Domain: xkcd.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to xkcd.com.
Comments · 12,563
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Re:Demographics
That works out to about a 2% annual growth rate over the last 35 years, and Google seems to agree, though you'll note that it was down to 1.4% (50 year doubling) as of 2013 and continues to decline. For further perspective, the current annual growth rate for the US is 0.7% and India is 1.2%.
At that rate of growth, in about 200 years Costa Rica would be 16x their current population, or roughly 77million people. At the same time, the US would be at about 1.29 billion people and India would be around 13.6 billion.
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Re:People's instincts are correct
I'll say it again, LOUDER for the benefit of the usual internet idiots who can't be bothered to read:
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
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Obligatory XKCD
Comprising the root/admin account is sometimes overrated.
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The fear is highly exaggerated
If you haven't seen the counterargument, here you go.
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Re:pr0n forum? Really
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Re:They already invested in Slashdot
Much as you say, but I note that HRC has invested heavily in something called correct the record.
Looking at their about page, we find this helpful description:
Correct The Record is a strategic research and rapid response team designed to defend Hillary Clinton from baseless attacks.
The news article (first link, above) has some interesting sections, such as:
Citing “lessons learned from online engagement with ‘Bernie Bros,’” a pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC is pledging to spend $1 million to “push back against” users on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram.
Correct the Record’s “Barrier Breakers” project boasts in a press release that it has already “addressed more than 5,000 people that have personally attacked Hillary Clinton on Twitter.” The PAC released this on Thursday.
Some Bernie Sanders-supporting users on Reddit already started to notice the changes on Thursday afternoon.
“This explains why my inbox turned to cancer on Tuesday,” wrote user OKarizee. “Been a member of reddit for almost 4 years and never experienced anything like it. In fact, in all my years on the internet I’ve never experienced anything like it.”
Correct the Record, which has received $5 million this campaign season and has spent almost $4.5 million of it, according to OpenSecrets.org, outlined its strategy against “swarms of anonymous attackers” in a press release.
“While Hillary Clinton fights to break down barriers and bring America together, the Barrier Breakers 2016 digital task force will serve as a resource for supporters looking for positive content and push-back to share with their online progressive communities, as well as thanking prominent supporters and committed superdelegates on social media,” the statement read.
Due to FEC loopholes, the Sunlight Foundation’s Libby Watson found this year that Correct the Record can openly coordinate with Clinton’s campaign, despite rules that typically disallow political campaigns from working directly with PACs.
I suppose it's OK, because HRC only wants to "break down barriers and bring America together", because of course the ends justify any means. Right?
I wonder if any of these commisars^w um... partisans^w um... truth seekers have come to Slashdot?
(Also relevant This XKCD comic.)
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Re:A *Minimum* of Journalistic Skill
Relevant xkcd is relevant. https://xkcd.com/1060/
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Re:Video of the accident
No kidding. The just need to unlock the power of the vacuum!
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Pristine Code
I have two things to say about code style nazis:
1) If you totaled up all the money spent on trying to make code pristine in code reviews, you probably could have solved world hunger
2) You can have all the pristine code you like, but if it doesn't work, it's absolutely worthless. It's a big, shiny you know what.Summary: this discussion and my post consequently are a complete and utter waste of time that I can now never get back.
:PObligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/974/
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Re:Softare and wording problem
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/670/
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Re:If the singularity doesn't happen...
The fastest object we have ever launched:
The official record for fastest manmade object is the Helios 2 probe, which reached about 70 km/s in a close swing around the Sun. But it’s possible the actual holder of that title is a two-ton metal manhole cover.
The cover sat atop a shaft at an underground nuclear test site operated by Los Alamos as part of Operation Plumbbob. When the one-kiloton nuke went off below, the facility effectively became a nuclear potato cannon, giving the cap a gigantic kick. A high-speed camera trained on the lid caught only one frame of it moving upward before it vanished—which means it was moving at a minimum of 66 km/s. The cap was never found.nuclear powered and reached
.002%c in relation to the Earth, very briefly.quoted from https://what-if.xkcd.com/35/
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Re:Account passwords for cloud services = dumb ide
Old XKCD
For some reason we haven't found a way to transfer files well yet.
Or we have, but most people just don't want to use it. -
Re:points of interest
I think this is the one you are looking for.
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Heatmap
ObXKCD: Heatmap
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Re:FBI Word games
we're just going to have to accept a world in which prosecutions are a lot harder
Only if the "crime" begins and ends at one's own electronic device. People will be able to see wrong pixels - the horror!!. I don't think that is much of a crime. Or if constitutions are proposed to be modified to make such activities crimes then this limitation in enforcing them is a welcome deterrent to such legislation.
