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Sigh....wrong html code! Here it is...
obligatory xkcd quote.

XKCD sums up my concerns

And as long as there are $5 wrenches.

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

I do the same thing. Since each of my new computers has had, typically, an order of magnitude more storage than the previous one, the entire recursive archive costs me less than 10% of the capacity of the new one. (I say typically because there was a discontinuity at the transition from spinning rust to SSD.)

Obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/1360/

https://xkcd.com/927/

> What can you do on a Chromebook that you can't do on just about any other personal computing device?

Do it for $200 new in box.

So the answer is no, there's nothing unique about what you can do on a Chromebook.

Beats me. But it doesn't matter much, because.

That's exactly my point. It has no unique functionality.

The point, sorry *my* point, is that it's a concept that's very difficult for Microsoft to compete against. A cheap enough OS to provide a $200 (retail) computing device that's at all useful, is simply not part of Microsoft's business model. As previously said by many here, they've tried before, and failed.

Now, part of that failure is expectations previously set. When people found that their Windows CE or R or whatever they were calling it at the time, would not run Microsoft apps, that was often a deal killer. Whereas practically anything with a browser will run the Google suite. The Chromebook is an admission that you just don't need much in the way of local apps to be productive. And that's a space where Microsoft has a very difficult time playing.

> What can you do on a Chromebook that you can't do on just about any other personal computing device?

Do it for $200 new in box.

So the answer is no, there's nothing unique about what you can do on a Chromebook.

Beats me. But it doesn't matter much, because.

That's exactly my point. It has no unique functionality.

> What can you do on a Chromebook that you can't do on just about any other personal computing device?

Do it for $200 new in box.

> Does it have some exclusive functionality to compete with?

Beats me. But it doesn't matter much, because.

- can be legally (?) confiscated, unlike say a password that is encrypted inside a brain, to access the latest and greatest bomb threats? - ...

Nothing a $5 wrench couldn't retrieve

Undoing

.NORM Normal File Format

https://xkcd.com/463/

They probably want to study them to see if there has been any damage from radiation or other issues, but leaving them running longer may help them to find more useful information.

That's just what they said about Spirit.

I see an XKCD fan: https://xkcd.com/927/

Data privacy is so far down the list of problems in my life it barely registers.

Maybe it's different in Europe & Canada, but in the US we aren't guaranteed healthcare (and I have friends who struggle daily to get the medicine they need to live), inflation's about 4.5% on necessities (food, healthcare, rent, insurance, tuition, etc) but pay raises top out around 3% if you're very, very lucky, my government's actively involved in 8 wars, working on 9 and 10 and using the debt from those wars as an excuse for why they can't pay for us all to have healthcare. Oh, and my taxes just went up this year.

The rich and powerful have much, much better ways to oppress me than invading my privacy. Any talk of it is just a side show from much, much bigger problems.

We've known from since the time of Royal Rife that to build real Star Trek tricorders, you need to resonantly stimulate and sense the characteristic frequency of the testing material. This mucking around with nano blood samples is still messy biology. Also once you can determine the resonant frequency, it's a simple matter to destructively overdrive pathogens to blast them to bits. This has been settled super-science since the late 1920's.

Rei, you seem to have confused my reply with another one. I didn't say anything about the bumper...

The rain issue is a design flaw: https://youtu.be/hCv_Ha0oWjE

Some have speculated that it might be fixable with a better seal that catches the run-off water, but I think it has too much velocity by the time it gets down there.

I did actually have a Model 3 pre-order but cancelled it. Aside from anything else it's too small. Very low, the boot entrance is tiny. Sat in one in the UK, the driving position is not great. Plus the quality issues were very off-putting.

According to the Model 3 Owners Survey

The problem with these kinda of informal survey, especially on an aspirational product like a Tesla, is that they rarely give any kind of accurate reflection of reality. This XKCD is also highly relevant: https://xkcd.com/937/

On the Ars article someone reports that the screen crashed while driving, and the wipers stopped working. Imagine suddenly having no wipers in heavy rain on the motorway. Maybe they work great 99.999% of the time, but like Autopilot occasionally decides to drive at speed into a wall that 0.001% failure is pretty serious.

They're giving the impression that we're talking about recent Model 3s here.

