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https://xkcd.com/566/
Second row.

Like me.

Obligatory xkcd.

The value of a currency is determined by what people are willing to pay for it (again, just like anything).

Maybe you should take an introductory economics class (I used to teach one, so I can help). The value of a currency is not based on what people are willing to pay for it, it's based on the underlying value of the society that produces it. What people are willing to pay for it is simply a by-product of a society that produces value.

The value of the USD is determined by the value of the entire country. The value of the Zimbabwean dollar was worth what the country was worth - which was a lot when they were over-producing and sank to nothing when they stopped producing.

Look - we get it - you got in at the top of a Ponzi (or pyramid - take your pick) scheme and you mistake your luck for prescience. However, the more BTC soars to clearer it becomes that the only thing underlying it is the greater fool theory. This seems appropriate.

Look at it this way - BTC increased in "value" by a factor of two since [particular time-frame], but it has not increased in usage (retail payment) by the same amount. IOW, the increase in value is due almost entirely to people who are buying and holding it in the hope of gains. That's exactly the greater fool theory.

Gold does have innate value. It is a rare metal with many desirable qualities.

No, you are wrong. It is your desire that gives it value. You desire those qualities and are willing to pay for them. If no one is willing to pay for them, then it has no value (not many years ago, no one was willing to pay for the conducting properties of gold. If a better, cheaper conductor gets invented, again no one will care).

Again, you have not taken an economics class, it shows, and by posting you have become a personification of this comic.

Nobody gives a fuck about gold or economics anymore, they just want to smash your autistic fucking face in.

See, economists aren't very smart.

Oh yeah? And you're the smart one who sees all the holes in their logic, are you? Don't be this guy.

Soon to be irrelevant? https://xkcd.com/418/

Also this https://xkcd.com/1823/

https://xkcd.com/1904/

Gold does have innate value. It is a rare metal with many desirable qualities.

No, you are wrong. It is your desire that gives it value. You desire those qualities and are willing to pay for them. If no one is willing to pay for them, then it has no value (not many years ago, no one was willing to pay for the conducting properties of gold. If a better, cheaper conductor gets invented, again no one will care).

Again, you have not taken an economics class, it shows, and by posting you have become a personification of this comic.

I agree. Although the one "unique" feature I would like to see the most in an Android phone is a USB port that will last as long as the rest of the phone does. My latest Android is a Nexus 5x. It's barely 1 year old, the phone still works great, but the USB cable won't stay plugged in if someone breathes on it. Every Android phone I've ever had has eventually had the same problem, so I try to be really careful when plugging/unplugging it, but it didn't help. I had also hoped that either the Google-branded phone or the change to USB-C would help with that problem, but no such luck.

I may try a magnetic cable, but I'm worried it will end up falling into one of these categories: https://xkcd.com/1892/

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1200/

Also, only one Matrix film.

That means RSA tokens are in many ways worse than a well-chosen password (like the XKCD method) because at least in the case of a well-chosen password, the attacker will need to put some effort into discovering it when the password file leaks.

obligatory xkcd

How in the actual fuck is this possible? They have an audio an audio signature of every song built in?

Yes. And this is not surprising; the data needed to identify songs is tiny. Essentially it's just vectors (big numerical arrays), they don't need to store the whole mp3.

More and more can be done locally on the devices. For instance, look at what is actually needed to detect English speech using CMU sphinx:
https://github.com/cmusphinx/p...
(look at the hmm model)

This used to require huge computing power and storage, but now it can work on a mobile device.

Another example: once upon a time you needed Google datacenters to do gender and age recognition on photos. Now you can download pre-trained models for that, and the result can fit on a mobile device. Or you can download the entire dataset (500k photos of celebs) and train it yourself on your own servers;
https://data.vision.ee.ethz.ch...

Or you want a model to recognize basically any kind of object in a photo?
https://github.com/tensorflow/...
(there's a model specifically designed to run on mobile devices)

i know it's disturbing but this is where things are today. Just a few years ago, this XKCD comic was true:

https://xkcd.com/1425/

Now you can actually download the code and models to do that completely offline and in a few ms.

I'm afraid most of the time, you'd just be trading tomorrow's inefficiency for today's.

I'm calling bullshit on you. There is 0% chance that you are carrying that much weight and riding 70 - 110 miles in a day. ZERO. I'm 6' 1" and when my doctor told me I needed blood pressure medication because of my weight and was possibly going to have a heart attack in 6 months, I told him I was going to do something about my weight, I was 215 at the time. So I decided to scratch the rust of the bicycle I had hanging in my garage for the last 10 years with out being touched.

