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It's not that marijuana has never been linked to any deaths, it's that there has never been a lethal marijuana overdose, and estimates of the LD50 are 20,000 to 40,000 times the normal dose. I have no doubt that marijuana in combination with other drugs or other health conditions could be fatal, but [a] the difference between the effective dose and the lethal dose is one of the greatest of all psychoactive substances, and [b] consuming a lethal dose is more than a little impractical. It is completely impossible to consume a lethal dose of marijuana cigarettes. Even taking low estimates for the LD50, it would require smoking more than one cigarette per second for a sustained period of time.

As you no doubt know, the role of cannabis in producing psychosis is debated, and odds are there are genetic factors there as well. I believe it is more fair to say that drug use can produce psychosis in susceptible individuals, without needing to be more specific. Similarly, there are studies on both sides of the violence issue, and using the word "linked" is somewhat disingenuous. I believe further study is necessary to be able to firmly establish either position.

Cannabis has been established as one of the safest recreational drugs. One can even make favorable comparisons to caffeine. As one of the >40% of the US who has tried marijuana, I would say you're being alarmist, and I don't think that balances out the "pro-drug propaganda". Telling people to "Fuck off!" is also not indicative of a desire for honest discussion.

Or this one

.

http://xkcd.com/224/

Hey!
https://xkcd.com/570/

I was expecting this one: https://xkcd.com/552/

Exactly. I ran some back-of-the-envelope calculations on this 3.5 years ago in another Slashdot thread. https://slashdot.org/comments....

And because we're presumably too lazy to click that link, I'll paste it below for your reading pleasure...

This is why: http://what-if.xkcd.com/17/ [xkcd.com]

There simply isn't enough solar power delivered to the surface of the aircraft, even at 100% conversion efficiency, to move people and luggage using only available sunlight.

Google tells me direct illumination to a surface perpendicular to incoming full intensity sunlight is about 1.4 kW per square meter. Google also tells me that the wing surface area of a 747 is around 5500 square feet. Only half of the 747 wing is directly illuminated by sunlight at any given moment, but the surface of the fuselage could be covered with photocells as well, so 5500 square feet overall is probably a decent estimate for the directly illuminated surface area of the aircraft as a whole. And for hand-wavy purposes lets assume that the entire surface of the 747 is perpendicular to the incoming sunlight (i.e. a planar plane... pun totally intended). And that we have perfectly efficient photocells giving us 100% conversion efficiency. Running the math, this gives us around 715kW under bright direct sunlight, or about 959 horsepower -- the equivalent of 1.5 2012 Ford Shelby GT500's.

Each engine of a 747 generates around 15,000 horsepower at cruise, and around 30,000 at takeoff, and a 747 has four engines. So you need around 125 times the power generated by a perfectly efficient perfectly illuminated solar-powered 747 to get said plane off the ground, and around 65 times the power for cruising. And then you could only fly it in the middle of the day near the equator.

The stupidity of some IT people is staggering. We had one case where they put AV on a highly isolated system and then had to compromise its isolation to allow over-the-net updates. When we told them that the system was not isolated anymore and that at the very least the AV vendor could now attack them over the network, they did not even understand what we were talking about. They mumbled something about "all machines must have AV".

Have you asked them if they approach their kids' schooling with the same keen sense of security?

I don't think anyone should be surprised that so many in the US access it. So, the top users are from "Iran, China, India, Russia, and the United States"? I think XKCD had something to say about that...

someone's got to link the relevant xkcd

https://xkcd.com/384/

A 10yo with god level access to social media made me think of this...
Locke and Demosthenes

That's what I'm wondering too. First, humans were hunter-gatherers. Then we domesticated plants (developed agriculture).

Then we got upset that wild herbivores were eating all the crops we had put so much effort into cultivating. So we fenced them out. But they kept breaking in so we hunted them down and ate them.

Then we noticed it was getting harder to catch wild herbivores to eat, so we began domesticating those as well.

Wild predators were having trouble finding enough to eat (because we'd eaten most of the wild herbivores). And they turned to the only remaining viable food source - our domesticated herbivores. We tried the fence thing with them too, but again we eventually hunted down and killed them as well. They don't taste as good, so we mostly used their skins or mounted them as trophies.

