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How do you intend to use this to fight cancer? Yes, you might be able to use it as a delivery mechanism, but there's no easy way to differentiate cancer cells from regular cells. Nothing here jumps out as doing something different that's relevant. Most things we use on cancer (radiation, and chemo) work by differentiating between regular cells and cancer cells, generally using the fact that cancer cells are always reproducing. No aspect of this process has anything to do with cell reproduction. This isn't even in the petri dish category https://xkcd.com/1217/.

https://xkcd.com/462/

The discussion was not about EM drive. And nobody has done what you're describing, they've just been pouring huge amounts of power into the thing inside vacuum chambers and measuring "thrust" near lower bounds of their measurement equipment's sensitivity. XKCD said it best.

Furthermore, let's stop obscuring it behind the name "EM drive" and call it for what it is: "Shawyer's Fantastical Perpetual Motion Machine". Because that's literally what's being proposed: a violation of the laws of physics that would allow for perpetual motion. Versus the obvious answer of measurement error / mass loss / etc, I'm going to have to side with the latter.

oblig XKCD

What does sanitizing data have to do with preventing "SQL injection flaw" besides absolutely nothing?

Ask little Bobby Tables, he'll tell you: https://xkcd.com/327/

There is sadly widespread belief SQLi is caused by failure to perform data validation/sanitization. This belief is both incorrect and dangerous.

What does sanitizing data have to do with preventing "SQL injection flaw" besides absolutely nothing?

Ask little Bobby Tables, he'll tell you: https://xkcd.com/327/

You could do some kinky stuff with The Force, amirite?

Yup.

At least post the relevant one.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/678/

10 years never means 10 years, it just means they have no clue.

TBH, it sounds exactly like these arguments https://xkcd.com/1227/

Slowly got worse over years? Decades? Centuries? People/organizations using information (or disinformation) to their advantage.... that seems new? Nothing like the propaganda of old?

newspapers knew why what sold to some degree, but with nothing like the detail or vital capability of clickbait.

That doesn't sound new it just sounds like new technologies and mediums through which newspapers and other news sources must operate. Clickbait, is a new term for a poster titled; "The Dog Faced Man" or "The Bearded Lady". Just look at the circus posters from yesteryear and tell me those don't look like clickbait from a different time.

The abuse of statics was particularly bad, because it made people think that even facts were untrue.

[I am assuming you meant statistics in 'statics' and typo.]

Hasn't statistics always had this problem? There are lies, damn lies and statistics? Your telling me people abusing statistics to their advantage is somehow new and novel today then the past? Come on, just look how long the gun debate has been going on to see how statistics is bastardized to see how each side use it to their advantage.

https://xkcd.com/937/

You just inspect their cameras and media on the way out and if either you find content that you cannot access, or you find a discrepancy between the size of the content reported plus the free space when compared against the size of the media, you take steps anywhere from seizing the offending device to tying them to a chair, putting a football helmet on their head, and then beating their helmeted head with a baseball bat until they tell you how to access the content. .

Exactly.
http://xkcd.com/538/

Since this may involve (corrupt) government, nothing prevents them from detaining you, drugging you, and hitting you with a $5 wrench until you give them your password.

I would say the level of encryption should be close to the plausible deniability that TrueCrypt had been touting about: one storage space that contains "meh" evidence, and one hidden space to store the condemning evidence.

To (1), see this and this and this and the obligatory xkcd. Important take home message - it's not just the raw scale of increase, but the rate of increase. It's well outside of a natural timescale which those same historical records indicate is on the order of thousands of years. What's happening now is 8x faster. Also, we know what natural causes drive global temperatures (Milankovitch cycles, ninos, volcanic eruptions, and other things) and can model that. When we take those into account, the observed warming is NOT recovered. Only including the effects of increased CO2 and CH4 levels accounts for the observations.

To (2), see this, and this and a lot of other refs if you google it. Main take home point: in the past, natural global warming (which should take place over thousands of years, see above links), has lead to the further emission of CO2 coming out of the oceans and other places (see here, hence the lag. This was predicted to be the case by Hansen et al before the lag was discovered.

Microsoft has improved their estimation algorithm quite a bit then.

https://xkcd.com/927/
At least we agree on DICOM

Yeah, and soon it might even be the fastest-growing computing platform! https://xkcd.com/1102/

I stopped reading xkcd when he decided to use his comic as a platform for political advocacy.

Yeah god forbid a cartoonist uses politics for inspiration for his work. What will the world come to.

Also, I think whatever humor value it provided in the past is vastly outweighed by all the mouthbreathers who are compelled to post "obligatory" xkcd links on any given subject.