The best that I could do was 0.1 of a mile a day. It took me 3 months to ride more than 0.2 of a mile from when I started. and I was only pushing 23% BMI. It took me years to rid more than 10 miles in a day.

Here are pictures of the weight loss in the first 4 months of riding to work every day only about 11 miles a day... http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashin...

I now ride 5,000+ miles a year... https://www.strava.com/athlete... and can only average about 20 miles a day not 70 - 110 miles. I also out ride the pro's at the bicycle shops, and don't ever gain weight.

I eat all my coworkers under the table. They are amazed how much I eat and maintain ~180 lbs. If you are regularly riding 70 - 110 miles and not around 140 - 150 lbs., I'm calling serious bullshit on you.

There is no possible way you can be overweight and ride that much. None.

Nathan

Obligatory:

https://xkcd.com/927/

you missed the link https://xkcd.com/949/

"Edge cases" have always been the use case for desktops. Remember the old full height, full sized ATX towers? Those were the Z840s of their day. Your average home user got by just fine with an Apple II.

Companies have found that salaries are much more expensive than hardware. That machine costs around ~2 hours of engineering time to lease per month. They have always paid for 'edge cases' to simulate, compile, render, etc to allow their workers to work on what they were paid to do and not sword fight in the hall way.

I think you're mis-parsing the report a bit. What's exceptional here is the *combination* of factors; the strength of the storm, that it's so far east, *and* so late in the year. There have absolutely been recorded storms that are more powerful, further east, *or* later in the year, but not all three at the same time - hence it's of at least some note to those with an interest in meteology or climate change - even the deniers and skeptics, since they need to know about it to try debunk it. Yeah, there's an element of those dumb precedent stats (Oblig. XKCD) like "Party X has never lost the election when they've won seats Y & Z", but there's nothing wrong with the reporting - all it does is state a series of facts about the storm.

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

If there is visible light we can be certain that it wasn't a black hole that was formed.

Not true. The radius of a neutron star is roughly twice its Schwarzschild radius (the radius of the event horizon of a black hole of the same mass), so in a collision resulting in a black hole, 7/8 of the mass would initially be outside the event horizon. Much of that would likely fall in, but much of it would also likely be blown away by the force of the collision.

Keep in mind that the amount of energy released in a collision like this is big. Like really really big. Even a regular supernova is big. Imagine detonating hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball. Well, a supernova, observed from 1AU, is a billion times brighter than that! And that is just peanuts compared to this collision. It is possible the one or more solar masses were radiated away as energy if it actually collapsed into a black hole.

That's the fastest way to measure whether you're a parasite. At the end of the day you have taken $N dollars from society, and did X actions for society.

Did X really warrant N? Think carefully. It doesn't help that there's really no sense of depth perception after a few orders of magnitude: https://xkcd.com/1894/

Don't bother thinking about whether it comes from an employer or VC investments or directly bartering your creations to patrons. Zoom out, it's simpler, it's ultimately money you took from society, for your goods or services. I repeat: At the end of the day (or any time unit) you have drained $N dollars.

Feel free to apply the thought experiment to various professions, janitors to congressmen. Poets. People selling hats on etsy. Don't feel bad if it turns out days of [slashdot, checking your email, three-hour lunches, and an increment or two on your actual projects] ends up looking imbalanced on the scale, opposite the $500 you billed us. Most of the musical chairs in the paycheck club are quite padded, mine included.

The only difference is some members are in denial.

Shotguns aren't great because then you have bits of lead all in your meat (yuck).

Well, there are always steel shotgun shells.

Wait, this isn't like the matrix sequels is it?

And it's not as simple as it sounds https://xkcd.com/1133/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544668251/

The first step in any scientific thesis is the literature survey, as every PhD student knows. Not paying attention work already done will lead to reinventing the wheel and secondary papers confirming the path breaking original paper. Your paper will be counted as a mere citation and the paper will end up as the leaf node in the citation tree. So pay attention it first.

That was basically what I was speculating on, and the possibility of using parabolic dishes or some other highly directional means to aim the signal at each point of emissions.

Think this XKCD but with a little less humor.