But if there is any real world, meatspace, brick&mortar etc. implications of the crime, they are as much investigatable/prosecutable as they were 2000 years ago. Criminals can now co-ordinate using electronic devices, travel using aircraft - unsurprisingly so can the "law enforcement". Both parties can create colorful flowcharts of their plans using Microsoft Visio, if they should be so softwarically challenged.
If the crime is inter-device, as long as data remains encrypted, it can't do much. For someones "data" to harm my devices, my device should decrypt it first - at which point there is your evidence. Otherwise, the harm my device came to could just be due the the volume of the data at which point encrypted data is equivalent to random data, so there is no need to decrypt it to investigate anything.
For the rest, I don't see any problem with asking for warrants. That ensures at least 2, somewhat independent, branches of government are involved lowering the chances of abuse of power.
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Obligatory xkcd
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Re:No productivity gain here, move along
As long as your script is doing compilations, then it's ok. Otherwise...
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Re:problems, lol
Ah! C is for kids, real man program in assembler, becouse optimizer is for lazy people, that waste precious cpu clock cycle.
Obligatory xkcd is obligatory: https://xkcd.com/378/
What do you mean assembler? That's for wimps. Now coding in binary using dip switches that's real programming.
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Re:problems, lol
Ah! C is for kids, real man program in assembler, becouse optimizer is for lazy people, that waste precious cpu clock cycle.
Obligatory xkcd is obligatory: https://xkcd.com/378/
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Re:So, how does this work exactly?
It depends on what you mean by "good." If you mean it in the sense of moral judgment, then you are correct. If you are mean "good" in the sense of "accurate to real life" then you absolutely can measure this.
For example, see XKCD... and/or tvtropes.
Of course this raises the question of if a "good" portrayal is a good movie. Who wants to see a movie of a woman sitting at a computer, programming, getting coffee, and occasionally posting to Slashdot for 2 hours?
And, as others noted, people focus on bad female portrayals... but how many fat/ugly/etc. male characters get cast as the hero of a story?
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Re:Another reminder of why wait before buying
Just don't be this guy: https://xkcd.com/606/
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Re:Young engineers ...
And you wanted "affect", not "effect".
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Re: Why is this news?
Users of WhatsApp (or Facebook) are not the actual clients/customers of these services. More here: https://xkcd.com/1150/
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Re: SMS-Based? Dear Flipping ${GOD}...
Thanks for sharing your experience, and congratulations on being one of today's lucky ten thousand
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Re:Pixels density
Obligatory Xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1014/
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Re:Recommended reading A method to detect and prev
See also, little Bobby Tables.
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Mandatory xkcd
Mandatory: https://xkcd.com/134/
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Re:or, maybe Google screwed up "ownership"
Due to custom compilation of hardware. The OS requires firmware for all of the interfaces and chips. While you may be able to get away with a "One size fits all" solution like Ubuntu on an AMD/Intel chip, there's a huge variety of ARM version chips out there, each with different clock speeds and (presumably) instruction sets. Not to mention all the different WiFi, Bluetooth, and GSM/Edge antennae.
On x86 platforms, we have standards for dealing with things like booting, drivers etc. That's what's needed for ARM too. It would help not only with smartphones, but also with SBCs like the Raspberry Pi, Odroid etc.
Somehow, I suspect it will be hard to get the different manufacturers to agree on such standards. Oblig. XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
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Dear effing Idiot Webmasters...
Puh-h-h-lease...
Stop playing games trying to identify the user agent and sending to different pages,. Mozilla has gone off the deep end, and there are multiple forks of Firefox (I use Pale Moon). Many idiot webmasters try to match user-agent to one of the "big 3 or 4". If the match fails, they assume it's some weird mobile browser, and force even desktop browsers to the mobile site. If I specify "bad.example.com/", I want the desktop version, not the mobile version.
If you absolutely insist on doubling your workload, go ahead and create a separate "m.bad.example.com/", but please don't try to force users to it, because it probably sucks. A couple of "obligatory" cartoons for you...
http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/...
https://xkcd.com/869/ -
Was this the cause of the explosion?
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Re:Pet Rock
This Pokemon Go shit is the electronic equivalent of the Pet Rock, Tickle Me Elmo, Cabbage Patch Doll, etc.
Useless.
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Re:Waste of money
To make sure it works once you use it somewhere else. This new docking system is supposed to be the new international standard docking system
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Re:Grey Goo Limit
You recall xkcd 865.