So what you're saying is you have no sense of humour and you're an asshole who looks down on people for finding something funny written by a guy who doesn't sit in the same square of the political compass as you. We here at Slashdot would like to thankyou for your inspirational and informative view of books you've never read which will be enjoyed by people who you will never understand.

But maybe I have this all wrong. Maybe you don't find it funny because you don't understand the topics enough to see the humour in them. Fortunately Randall Munroe has a good book that would suit you well:

Obligatory XKCD

Report 12323a: "Instead of personal effects, luggage contained bobcat. Would not inform again ...

The usual, perhaps subconscious, argument against that is that the poor person isn't smart enough to realize that the options that seem worse to him are actually better. Or that they're too lazy to look for the other options. There is, as with most stereotypes, a kernel of truth - people are creatures of habit, and tend to stick with things longer than they ought to (obligatory XKCD).

But it's still a pretty arrogant and often inaccurate way of looking at things. In this case, it's unlikely that the Scottish employee has been with Amazon for 20 years, so that Amazon is all that he can imagine working for.

I'm sick of these articles that sound like they are mansplaining the basics of tomahawk fusion that we have known since the 1970s

Ten Thousand

https://xkcd.com/1328/

You know what's more inconvient than a broken phone? Your phone setting your fucking house on fire, that's what.

This article shows how wide the skills gap really is. By Slashdot standards, the vast majority of computer users are tech-illiterate. What we take for granted -- for example, knowing anything about Flash security -- is completely beyond them. The linked article also fixes this divide as the reason UI is hard: if you are capable of making one, you are ipso facto not able to judge the needs of the average user. My perspective on this has always been that some of humanity has to sacrifice our brains to this technological morass that we have developed, and the rest of humanity is much happier not knowing. We just have to accept that the rest of humanity is perfectly able to lead rich, fulfilling lives without having to give a shit about Flash vulnerabilities, and try to deal with the consequences as best we can.

For perspective, here's how 1979 compares to the last 10,000 years. 1979 was at the time already a record hot year.

I'm not sure. It was snowing yesterday, but it's mostly melted now. Perhaps we need a theory of differential global cooling and warming. I'm somewhere that's experiencing global warming, so if my extrapolations are correct, the lake should boil off completely come February. Meanwhile where you are, there will be a mile-thick glacier.

No friend, you are flat-out wrong. No such debunking has taken place (care to provide even one citation?). Global temperatures have indeed risen in the last hundred years, and faster in the last 50 than in all of recorded history. See https://xkcd.com/1732/ for an excellent easy-to-read chart. Given even optimistic scenarios more rise is already unavoidably locked in. Rising temperatures caused by human emissions is a real effect, is unprecedented in its speed compared to natural variation, and is a big problem.

Obligatory XKCD

I dont trust any company which at its very beginning has such a megalomaniacal view of itself that it makes its logo "Do no Evil" .

Fair enough, but what large, successful company *doesn't* have the opportunity to be evil? I don't view that as megalomaniacal, I view it as taking the viewpoint that you may one day be wildly successful. I'm not suggesting that they've adhered to this motto exactly, but compared to banks, agrochem and pharma (in particular Monsanto's pending merger with Bayer), the food/tobacco industry (in particular Altria)...

Yes, it's a mildly disturbing motto, but at least they're confronting it head-on. Just my opinion though.

Congratulations! You're one of the 10,000 people today discovering floating point numbers!

https://xkcd.com/838/

As always, the IT seems to be in power here.

When talking about Grandmas, this xkcd is better.

Well, on my home rolled NAS appliance, I really like the ability to reboot all of my VMs very quickly when applying security updates, because I'm not the only one that uses it.

A fair point.

The thing is, there's so much damn drama over it that I'm curious what its detractors want to use in its place.

Typically sysvinit or mostly-compatible equvalents. From my perspective, they don't want to learn something new, and they don't see the existing system as broken.

And why are some people going to go out of their way to say "you don't need a faster boot time" when they don't know my use case?

The obligatory XKCD applies. Most boot processes are fast enough now that it's not really worthwhile for an end user to shave a few seconds off the time. On the other hand, doing something as a hobbyist is entirely about wasting time, so I won't hold that against you.

The biggest improvement over antique boot systems is going to parallel boot chains. Rather than running scripts one at a time, in order, a tree is built to determine what services are dependent on what other services. For example, it doesn't make sense to start the SSH server until the network is live. There are several init systems that do this, differing mostly in how they define dependencies. Some rely on specific services ("openssh-server relies on network") while others work on more generic capabilities ("remote-shell relies on network, and openssh-server is what we'll use for remote-shell").

