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average global temperature is at record highs

LOL! Nope.

True, but take a look at this https://xkcd.com/1732/

The GP is correct in that the vast majority of scientists attribute the recent increase to CO2 levels. If you can explain the slope of the curve in recent times by some other mechanism then I suspect there's a Nobel prize waiting for you.

If you claim that the vast majority are scientists are wrong, but cannot offer another explanation then you're either a troll, or a ...eh ... non-rationale, reality-challenged individual (plenty of those about).

There are lots of other theories around, including one that did get a Nobel in 1972, for a formula to calculate the global average temperature at the Earth's surface at sea level. The composition of the atmosphere was a tiny factor - the big factor was the density.

Cartoons aside, 22,000 years is the blink of an eye in the history of the earth, and it certainly has been MUCH warmer in the past. To say it's currently at "record highs" without qualification is simply factually incorrect. Some folks also have made the assertion that the speed of change is unprecedented in the historical record, but that has also been shown to be false.

I don't dispute that human activity is having an affect on the climate, but it's going to change regardless. I have no faith in the ability of mankind to be able to effectively control the without creating even worse consequences, either.

In this case, the data appears to say nothing. TFA is just conjecture, opinion, and a few correlations, which as we all know, are not the same as causation.

Yes, maybe it's the smart phones. But smart phones aren't then only bad things to happen in the last ten years. Rather notably, it's been a rough ten years in terms of trying to find a decent job.

Did smart phones also cause Trump to get elected? Are smart phones causing white working class people in the middle states to kill themselves with drug overdoses? Are smart phone responsible for the rise of ISIS in the Middle East?

In a time when it's so hard for ordinary people just to have basic necessities, correlation is a long way from causation when it comes to smart phones.

https://xkcd.com/937/
https://xkcd.com/1098/

https://xkcd.com/937/
https://xkcd.com/1098/

The important question is not "What do folks think?" but "What does the data say?". In this case, the data appears to say nothing. TFA is just conjecture, opinion, and a few correlations, which as we all know, are not the same as causation.

Maybe, buried deep behind an obscure link, there is some actual evidence that the world really is going to hell because of corruption of the youth. If so, I would appreciate someone pointing it out.

Here is another you smart arse

https://xkcd.com/763/

Old XKCD https://xkcd.com/1172/

Old XKCD https://xkcd.com/1172/

https://xkcd.com/949/

I know my parents want something like this.

Obligatory:
https://xkcd.com/214/

Distant Death

https://xkcd.com/605/

It's like a quest for the White Whale anyway.

A "new Internet" will face enormous obstacles to becoming important or useful. Let's say that it does though, for the sake of argument.

Once it becomes important and useful, commercial entities will want access. "Hey, there's this valuable new market and it's practically unharvested! We could own the place if we get in on the ground floor!"

Then government will notice and decide that they want a piece of the action. I'm not a bleating "gov'mint bad" type, so that's not my point. My point is, once the government demands a role, you are for all practical purposes back to Internet 1.0. What have you gained?

Next, I expect that technologists will be objecting. "You just don't understand! Due to our innovative use of encryption/accounts/crypto-currency/blockchain/quantum computing/IoT/mesh/buzzwords of the week, our Internet 2.0 is immune to the above actors and actions!"

Um, no. The big problems with the Internet aren't really technological, they are social, political and economic. Technology can help but it is no silver bullet.

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

This applies.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Sorry, but what the devil are you on about? There are no laws anywhere regarding smart guns. Nor are there any plans to have laws regarding them (short of a few lawmakers trying to get the government to buy smart guns after they received rather generous donations from the makers of said smart guns).

You're seeing a conspiracy where there is none and immediately jumping to a worst possible conclusion. Nobody is planing on forcing you or anyone else to use smart guns. If they're going to take your guns (they're not) they'll just send somebody to round 'em up. On the plus side you reminded me of this today :).

XKCD also wanted Hillary to win

FiveThirtyEight.com -- aren't they the guys who predicted a Hillary win by consistently integrating bogus D+12 surveys into their models? P values cannot repel fraud of that magnitude!

ObXKCD

This is the P-value in a nutshell: it's the probability that your measurements could be the result of chance.

This is why real scientists use Bayes' theorm and provide confidence intervals.

It looks like people are investing money to obtain an interest in an item with no practical use other than as an investment

I am reminded of https://xkcd.com/1494/

I don't mean to be rude. I just think that the self-selection bias of this study implies that we should look further into the amount of additionality that this sport brings in for CTE, and be more skeptic about the nature of the causation link.

There's actually a very recent XKCD post about reliability of WiFi versus cellular: https://xkcd.com/1865/

Never mind the fact it is SO easy these days as compared to the past. I mean you can watch YouTube stuff on just about every level conceivable. You can Google the answers to just about anything as someone somewhere has likely run into the same probable at some point (though you do need to know enough about what you are looking for I suppose). One of my favorite memes/jokes was the xkcd flowchart on how I know how to do everything that you do not know how to do:
https://xkcd.com/627/

The big difference is a lot of people can't be bothered to figure it out themselves or at least put the effort in to at least try.