The end result of thousands of years of doing this is a seriously screwed up ecosystem. You're not going to be able to fix it simply by eliminating domestic livestock. It's going to take a multi-pronged, controlled reintroduction of wild predators, wild herbivores, and wild plants in order to jump-start the ecosystem back to the way it was. If we adopt the PETA dream of simply stopping eating meat, the ecosystem is going to go through decades if not centuries of wild flora and fauna populations cycling through overpopulation, overgrazing, flooding, starvation, overgrowth, fire, repeat over and over until the fluctuations dampen out naturally.

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1338/

It's a generally effective stunt because few few people actually try to verify signatures.

https://xkcd.com/1181/

In my professional life, I had numerous encounters with customers and managers who either say. Such process is impossible for a computer to do, while it has a lot of steps each step is logical (or sometimes just can be skipped) allowing for a quicky program that solved hours of laborious man hours. Then you get the seemingly simple request which is very easy to explain, and train a person to do. While for a computer it is a difficult tasks and the chances of failure are higher than the acceptable limit.

Obligatory XKCD.

I always thought Randall should do a followup to this XKCD comic with "hold him down and swipe his finger on his phone to unlock it."

The only faster than light effect that has ever been observed (and has in fact repeatedly been demonstrated), is the situation where a journalist sees the word "entanglement" and immediately starts typing "faster than light communication" without any time delay whatsoever.

Obligatory xkcd.

For example I think the Linux (POSIX?) file system was written before they invented autocomplete, it's all TLAs like /var/usr/bin/lib/wtf.

In this case it's the file system hierarchy, not the file system. Personally, I think the argument for longer filenames is bogus. Using longer filenames isn't necessarily going to make their purpose any more clear, and for everything outside of the home folder, the novice user should probably not be touching that stuff, any more than they should be poking around in C:\Windows. Being user friendly is not a feature for things that are not intended for casual use. Autocomplete is an even worse argument: I'm not saving any keystrokes by typing /bi[TAB] versus /bin.

However, your example was somewhat poorly chosen in another sense, because while there is no call to make the names longer, at least one major distribution got rid of some of those top-level folders. Fedora likes to move fast and break things anyway, but in this case the historical justification for splitting up the binaries was, well, kind of ridiculous. Thompson and Ritchie created that particular issue a couple years before CP/M inflicted drive letters on us, but forty years later it's still a bug worth fixing. Most of today's code and systems will be pretty hoary in forty years, and I'm not sure I would consider it a virtue if it ran unmodified on my...hmm, well, whatever system exists at that time. One can always use emulation to provide old features, but most of the time I'd rather that not be happening at the OS level.

Given that Windows inherited both 8.3 filenames and drive letters from CP/M, it makes sense to talk about them in the same context. Drive letters are pretty harmless, but having "secret" 8.3 filenames and unremovable folders is probably something that needs to go. Linux definitely doesn't have those kind of problems.

Well they couldn't get in in the first place (and I had a few ideas that are very possible that would completely bypass the operating system and just get at the data (and one pass will get everything), and even though the data would be encrypted, you could brute-force attack the encryption scheme with acres of processors and get all the data in a deterministic and reasonable amount of time (the judge would be happy). And I have no doubts that there are *other government agencies*(tm) who would also have no problems opening that iphone up like a can opener and suck all the data out without batting an eye. And I don't think the FBI is all that terribly bright when it comes to those computer thingies. I think they focus on: suit,tie,gun,shoot. Maybe not in that order, but I think they don't have a lot of deep-thinking analysts over there. Its like finding a theoretical physicist that plays football. Its possible, but you would need a few dozen, not one in a million. So they paid someone. The someone showed them. There was a video, there was a paper. There was a demo and the data was retrieved. You have to pay attention, understand and think. And if things got too: "I think I understand that part", "Ok, I think I understand that part". "Ok, Jim thinks he understands that part". "I don't understand how those parts work together. " Then you have a solution that no one but the person who came up with it (and their friends) who can "do it", and a bunch of flat foots (flat feet?) who are going "just call that guy again." Its like this.

outside of the FCC's rules from the 1940's -1960's that were put in place by republicans wanting to save the children from talk about nipples.

