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I can't find out info about that - and I want to! But, there's an interesting article from TIME comparing harassment of men and harassment of women. Shit I hadn't really thought of? Women seem to get harassed for "being women" moreso than men are harassed for "being men."

women’s harassment is more likely to be gender-based (...) (T)he harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. (...) a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”

I won't get into the end part there, not touching that with a ten foot pole. BUT - it's true; very few men are harassed just for being men. Relevant XCKD, perhaps?

How many unique English tweets are possible? How long would it take for the population of the world to read them all out loud?

Even with only 140 characters, there are *a lot* of possible English phrases.

And what if you tried to store them all for future reference? You'd end up boiling the world's oceans.

You don't even need a phone book. A pad - one time or otherwise - requires that both ends have the key. IOW, agreement ahead of time on encoding.

If you're going to do that, you can just agree to nonsensical, 100% non-mapping encodings such as this:

message: "The swan is in the jacuzzi"
meaning: "set the timer for 10 minutes and run like hell"

message: "seven burgers at midnight"
meaning: "the VP is the target"

message: "Transgender cotton candy"
meaning: "we'll meet at the fenceline"

...and of course, the key to breaking such an encoding is, as always, a heavy wrench, liberally applied with great force to either the sender or the recipient. Obligatory

Follow along with me: Cryptograghy is subject to ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) This means the Federal Government treats Cryptography as an Armament What does the second amendment say: "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" Hey NRA time to step up and defend the Second Amendment against the heinous assault. Slippery slope and all. You don't want these guys coming after your guns do you.

OMG... brilliant!

Prior art: https://xkcd.com/504/

Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness.

Obligatory XKCD

Please enjoy hunting me with your time machine.

https://xkcd.com/652.

What we need, is a new standard that standardizes all the other standards ...

https://xkcd.com/927/

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/612/

Section 26:
Functions

getRandomNumber()
https://xkcd.com/221/

I take your point. You're right.

That's very unusual on slashdot. Well done, sir. And, BTW, I apologize for inserting "silly" into my earlier post. That was unnecessary.

Now let's try to help. Please stop using the word "password." It's "passphrase." Thanks.

(ObXKCD.)

Passphrases are better, certainly, but without some significant anti brute force mitigation they're also not going to be secure for long. There are limits to what people can invent and remember, and are willing to enter regularly, and those limits aren't anywhere near the "red giant sun" range... particularly if people have to deal with many different passphrases.

I take your point. You're right.

Now let's try to help. Please stop using the word "password." It's "passphrase." Thanks.

(ObXKCD.)

And: https://xkcd.com/605/

Don't forget: https://xkcd.com/1102

Nope, that's toys. They can watch a movie and you can't.

Nope, it's not toys. Who cares about movies? I renew my license plates using the Internet, and at the rate the state is going, that will be the only possible way to do it by 2020. They're closing DMV offices all over the state, and they never had a mail in option. I have two different bank accounts that are accessible solely over the Internet. There is no local branch whatsoever. There are no branches in my state or in the neighboring state.

These are not toys. These are necessities of living, and I'm not a rich person. The trend is more of the same, where interacting with government, financial systems, and health systems are all moving to Internet-only. It's inevitable, because it's cheapest. They're closing offices, shutting down call centers, and eliminating mail handling centers. I don't give a fuck about stagehands. I need to be able to pay my taxes.

The Internet does, in fact, behave like a water or gas pipeline; both data and electricity flow like water;

Wrong. No, it doesn't. The Internet does not behave like electricity or water or gas. The analogy especially fails for water and gas. Water and gas are physical things, being moved into your house. You will perform physical processes using them, and they behave in ways specific to physical things, which do not apply to data.

Water and data are in no way analogous. Water requires acquisition, treatment, and the ability to move vast quantities of something very heavy. Water pressure and data throughput are in no way analogous. Water velocity is a physical thing, which can be very expensive to achieve. Data velocity is an electrical thing that costs nothing beyond powering the routers and switches. Specifically, moving no data at all costs exactly the same as moving maximum data (since the majority of installed routers and switches today do not have sleepy ports). Similarly for gas, though the power required to move gas is much less than it is for water, since it is much lighter. It's still far higher than that required to move data, and still changes substantially based on demand, because it is a physical process.

Electricity and data are not analogous either. Electricity must be generated, and that generation requires vast physical plant with, in the case of coal and fission power, extremely heavy inputs. How much you and your neighbors are using changes how much must be generated from moment to moment, which requires changing a very large physical process. Sending or not sending data changes nothing at all. Send, don't send, the same (minuscule) amount of power is required either way.

Congestion does not behave the same way either. If too many people try to draw on the capacity of a physical system, physical processes simply stop working. If the gas pressure is too low, your gas water heater will not ignite correctly, and will in fact extinguish itself if it's an older model driven by a pilot light. If the water pressure is too low, your shower won't work. If a network connection is congested, many things keep working. Only latency-sensitive things suffer, at first, and even that can be alleviated by QOS routers. There is no analogous process in water or gas systems. You can not simply throttle your faucet and make your shower work when water pressure is too low.