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Placebo cannabis?
After smoking the same amount of either an active or placebo form of cannabis
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Re:"Sharing"
Good grief, bro. You know what I find even more ironic? Your unhealthy obsession with trying to prove me wrong is over an opinion I expressed about a completely hypothetical scenario. Ever notice how the OP didn't respond to my very polite request for support that there's actually a widespread requirement for cabbies to be CPR certified? That smelled like bullshit from the beginning, and apparently it is.
Your DNR straw man you keep trying to shove down my throat is bullshit as well. You sound like a really smart guy, so I'm sure you can reason through (and probably write a book-length post about) the difference between a population of people who have chosen to get CPR certified and/or have chosen to work in helping professions, and a population of people who largely just want to drive a car and could give a shit less about CPR but have been forced to take it by box-checking bureaucrats. If you've actually been through first responder training, you should well understand that people who don't know and/or don't care about what they're doing can actually leave you worse off.
And on top of that, your downright creepy contention that CPR certification somehow gives you the right to just wait for someone who is actively denying consent to pass out, and then do whatever the fuck you want to them anyway, just further proves that we should not be manufacturing mass plausible deniability (er, I mean, requiring mass certification) for arbitrary groups of people.
It's clear by now that you're one of those "last word" trolls, so knock yourself out.
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Re:Why isn't this configurable?
Oblig XKCD
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Obligatory XKCD: Extened Mind
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Re:Oblig... for the AC
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Re:well...
It depends on what you call technically strong. As https://www.xkcd.com/936/ indicates, it is not intuitively clear which passwords are strong. Humans have a terrible instinct when it comes to entropy in data and therefore need to be guided in choosing a password. This often results in a check for length(which is a good thing), but also requirements for capitals, numbers and special characters(which is often used poorly). The result is that people will use passwords like Welcome0! which can be figured out by many people simultaneously and therefore is a weak password.
The 'technical' strength of a password is connected to its entropy. Using a password that satisfies some byzantine requirement, but contains not enough entropy is also weak in the technical sense. "Correct horse battery staple"-like passwords are strong, "Correct horse battery staple" itself is incredibly weak, thanks to mr. Monroe.
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Length damn it!
I spent 15 years developing and writing password / pass phrase security tools used on a huge number of web sites. I analyzed millions of brute force and dictionary attempts, as well as the offline tools.
In my professional opinion, where strength meters and password policies most often fail is that they greatly underestimate the importance of length. I recently encountered a site which required:
8-12 characters
Must include upper and lower case
Must include digits
Must include punctuationWell we've all been taught since 1st grade or so that punctuation goes at the end of a sentence, and the first letter is capitalized, so most passwords on the system are of the form:
Capital lower lower lower lower lower lower digit punctuation.Since the whole password is 8-12 characters, to get the digit and punctuation at the end you need a word that is 6-10 letters. Passwords are pretty predictable on that system. According to their policies, these are a good passwords:
Password1!
Passw0rd!But this is a horrible password, that anybody can guess:
YRNKBV JSYZCXPRM ZOXADEKO JARQYTLY
OFOFBQ VKGDOSUE XFEUJQOHG TZBVHQIA WSBQHKVD SPIODPLAllow and encourage long pass phrases. (Also encourage the term "pass phrase", not "password".) Making your pass phrase a tiny bit longer adds much more security than switching the number 0 for the letter O.
Ever heard of 2048 bit security? Or 1024 bit keys? That's how security professionals talk about strength - X number of bits. Those numbers refer to the LENGTH of the keys (passwords). That's what's most important above all.
See also:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/pa... -
obligatory xkcd
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Oblig
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Oblig XKCD
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Re:Desktop?
Desktops matter if we believe the summary:
"Google is aiming to solve this dilemma", where dilemma refers to fragmentation such as Facetime being iOS only, and skype being buggy and clunky.Personally, I think this is more like that xkcd comic about standards: https://xkcd.com/927/
I was doing video chats in the late 90's, and others were doing it before that. Two decades later and it's still a PITA to get everyone on the same thing and working.
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Re:Generalization is appropriate in this case
Other obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/386
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Re:"3 whole buttons to talk to Nana? Bullshit!"
Obligatory XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/927/ -
Re:Generalization is appropriate in this case
Oblig: http://xkcd.com/1717/
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Re:"3 whole buttons to talk to Nana? Bullshit!"
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Obligatory XKCD
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Re:Goto
Goto. I use that (in C) for error handling all the time, and frankly, it is about the cleanest way to do it I have seen.
One little goto. How bad can it be?