The descriptions we've had publicly released indicate that the points of effect are very narrow, sometimes as narrow as a single room, sometimes as narrow as the bed. If ultrasound transmitters are positioned in adjacent floors or adjacent buildings, or even in vans on the street, all trained on the room or the bed, then when the signals aren't overlapping they're not really having any effect, but where their paths overlap they intermodulate and that's where a human is medically affected.

What we haven't really been told is if these attacks have been on the personal residences of staff that are outside of the embassy, if they've been on official staff apartments within the embassy, and what the architecture and construction is. I expect all of these have been above-ground. As bedrooms I expect that there are windows, and if the weather in Cuba is like the weather in Hawaii, windows may be thin or may spend a lot of time open to the air. If there's essentially no barrier, then perhaps sleeping in a different part of the building with either no windows, or with windows that only open into a fully enclosed interior courtyard might prevent attacks from being practical, or if materials like dual-pane windows manage to block some kind of ultrasound or infrasound waves, install those and instruct staff to keep exterior-facing windows closed, only opening windows to interior courtyards at night.

Admittedly I'm not an acoustics expert but if they think that inaudible sound is causing the damage, it would seem that moving to where that sound cannot reach would be the simplest solution.

Oblig XKCD

XKCD already beat you to it.

https://xkcd.com/1897/

to crowdsource driverless cars. Obligatory xkcd link.
https://xkcd.com/1897/

This XKCD comic is not that big of a stretch to apply to AV providers.

https://xkcd.com/1897/

Oddly, only from a week or so ago.

Crowdsourcing also depends on the crowd for the most part being non-malicious and honest. Just imagine 'pranking' the system and the potential outcomes.

https://xkcd.com/1897/
Oddly, only from a week or so ago.

If only we *were* crawling up on one of those spikes as you say...

The problem is, we're not crawling up one of those spikes, we're rocketing up on one, with no sign that we are about to level off (ie, our speed is still increasing).

Changes in tenths of degrees normally take several millenia, but here we are measuring such changes in mere decades, or two orders of magnitude faster than anything we ever seen or measured before.

Scroll down to the bottom of this picture to see how amazing recent measurements really are: https://xkcd.com/1732/

Why the hell is it called a BUTTER-FLY anyway?

https://xkcd.com/1012/

Better still, Technology is just applied physics.

Oops. You've triggered the obligatory xkcd.

Squick is a perfectly cromulent neologism describing a gross emotional disgust or discomfort. I have never seen that word verbed before, but English is great at extensifying linguistics unofficially in order to adapt to its userbase. See also obligatory XKCD. You do have to be careful googling words you don't know, though. I didn't know what a choad was, for instance. I mistakenly thought it was mechanical engineering jargon for a unit of measure. Not the sort of serach results you want on your work computer.

I'll just leave this here.

Money absolutely buys happiness, but only up to a person "sustained". Everything after that is ego and waste.

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/792/ mention.

I don't remember the exact number, but I once passed by a remark on data for how many suicidal people stop being suicidal when their means of living are a given. What I do remember is it was awfully high.

I didn't expect this to become relevant so quickly

It is amazing to see that the number of xkcd references are starting to outnumber the number of references in the original Slashdot post, isn't it ?!?

It is amazing to see that the number of xkcd references are starting to outnumber the number of references in the original Slashdot post, isn't it ?!?

Oblig.

His is a perfectly valid response. Just because something's from the 1980's doesn't mean we need to ditch it. Hell, I'm from the 1980's and I find new uses for myself all the time.

Incidentally, the 3.5 mm jack is actually 19th c. tech, just slightly scaled down for some applications in the 20th c..

...Eternity is REALLY long.

And heck, for all you know our simulated universe was powered on just one planck time ago, and all of history and 'prior observations' including your memories are merely programmed in to make you think otherwise.

As always, there's a relevant xkcd here: https://xkcd.com/505/

Randall's Cueball isn't constrained by finite time and space in doing his simulation, or the speed at which the state of the simulation is refreshed:

https://www.xkcd.com/505/

XKCD: https://xkcd.com/505/

As long as our universe's time doesn't run 1:1 with the simulator's universe, our universe could be simulated on a TI-83 calculator.

Obxkcd: As it consumes its battery, it heats up and expands. Soon it will swell to enormous size, engulfing us both.

https://xkcd.com/1494/

Protip: Laws tend to target behavior but not exact actions; we employ judges and concepts like animus nocendi to decide if actions are criminal or innocent. Otherwise, just as you say, people would find 'workarounds' for every law and spend their days creatively robbing and killing each other.