That's Tesla's problem really. If they shipped crap for a year and it clogged up their service centres and pissed off consumers, just saying "oh but we fixed it now, honestly in a year you will find that these cars have had fewer problems" isn't really going to cut it.

To be fair they do seem to be improving, especially on paint and panel fit. But that doesn't really help early adopters or give CR something they can work with.

Humans can't tell if a crossing guard is legitimate or is just impersonating a crossing guard. Oh no!

https://xkcd.com/1958/

Somebody will inevitably post this xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/2030/

However, it's not a remotely valid comparison. They're comparing planes and buildings operating under normal circumstances with software being attacked by a malicious actor. Software is actually far more robust than aeroplanes and buildings when faced with a malicious attack.

An unskilled person can easily destroy an aeroplane or demolish a building. We saw this on 9/11, when a few people equipped with nothing more than pen knives were able to destroy multiple planes, bring down two buildings, kill thousands of people and do billions of dollars worth of damage. When faced with an attack by a malicious actor both the aviation engineers and the civil engineers failed utterly.

Meanwhile, an electronic voting system would stand up far better to a malicious attack. While an unskilled person can easily bring down a plane, the same unskilled person would have no clue how to circumvent an electronic voting system. With an online voting system like this Swiss one, the best an unskilled person could do is click around a bit on the website, and achieve precisely nothing. Even a skilled person would have trouble circumventing an electronic voting system, and it would likely require considerable research, extensive planning and effective execution.

So, contrary to what the xkcd comic says, aviation engineers and civil engineers are crap at their jobs, and an unskilled attacker with a pen knife can destroy their "safe" products. Meanwhile, software engineers are far better at their job, and an unskilled attacker would be powerless to circumvent their work, while even a skilled attacker will struggle.

Right, I'm glad I could get that off my chest, because that xkcd comic annoys me every time I see it.

Heh, I was expecting you to: follow up with this.

Another standard... Good luck with that!

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

... for building Skynet, and it'll be Lisp or perl.

And we all know which one the Lord used: https://xkcd.com/224/

The big problem with the whole climate change thing is that it is hard. It's hard to analyze and even harder to predict the ultimate outcome, because there are just so many factors that all interact with each other. It's all imperfect so you can't guarantee the exact outcome.

This statement shows a really significant lack of understanding about climate science, and science in general.

Yes, it's hard. But it's also science. Science doesn't "guarantee the exact outcome". That's a typical layperson's misunderstanding of science, because science is hard and complicated, our education system is fairly crap in explaining how it works, and the media wants soundbites, eyes, and clicks rather than to convey understanding.

Science, unlike pseudo-science, gives a value and an uncertainty, and can explain how both are calculated. Climate science is no different. A whole lot of the media nonsense about "climate scientists say they were wrong about X" is often them reducing the size of the uncertainty. If I say, "There are 50 cows in that field, give or take 10", you know there are between 40 and 60. If later I count better and say, "There are 47 cows in that field, give or take 3", we now know that there are between 44 and 50. Note that 44 to 50 is a subset of 40 to 60, and has higher accuracy and less uncertainty. This is a good thing.

Unfortunately, most people view this increase in certainty as a bad thing, because it makes the original prediction "wrong". In large part this is because the media doesn't talk about the uncertainty, only the value. And often just a spitball average value, or an extreme value. "Dude claimed there were 60 cows in field, turns out there only were 44!", "Dude off by almost 30% on Cow Claims!!" would be the media headlines of the previous example.

It's baffling to me that "we know more about this than we did yesterday" is treated as if all knowledge should be suspect. In popular culture, apparently if you can't be omniscient, there is no reason to ever trust a single word you say. What's missing is the admission that science is the best tool we have for understanding the world. It's an imperfect tool, but we don't have an alternate tool. And given that, it's really important to understand what that tool tells you, and how it works. Without that, you can't really have faith in it.

And the earth is an oblate spheroid. I thought everyone learned that in school.

why is that in this era that we are living in, people can't believe in what they want?

https://xkcd.com/154/

If anything I'm nostalgic for pre-september USENET, FidoNet Echomail, and QWK/BlueWave packets from BBSes. Not because of the technology, but because of the camaraderie. And the cost of sending by (non-free, even local) slow modem means people weighed their words and didn't send anything superfluous. Like previous messages in their entirety, with extra quoting added.