After parallelism, it gets tricky and subtle. Maybe we don't need all of a service to start before its dependencies. For example, we don't necessarily need all of our DHCP leases assigned before we know which network interfaces are connected. That requires a more granular service definition, but provides a lot more power, especially for systems with very complicated startup procedures. With that power, we can shave a few more seconds off the boot time, because we aren't required to wait while services settle, improving our overall parallelism. That's useful for me (professionally, I build systems that boot with a strict time limit, and may reboot every few hours), but most folks don't really benefit with the added complexity.

Furthermore, with the way I hack my Android smartphone, I'd love it if it booted faster.

I don't know much about Android init, but I think it uses its own system unrelated to systemd, sysvinit, or any of the alternatives listed in TFS.

"Grandma", I asked, "Which init system do you prefer? sinit, openrc, runit, s6 or shepherd?"

"Sonny", she replied, "That would be why Linux has not even 1 percent of the desktop OS market share."

XKCD.

Ok, look, he's probably correct, but why are we so hung up on a theoretical physicist's input?

Obligatory XKCD.

This study proves that working for a publicity-hungry quack clinic damages your ability to distinguish between association and causation.

The author http://www.amenclinics.com/sta... works for a clinic http://www.amenclinics.com/ that sells dubious treatments based on dubious SPECT diagnoses.

Quackwatch has this to say:

https://www.quackwatch.org/06R... A Skeptical View of SPECT Scans and Dr. Daniel Amen by Harriet Hall, M.D.

I believe it is improper to charge thousands of dollars for a test that has not been validated and may not be safe. I don't think any of Amen's research has provided clear evidence that patients who have had SPECT scans have superior clinical outcomes to adequately treated patients who have not been scanned. That's really the bottom lineâ"especially with an expensive test that involves significant radiation. At the very least, he should be describing the test as experimental.

Some of Dr. Amen's treatment suggestions also worry me. For example, he recommends: (a) uses for dietary supplements that are not supported by good evidence, (b) EMDR (a highly questionable approach), and (c) hyperbaric oxygen therapy for conditions not generally considered to warrant such therapy.

I don't doubt that many patients who visit the Amen Clinics are helped. The key question, however, is whether or not SPECT scanning is justifiable for most of them. I, personally, would not undergo the test at Dr. Amen's clinic even if it were free. In my opinion, based on current knowledge, the possibility of harm outweighs any potential benefit. Pictures showing that "this is your brain on drugs" may impress some people, but I am far more impressed by quantifiable data (such as tests of mental performance) and clinical consequences (such as improved behavior) than by nonspecific pictures of "holes" in the brain.

So this is an operation that is selling diagnoses and treatments not supported by legitimate scientific research. They wound up with thousands of SPECT scans and decided to do some data-dredging on them, a process that we know is guaranteed to produce false positives http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea... https://xkcd.com/882/ , along with any real causative association. They found an association with marijuana, and rushed to publish.

Once it was published in a journal, they made claims in the press release that weren't supported by the data:

According to Daniel Amen, M.D., Founder of Amen Clinics, "Our research demonstrates that marijuana can have significant negative effects on brain function. The media has given the general impression that marijuana is a safe recreational drug, this research directly challenges that notion. In another new study just released, researchers showed that marijuana use tripled the risk of psychosis. Caution is clearly in order."

Clearly false. Association is not causation.

Well played, sir. I looked at the quackwatch site, which had this quote from the Amen Clinics site "Brain-Soul connection." and found that sufficient. Not that that's not an interesting question in general; just that this current research direction seems no more likely to elucidate it than any of the others pursued over the previous 10,000 years.

This study proves that working for a publicity-hungry quack clinic damages your ability to distinguish between association and causation.

The author http://www.amenclinics.com/sta... works for a clinic http://www.amenclinics.com/ that sells dubious treatments based on dubious SPECT diagnoses.

Quackwatch has this to say:

https://www.quackwatch.org/06R...
A Skeptical View of SPECT Scans and Dr. Daniel Amen
by Harriet Hall, M.D.

I believe it is improper to charge thousands of dollars for a test that has not been validated and may not be safe. I don't think any of Amen's research has provided clear evidence that patients who have had SPECT scans have superior clinical outcomes to adequately treated patients who have not been scanned. That's really the bottom lineâ"especially with an expensive test that involves significant radiation. At the very least, he should be describing the test as experimental.

Some of Dr. Amen's treatment suggestions also worry me. For example, he recommends: (a) uses for dietary supplements that are not supported by good evidence, (b) EMDR (a highly questionable approach), and (c) hyperbaric oxygen therapy for conditions not generally considered to warrant such therapy.

I don't doubt that many patients who visit the Amen Clinics are helped. The key question, however, is whether or not SPECT scanning is justifiable for most of them. I, personally, would not undergo the test at Dr. Amen's clinic even if it were free. In my opinion, based on current knowledge, the possibility of harm outweighs any potential benefit. Pictures showing that "this is your brain on drugs" may impress some people, but I am far more impressed by quantifiable data (such as tests of mental performance) and clinical consequences (such as improved behavior) than by nonspecific pictures of "holes" in the brain.