Data access is no longer a luxury, and while it's not magical, it's definitely special. Attempting to reason about it as if it were a physical thing fails in numerous ways, some of which I have described here. Other people do it a bit better, but I think I hit the high points.

I've always like the kidney harvesting joke myself

The devices were put in free-game mode. Granted, maybe not every admin was aware of the fact (more like "not still employed") but that doesn't change the reality of the first point.

The devices were put in free-game mode, possibly with the awareness that Some Punk Kid might do something obnoxious, and thus ruin it for everyone by breaking the Have Nice Things implied-truce. A risk to acknowledge and accept because some of us are just fucking nice and do shit like that anyway, strange as that may seem to the modern American mind. I'm pretty sure lots "art experiments" go even further about exposed stuff..

THIS is the obligatory XKCD, which is to say weev did something permitted but is still a dick. It even reminds us that society has ways of reacting; laws from a nanny state are appropriate for crimes but not for correcting manner.
https://xkcd.com/1499/

We're talking about 2 degrees warmer over 100 years; not global thermonuclear war son.

https://xkcd.com/1379/

No, real men edit inodes, by hand, with a magnet.

(Obligatory Userfriendly.org reference) http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

Magnets, schmagnets. Butterflies... or emacs... :-)

https://xkcd.com/37/

The 80's called? Did you warn them??!

No, it proves you don't know what the whole "free speech" thing is about. Take a quarter and go buy a clue, because you haven't got one at the moment. Now, you could just as easily say that news organizations stifle your free speech when you want to report that the sky is actually pink and paisley, but what they're really doing is simply saying "you're a fucking idiot, begone."

http://xkcd.com/1357/

Long polls? I don't think you realize how long the polls would have to be.

You are also mistaking the buildings these things are in for simple, flimsy structures into which one can simply drill a hole and drop a cable.

http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent...
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

I never got the 4K phone thing. Relevant xkcd!! https://xkcd.com/732/

obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1172/

C-x M-c M-butterfly

You're aware this is Slashdot right? You do sound like a YouTube commentator though....

I'll just leave these here: https://xkcd.com/202/ - https://xkcd.com/481/

You're aware this is Slashdot right? You do sound like a YouTube commentator though....

I'll just leave these here: https://xkcd.com/202/ - https://xkcd.com/481/

Obligatory XKCD.

I think it's good that they choose a permissive license for their source code, but their reason for it, Why MIT? is just... someone is wrong on the Internet

The GPL is upstream-centric, the MIT license is downstream-centric. We happen to prioritize downstream more than upstream, since downstream is what really matters: the userbase, the community, the availability.

It is the GPL that is downstream-centric and MIT that is upstream-centric. The GPL was designed to ensure that the entire program, source code, and ability to use it, are available to the userbase and community. The MIT license is primarily about avoiding liability, so anybody upstream of the userbase has greater privileges than the community.

I wish them well, but it’s a hindrance when they get the community aspects so wrong.

Jeez, doesn't anybody know how to make a link any more? Standards.

Obligatory XKCD

That reminds me: https://xkcd.com/894/

https://xkcd.com/1329/

https://xkcd.com/1497/

Few people know this, but Hillary Clinton is the final boss of the Democratic party. Also called the Queen of Corruption, she is currently a level 100 Democrat. All level 100 Democrats have the the Corrupt Soul ability, which allows them to corrupt anybody 10 levels below them. If you want proof of this, Obama was a level 90 Democrat when he was elected. He's currently level 100, but because Hillary is a raid boss, her stats count as 3 levels above him, thus making her the final boss.

Bernie of course stands no chance against her, because he's only a level 34 Democrat with quest greens. Hillary's ass is so big, she can literally one shot him.

Hillary also has 100 minions who are lvl 40 Democrats who can crit heal and replenish mana cash at anytime, she is also known as the Fallen Angel. When she is full charged she is a lvl 103 False Prophet and gains the ability Full Immunity.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/393/ - I particularly like the despair in death's voice when the guy pulls out the rule book.

As usual, there is a relevent xkcd.

Are real estate people making a killing in buying/selling land on coasts or farm area that will supposedly be affected by global warming?

XKCD

it's a clear improvement over what's in web browsers now

- I doubt it.

Here is an obligatory xkcd for you : https://xkcd.com/1002/

and Randall will get to re-release a cartoon...
https://xkcd.com/713/

.01 millirems is 1 BED (Banana Equivalent Dose) The amount of radiation from the potassium-40 in one banana. https://xkcd.com/radiation/ is a handy chart that provides a scale of radiation. There's a good entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (It uses Randall's chart)

This one kind of fits also.

I can't help but think of this xkcd comic.

https://xkcd.com/723/

Obligatory xkcd... sort of https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

Problem: there are N relevant places to look for CVEs

Solution: let's make a better one!

Problem: there are N+1 relevant places to look for CVEs.

https://xkcd.com/378/

Are there any classic games left where humans have a marked advantage over computers ?

obligatory: Game AIs