My experience is that replies in paper generally don't take the form of a single line in crayon tacked on top of my entire message sent back to me. They'll just refer to my letter. Something that decent email clients do automatically, so why include the entire previous content? It makes no sense. In fact, sending letters back is seen as an insult. I likewise see top-posted crap as an insult. A double insult: Sent back the letter and couldn't be arsed to put any sort of effort in writing a reply.

And there is a difference: There is a widespread etiquette to letters that you get taught in highschool. The same highschool whose teachers themselves can't write emails to save their lives either. Another difference is that it "feels different". People do sit down and take an effort more conciously than when writing emails. At the very least the act of printing the thing (if it's not hand- or typewritten) invites (proof)reading your letter once more than happens with email. Even the act of signing the thing by hand invites "but what am I putting my signature below, really?"

So while printing before reading obviously makes no difference on the content (but probably does on the reading comprehension!), printing after writing but before sending certainly does make a difference. I did use to print long important messages and took a marker to them, typically while on the toilet, before another round of editing.

So regardless of skill levels, people writing a paper letter tend to put more effort in it. Which doesn't change the generally poor skill levels, I'll give you that. But seeing the difference I still prefer paper. The perceived biggest cost of the stamp already means I'll get less attention-sucking idiocy in my paper inbox. The actual biggest cost is in writing the letter (unless your time is free). Reading is next. And yeah, the writer generally doesn't count reading cost, but if paper makes them consider cost at all, thus reducing my reading load, that's a win. So paper it is. Maybe I'll try email again once I get around to hosting it myself and rejecting poorly-formatted email at the gate.

Thinking about it, this is the same sort of mechanism as why abandoning powerpoint is such a productivity boon. Making presentations takes a lot of time and adds a little colour to your dour talking, but both the making and most of the use in a talk are a distraction. And thus you lose sight of, and fail to put sufficient effort into, what's really important, ie. conveying the message. With pretty stuff that looks nice, true, but that isn't actually contributing to that goal sufficiently for the cost of making and using it.

But it's so easy to do! In the same way, writing emails is too easy. This is a widespread problem.

"What it would do is any X-rated pornography stuff would be filtered."

Yes, of course. Why not pass a law so that guns don't work when being used by thieves and murderers, while we're wishing for fantasy magical stuff with no basis in reality.

https://xkcd.com/1425/

I believe the Politifact article you are referring to is: here. If this is not your article, please provide a link. This link shows your post to either be confused or full of carefully constructed half truths.

Your list of net givers appears to be taken from the figure from the California Legislative Analyst's Office, January 2017 (original). If so, you are reading that figure wrong. That is the per capita federal spending in the state - what the feds send back, not the net transfer.

Much of the original discussion around this started with a study from The Tax Foundation. Characterizations of this group range from neutral/non-partisan to fiscal conservative/business friendly. That study listed the top ten givers as:

Colorado: $0.81
New York: $0.79
California: $0.78
Delaware: $0.77
Illinois: $0.75
Minnesota: $0.72
New Hampshire: $0.71
Connecticut: $0.69
Nevada: $0.65
New Jersey: $0.61

and takers as

New Mexico: $2.03
Mississippi: $2.02
Alaska: $1.84
Louisiana: $1.78
West Virginia: $1.76
North Dakota: $1.68
Alabama: $1.66
South Dakota: $1.53
Kentucky: $1.51
Virginia: $1.51

But that's from 2005, and the California report I linked to above said they had questions about its methodology around estimating taxes paid by Californians.

WalletHub put out an analysis last year on "2018’s Most & Least Federally Dependent States." That list is largely similar, but with California buried at (gasp!) #39.

I have better things to do on a Saturday than correct people on the Internet, but if you'd actually like to have an informed discussion, we can pull data from the IRS and understand why PolitiFact's conclusion was there isn't a simple answer.

I believe the Politifact article you are referring to is: here. If this is not your article, please provide a link. This link shows your post to either be confused or full of carefully constructed half truths.

Your list of net givers appears to be taken from the figure from the California Legislative Analyst's Office, January 2017 (original). If so, you are reading that figure wrong. That is the per capita federal spending in the state - what the feds send back, not the net transfer.