I mean when I grew up, you *had* to seek higher education, and read a frikin' book about it, perhaps talk to people. Later things like message forums, should they exist for your particular thing and have people on it that know things.

Anyway as I said they have so many options available to them outside a CS degree, all they really need is the interest and some effort.

Python has hit critical mass in both popularity and tools available. C, C++, Java, Perl and anything else the average /.er is going to complain about going anywhere just like FORTRAN and COLBOL haven't.

XKCD hit the nail on the head. It's something easy enough for middle schoolers to grock and powerful enough to use with TensorFlow. It's our office's go-to language for "I need this task done". It's basically BASIC where you can import math (numpy), plotting (matplotlib), neuralnetwork (TensorFlow) and other packages.

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.".

You can knock out something in 30 minutes in Python that would take longer in anything else and the performance difference isn't worth doing it in something else.

https://www.xkcd.com/1279/

Probably Linus is just following established industry standards.

No, it's not Alexa, it's sudo make me a sandwich.

Relevant XKCD.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Johnny Tables reference

Did you mean Bobby Tables?

Sure I have. It's still not meant to be used as a primary home internet connection. There's a reason wireless is also called "mobile". It's designed to be used while you're on the go.

Your thought leader Randall Munroe has decided mobile data is good enough to replace home internet.

https://xkcd.com/1865

Update your prejudices for current year.

Guess what, imbecile, I said to find the C&C server, not the hacker. The whole definition of UDP hole punching revolves around having a server with a constant address, reachable by both clients, outside both NATs to coordinate the timing.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/386/

https://xkcd.com/1807/

Gyroscopes... How do they work? What the hell are they really up to?

https://xkcd.com/332/

Actually Randall Munroe is more worried about velociraptors.

Once again, Mr. Munroe gets it right well before his time.

https://xkcd.com/341/

Did they only study AF or AF and 19 other health conditions?

I think this XKCD is pretty applicable:
https://xkcd.com/1827/

Obligatory XKCD : https://xkcd.com/1810/

Last set of panels.

That should give you an idea how it was meant.

Who's "they"?

The bogeyman, of course! Depending on who you are pandering to, it's conservatives, alt-right, the NRA, GamerGate, MRAs, Fascists, KKK, Nazis, Neo-Nazis, etc.

These days, it's all about whipping up a mob, and if you define the "enemy" too closely you can't get a big enough mob. It's why you have things like the "women's march" with no clear goals or message, with pro-sharia leaders, speakers who were convicted for torture and murder, and literal terrorists as organizers.

Most of these people calling for "free speech" in the case of Gawker would be the first to decry it when it comes to sites like Breitbart, infowars, and Drudge Report. They're the same crowd that loves to point to this XKCD (which completely misunderstands the principle of free speech) when they push for corporate censorship of opposing political views whilst mocking defenders of free speech with the phrase "freeze peach".

Does it look something like this?
https://xkcd.com/1856/

Score one for correlation vs. causation.

https://xkcd.com/552/

Obligatory xkcd

Or someone took the $5 wrench technique seriously when obtaining his passwords and hit him once too many times.

And if you went back 10 or 15 years the idea of carrying a GPS tracker with a microphone, multiple high resolution cameras and data connection to a cell network around in your pocket wherever you went would have sent the tinfoil hat crowd nuts. Yes potentially sometime in the last decade or sometime in the future maybe the governments of the world have secret backdoors that they could use to enable listening in, tracking or filming people via their smartphones and even track people who aren't carrying a phone by voice analysis of phones they are within range of. Connecting a device to any network you don't own and control is fraught with danger as well but the internet has become pervasive because people accept those risks and the actual demonstrable damage caused is almost non-existant relative to the benefits.

If it helps you get through life to consider yourself a special snowflake then that's fine too.

Obligatory xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/1860/

https://xkcd.com/465/

XKCD should receive "first post" for this. Or possibly claim an infringement of copyright for the story?

https://xkcd.com/1807/

Gee... with numbers like that, it'd seem that it'd be practical to use nuclear bombs as propulsion to get all that energy into making a payload orbit the planet. It'd probably work well on paper, but you can be sure nobody would want to deal with the complexities of cleaning up after a bomb-based liftoff.

Somebody designing such a thing would be a good sanity check on your math.

Oh I agree, like I said, 100 time more, maybe it's 10,000x more. The exact amount isn't the point. The point is that the question should be "which option is most likely to cause me the least grief?" The answer to that question isn't necessarily "which is the least vulnerable to remote gremlins being bad?" The original question is too focused on that. Your payment system may get compromised ten times, but not cost you a dime. Your Bitcoin or your cash getting compromised once, will most certainly cost you money you won't recover.

Rather than a longer rehash, I'll just leave this here.

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