Hold up, everybody. Someone is wrong on the internet!

The FCC was created by the Communications Act of 1934. Signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This law was updated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Signed into law by William J. Clinton.

The commission is designed to have a 3-2 party split - although there have been "independents" from time to time to get around this. For the first 2 decades it was controlled by Democrats. Since then it has switched back and forth, with a roughly even split of control.

There is no shortage of nannies in either party. The last great moral panic about the entertainment industry was spearheaded by Democrat Tipper Gore. Unless you count Thompson's video game thing. I don't know if he had a party affiliation, other than the nutball party.

To truly attain the high ground you have to align with one of the fringe parties. Like the Green Party. They have nice, consistent(ish) ideology-based positions. Or the Libertarians. Whatever. The point being, you get to be holier than thou with everybody.

Obligatory xkcd

Excess heat causes the keyboard to expand and flex, breaking the internal wiring.

That's actually a feature.

The following comes to mind:
https://xkcd.com/538/

Sure it's not a hammer, but incarceration sounds like a reasonably persuasive wrench...

He's a cop. Its a federal detention center. He's being accused of child porn crimes.

Its probably already worse for him in there than being pounded with a wrench.

+1. My old Nokia broke 3 months ago, and there's basically no cheap durable dumbphone à la Nokia anymore on the market.
So I've bought my first smartphone, a 2nd hand Moto G 1st Gen. It does everything I need and much more, and it would be like an upgrade to an iPhone 12 for someone already used to modern smartphones.
Obligatory relatex XKCD : https://xkcd.com/606/

It's basically the nuclear power plant equivalent of this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/932/

in other words, probably some old pc isolated from the network used for running some legacy software of a non mission critical nature was discovered to have old worms on it. "Data visualization software" could well just be something as innocent as an Excel spreadsheet.

https://xkcd.com/1013/

Wait. You're waking them so they can read? I don't know if they will go along with that plan.

In other words, something like this:

Bob wants Eve to send him an office chair. Instead of sending Eve the money first, or asking her to send the chair before he sends the money, he offers to have Alice hold the money in escrow. When Bob confirms he has the chair (the condition), Alice will release the money to Eve.

Instead of an office chair, Eve sends Bob a package containing a bobcat. This failure to meet the criteria puts the escrow payment in jeopardy.

Relevant links:
https://xkcd.com/325/
https://xkcd.com/1323/

In other words, something like this:

Bob wants Eve to send him an office chair. Instead of sending Eve the money first, or asking her to send the chair before he sends the money, he offers to have Alice hold the money in escrow. When Bob confirms he has the chair (the condition), Alice will release the money to Eve.

Instead of an office chair, Eve sends Bob a package containing a bobcat. This failure to meet the criteria puts the escrow payment in jeopardy.

Relevant links:
https://xkcd.com/325/
https://xkcd.com/1323/

1321: Cold

You're thinking of Emacs. C-x M-c M-facebook.

Obligatory XKCD: Don't wake the sheeple!

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Husbands.

There are logical fallacies here. If we can simulate something in "some" way, we do not necessarily have to assume that we will eventually end up with perfect simulations, even with infinite time. Or that ever growing size of simulations will have to necessarily culminate in universe scale simulations. This optimism is along the idea of Victorian assumptions of progress or along the lines of Cartesian optimism before it was tempered with Lockean empiricism. There will usually be previously unanticipated hard stops... like the speed of light.

Tyson is obviously a master of his subject and I am not a physicist and I don't understand these simulation theories in their native form. But this summary makes it sound like we are getting ahead of ourselves with assumptions.

Yes, correcting people who are wrong is just disgusting. We should of course be encouraging insane beliefs instead of correcting special snowflakes who can't accept that they're just wrong.

Said the paid troll.

