

We know how that turns out.

You forgot this.

Well, that is my story and I am sticking to it. https://xkcd.com/303/

And also here: https://xkcd.com/1357/

No, the moral of the story is best summed up by XKCD

From what I know about the windows kernel it couldn't scale upwards well enough to run in this league. And If I remember correctly one of the key goals of Linux was to make sure it could scale well on big iron systems.

Originally? No, not at all. "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." But it's the sort of thing you can patch a kernel to do so this happened.

Some features are used more than others. ;)

https://xkcd.com/681/

This charts shows you the size of Earth's gravity well, and where the moon is positioned. Getting to the moon and getting to the Sun take about the same amount of power, but landing on the moon at low speed will take more power than just falling into the Sun when starting from Earth.

And all the humans who flew to the moon had plans for a return trip, including making it back up out of the moon's gravity well with brought fuel.

You're mostly correct about the general proportions regarding the practicality of sending the waste to the Sun, but your specific example isn't very strong.

Doesn't specify a 50 cents club per se, but https://xkcd.com/1019/ was the same idea.

I'll just leave this here: https://xkcd.com/605/

I can only think of:

https://xkcd.com/605/

1st. 2.36 and 2.56 are wayyy off.

2.36 is well inside the 95% confidence interval of the observations (2.29-2.84), so it's not accurate to say that this is way off from observations. Indistinguishable would be a closer word. As far as policy implications go they are also indistinguishable. Both are about 1/2 an Ice Age Unit (IAU) for a doubling of CO2. We're on track to much more than double by the end of the century.

FaceID reminds me of this xkcd comic.

Except that you no longer need the wrench...

No, in fact a bullet would suffice. Makes the person hold still better.

128PiB of virtual address space, 4PiB of physical address space

The sad truth about Linux.

FaceID reminds me of this xkcd comic.

Except that you no longer need the wrench...

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

https://xkcd.com/893/

Sadly, he's right. That number will likely come down to zero within our lifetime.

This would be the obligatory xkcd

https://www.xkcd.com/538/

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/221/

Does anyone believe that a single policy will stop global climate change?

The Paris Climate Accord was a step in the right direction. If Trump wants to say he's taking a different step in that direction, fantastic. On the other hand, if he's saying that climate change is a Chinese conspiracy (or a normal fluctuation, or due to solar flares, etc.), that's another matter.

Ob XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1732/

Oblig. xkcd.

Its how to explain a SQL injection to someone non-technical. https://xkcd.com/327/

Here you go.

Argh, someone else posted it actually already... I'll try again though..
https://xkcd.com/386/

https://xkcd.com/386/

Oblig. xkcd.

https://xkcd.com/927/

If managers were actually allowed and taught how to manage, I'd think they'd be able to tell the good workers from the poor ones.

Yeah, because people love professional managers who feel it's a discipline you can learn regardless of the subject matter where they can just go into a line of business they know nothing about and manage. When I look at the fairly diverse group of people my boss is managing it's pretty obvious he can't possibly know how hard the tasks are. Neither do business users. And to be honest sometimes we're wildly off as developers too because things have weird dependencies, ugly hacks and show-stopping bugs which means your small tweak is sometimes a full do-over. And he knows some people are junior and senior, that some people are the primary caretaker and some are the backup. Does he know if you're pulling your weight in context? No.

You can do metrics, but they're all pretty horrible. You can try to track delivery time and completed functionality, but you don't know if it's kludges and hacks and how much the person has been sniping easy wins while the ones building the backbone of the application suffer. He can try to ask your co-workers for their evaluation, but obviously that rewards patting each other on the back and throwing the non-player under the bus. Very often it ends up not being the best coder, but the best salesman who wins. The one who always make sure their contributions are highly visible to the boss and often made bigger and better than they actually are.

I have actually read some management theory and it's useful for interpreting how people think and respond with regards to motivation, engagement, incentives, when to step in and manage, when to pull back and not micro-manage etc. but if I actually became a manager I still don't know how to get good data on performance. And nothing is so demotivating as the feeling of not being treated fairly. I'd probably just be very critical of what I know because it used to be my job and oblivious to the things that weren't. Or I'd try to really understand what everyone is doing and totally burn out trying to know everything. And I won't know when I'm wrong because honestly most of us think that we're above average, people will be unhappy but I won't know if it's justified or not.

So, to disprove human-caused global warming, not only does it need to be shown to not happen, but the natural warming previously known as "we are not in an ice age anymore" needs to stop also, returning us to the ice age.

Don't worry, the "natural warming" because "we are not in an ice age anymore" actually stopped thousands of years ago. The temperature has been on a long slow decline since then. If you removed the human influence from the global temperature it would start declining again.

You don't have to take my word for it, but the Holocene optimum happened about 7,500 years ago.

I had some discussion points I was going to post (including this reference), and then I came across this wiki entry.

Can anyone confirm or deny if this "Paul Nelson" is the same "young earth creationist" described in the above wiki entry or is he an actual scientist with a very unfortunate name?

You must be a scientist.

There's probably a lot less pressure when doing research work.

I'm reminded of xkcd's #664.

Here you have some ideas for those talking about SQL injection without knowing too well what all this is about. There are two basic requisites for this situation to ever occur:
1. Non-sanitised string SQL query (= sending a random string to the database without checking what is in there).
2. The potentiality of a malicious action to happen (e.g., building the SQL queries from random user inputs).

If any of the aforementioned points is missing, the probability of a SQL injection to ever occur is exactly zero. What means that you can ignore the first point and blindly send queries to a SQL database (not precisely recommendable) if, for example, all the strings are hardcoded or no external actions will ever affect any of them. Similarly, you might rely on random inputs, as far as you make sure that the resulting SQL query is fine; focusing on this second aspect is the most usual proceeding. Again, I am not recommending or promoting to rely on non-ideal proceedings, just sharing some basic, objective, fanatic-free information which some people (some of them with lots to say in programming-related aspects! Incredible, but true!) might find helpful. Long live to the little bobby tables! LOL.

But think about the passengers!

https://m.xkcd.com/1897/

Voting Machines: https://xkcd.com/463/

Oblig. xkcd..

This is what you're doing if you hardcode PRNG seeds:

int getRandomNumber()
{
    return 4; // chosen by fair dice roll, guaranteed to be random
}

221