So this is an operation that is selling diagnoses and treatments not supported by legitimate scientific research. They wound up with thousands of SPECT scans and decided to do some data-dredging on them, a process that we know is guaranteed to produce false positives http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea... https://xkcd.com/882/ , along with any real causative association. They found an association with marijuana, and rushed to publish.

Once it was published in a journal, they made claims in the press release that weren't supported by the data:

According to Daniel Amen, M.D., Founder of Amen Clinics, "Our research demonstrates that marijuana can have significant negative effects on brain function. The media has given the general impression that marijuana is a safe recreational drug, this research directly challenges that notion. In another new study just released, researchers showed that marijuana use tripled the risk of psychosis. Caution is clearly in order."

Clearly false. Association is not causation.

https://xkcd.com/927/

So does these ones apparently:
Poverty
African-American

Obligatory xkcd as a warning for maps (yours seem fine, though):
xkcd: Heatmap

You are full of it.

It is your choice to be unhealthy. YOU and only YOU choose what to eat and how much. It is your choice not to exercise. Boo F'n Hoo you feel a little pain. .

Now I was not obese but I was heavy when I walked into my doctors office some 8 years ago suffering from the flu. My doctor took my blood pressure at 160 over 110 and told me that he wanted me to start taking blood pressure medication or I would die from a heart attack in 6 months. I told the doctor that I was not going to start taking pills every day and I was going to do something about it.

My doctor asked what could I do on my own. I said "I don't know but I am going to do something."

I had a bicycle in my garage and thought I would do that. I started out only riding to the end of my street some 150 yards and back every day. It only took a minute or so do ride that. That was it. If you can't ride a bicycle 150 yards, you need to give up on life now. Was it painful? Hell yes it was, but I was rolling the clock back on that heart attack in 6 months. I discovered what I call vitamin N, "naproxen sodium" or Aleve https://www.aleve.com/. Take some. Deal with the pain.

I did that for a month and it became easy. Easy as in I was not sweating profusely and out of breath. So, for the next month, I rode to the end of the subdivision for a total of .25 of a mile some double the previous distance. I did that for 2 months even in the cold of winter.

After that became easy as in not as painful as when I started the .25 of a mile ride, I decide that I would get serious about this and start riding every day to work. Here is a few picture of me for the first couple of months riding to work... http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashin... Notice the drastic weight loss. The weight loss was not intentional, it was just a side effect

Was it painful...?? Hell yes it was. I made a choice to do that and stuck with it through the pain.... Well also taking plenty of Vitamin N.

I've continued to ride though the years and now ride 5,000 miles a year. As of this writing I am short by 117 miles... https://www.lovetoride.net/atl...

You want to know what keeps me doing it? I now can do things that kids half my age can't do and I am 51. I went out for a ride with a bicycle shop to get in some extra miles this summer. 56 people signed up for the ride and I out rode everyone of them... https://connect.garmin.com/mod...

I own the second fastest time of everyone who as ever recorded a ride of the Alpharetta Greenway here in Atlanta Georgia... https://connect.garmin.com/mod...

In my current job I have only driven to work 5 times since I have started working here almost 9 months ago. I drive only due to heavy rain. I didn't drive to work this morning only because it is raining here this morning. The first day we have had rain in 47 days. But here is yesterdays ride to work... https://connect.garmin.com/mod...

It is faster to ride a bicycle to work now than it is to drive here in rush hour traffic.

I don't want to listen to any excuses any more from fat people saying it isn't their fault. I've been there, it was my fault that I was fat. It was my fault that I was doing nothing about it.

Now it isn't my fault that I can out ride almost everyone in Georgia. Notice me in 8th place... https://nationalbikechallenge.... Notice me in 593rd place of everyone in the country... https://nationalbikechallenge....

> Because only when sugar substitutes be replacing sugar, does the "sugar-free" label become selling point.

Only until marketers get ahold of it.

The states have now been gerrymandered. Oh dear, that was funny.

I KNEW IT!

Becomes problematic when he's still an active topic.

Oblig xkcd

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/435/

Absolutely "real identities" should be required. So that means that a person has to physically show up to some store or government agency to verify their identity before they get a domain, using absolute standards and registrars who will be prosecuted for taking bribes to allow fake identities?

Oh. Then you're not really securing shit, are you?

We avoid voter fraud by requiring verification of ones name, age and address.

Citation needed. Plus the internet is worth a hell of a lot more to the world than silly shit like political news.

Obligatory xkcd

That's quite a claim. Did you check it on snopes?

XKCD Cryogenics

https://xkcd.com/669/

obligatory xkcd quote