Or are you this guy? Duty Calls

Forgot to include the relevant xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/869/

This, or if he is a sysadmin, you should hire him.
Here is a bonus xkcd for you : https://xkcd.com/705/

I know just the place for it...
https://xkcd.com/350/

A point of comparison:
- based on TNT content a hand grenade release between 400 and 800kJ when exploding. (example of source)
- unit conversion: 1Wh battery = 3.6 kJ (and 1Ah or 1000mAh x 3.7 V = 3.7 Wh = 13.3 kJ)

So your garden variety ~3000mAh LiPo "18650" 3.7V cell holds a little bit under 40kJ.
Your laptop long life 9-cell 8900mAh battery pack holds a little bit under 100Wh or nearly 360kJ, about the same ballpark range as a smaller grenade (hence the xkcd comic).

A long-ranged drone's (e.g.) 6s high voltage (= 6* 3.7V = 22V) 16000mah is 355 Wh or a whoping 1.2 MJ.
This drone has a battery that gives of the same range of energy as two hand grenades.

Yup, this is dwarfed buy the combustion of kerosene: 1 liter gives of 37 Mj (or about the same as pile of about a thousand "18650" batteries - fuel is still a denser energy storage than lithium). And the combustion chamber of the jet engine will probably not even notice if a puny little drone battery went "poof" inside.

The thing is, an air-plane is far more than just the interior of the jet engine's combustion chamber.
And there are a lot of parts of that air-plane that wont appreciate the explosion of a drone battery.
Think of it, if you need to test it by throwing chicken at it (ball park estimate: an average chicken weights ~2.5 kg. I use an approximate speed difference of 500km/h. That gives us Ecin = 1/2mv^2 = about 25 kJ of cinetic energy), an air-plane is going to take some damage from the equivalent of 2 hand grenades lobed at it.

A single drone impact won't cause the plane to sustain a catastophic hull failure (as TFA points out, the plane successfully landed safely afterwards), but it's certainly going to do a lot more damage that fowl.
When ingested by the engine, even if combustion chamber won't suffer much, the turbine is going to take quite some damage.

Oh, and the obligatory XKCD

Genetically modified T-cells to treat cancer, reminds me of this.
https://xkcd.com/938/

https://xkcd.com/1235/

This isn't about means of worship, it's that this isn't worship because the guy in question doesn't actually believe there is a flying spaghetti monster.

There are a lot of worshippers who don't believe the literal meaning of their literature. For example, many Catholics don't believe in transsubstantiation, i.e. that the host (wafer) turns into the flesh and the wine turns into the blood of Jesus during communion. That reminds me: https://xkcd.com/1152/

Suppose I use some third-party encryption that is made available anonymously or from another country, so there's no company to compel to reverse it. (Think TrueCrypt, or something from Schneier's Applied Cryptography.) Now suppose I plead the fifth and refuse to decrypt it. What then? We start blocking any site that hosts such a thing? Burn books on cryptography? Ban people from running compilers? Code escrow of all source with the NSA on pain of death?

Sure, there's the obligatory XKCD wrench decryption, but otherwise... I'm not sure how this makes a lick of sense.

the amount of ambient light is impressive.

Meh. It is not as impressive as everyone using a 500 Tera-Watt NIF laser.

Obligatory xkcd.

If you look at the EIA data, you'll see the coal generation percentages by year (if you manually compute them from the data).

2010: 45%
2011: 42%
2012: 37%
2013: 39%
2014: 38%
2015: 32%

That 6% drop from 2014 to 2015 was due mostly to many units closing due to the MATS EPA requirements (the Supreme Court ended up issuing a stay on that regulation, but only after generators had spent the money to upgrade the units they decided to keep open, and after many of the units were retired). There are some significant MATS-related retirements in 2016, but I would expect the retirements to drop off dramatically after that since the remaining units will have made those significant capital investments to meet the MATS requirements.

If the Clean Power Plan survives and natural gas prices stay low that will likely lead to significant retirements by the early 2020's.

https://xkcd.com/1447/

Obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/927/

I see one advantage in snap apps. The current situation is depicted in this nice xkcd https://xkcd.com/1200/ perhaps in the future we will have more isolated applications.

Obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/638/

It's all in the mouseover text, but we (should) know that here.