Much of the original discussion around this started with a study from The Tax Foundation. Characterizations of this group range from neutral/non-partisan to fiscal conservative/business friendly. That study listed the top ten givers as:

Colorado: $0.81
New York: $0.79
California: $0.78
Delaware: $0.77
Illinois: $0.75
Minnesota: $0.72
New Hampshire: $0.71
Connecticut: $0.69
Nevada: $0.65
New Jersey: $0.61

and takers as

New Mexico: $2.03
Mississippi: $2.02
Alaska: $1.84
Louisiana: $1.78
West Virginia: $1.76
North Dakota: $1.68
Alabama: $1.66
South Dakota: $1.53
Kentucky: $1.51
Virginia: $1.51

But that's from 2005, and the California report I linked to above said they had questions about its methodology around estimating taxes paid by Californians.

WalletHub put out an analysis last year on "2018’s Most & Least Federally Dependent States." That list is largely similar, but with California buried at (gasp!) #39.

I have better things to do on a Saturday than correct people on the Internet, but if you'd actually like to have an informed discussion, we can pull data from the IRS and understand why PolitiFact's conclusion was there isn't a simple answer.

Look at this XKCD comic.

The farther you get from pure mathematics, the more skeptical you should be of so-called 'scientific studies' and the more you need to question the study's methodology and statistical analysis.

What we should already know is that agenda-driven 'researchers' can do everything in their power to bias 'research,' submit their findings to non-trustworthy 'journals,' and most unskeptical people will tout the findings without knowing the bogus processes behind the results.

Why, this week alone, we've seen several 'studies' posted on slashdot with dubious research:
    1. Study about violent video games without large samples, representative samples, and survey based data collection.
    2. Study about glyphosate that purposefully used only 'high exposure' data to derive their 41% cancer increase.
    3. Investigation into Tesla's 'autopilot' where a difference of 18 cars worth of data causes a 100 percentage point swing (+40 to -59).

We as consumers of this information just need to be more skeptical that farther away the research gets from hard science. Sociology research should be ignored outright; medical research should be taken with a large grain of salt; physics/chemistry research should be relatively reliable.

But still be wary, snake-oil salesman exist in all areas of research -- anyone remember cold fusion?

I can still remember this over many years... but let me Google the link... fond it XKCD

Obligatory XKCD : https://xkcd.com/605/

Fastest-Growing

xkcd already has a new comic in remembrance of Opportunity. This new one makes me smile wistfully, rather than wanting to cry.

Ah, I see you are a machine person. I too am a machine person.

I'm kind of surprised this XKCD panel hasn't been posted yet: https://xkcd.com/1504/

For the benefit of the non-trolls here an informative and fun graph of the climate in the last 20000 years:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Make sure to scroll down to the very bottom (the present).

"These are the types of changes they're talking about" No, they're explicitly talking about changes over millions of years. The ice age 20,000 years ago wasn't the starting point. It's been way hotter than now, and temperatures have swung wildly before too. Randall was very picky-choosy in this xkcd.

xkcd already has a new comic in remembrance of Opportunity.

This new one makes me smile wistfully, rather than wanting to cry.

https://xkcd.com/2111/

Obligatory xkcd about its twin: Spirit. We learned a lot from these machines. I hope Matt Damon can one day use one of them to phone home.

For the benefit of the non-trolls here an informative and fun graph of the climate in the last 20000 years:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Make sure to scroll down to the very bottom (the present).

I just wish they'd hurry up and start recruiting space miners to go to the asteroid belt.

You read too much sci-fi. IRL, when miners go to the asteroid belt, they will be robots, not humans.

There is no practical reason to send humans beyond earth orbit. Robots don't need life support, they don't need expensive ultra-reliable gear, and they don't need to come back home.

https://xkcd.com/695/

Funny you should mention xkcd... https://xkcd.com/1732/

Is it really necessary to talk about extrapolation?

Is it really necessary to talk about extrapolation?

Is it really necessary to talk about extrapolation?

Is it really necessary to talk about extrapolation?

Mum: Ifeveryone else was jumping off a cliff...
Today's kids: Yes, Mum. Yes I would.

Obligatory xkcd.

1. Take a look at this: https://xkcd.com/1732/
2. "Global cooling" was a briefly hyped (six months at best) concept at some point in the 1970s. It has never represented the scientific consensus.

Obligatory: XKCD

Obvious troll is obvious.

Real programmers use butterflies