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Which gives you more radiation???

A. Flying from JFK to LAX. B. Going through that darn TSA scanner to get on the flight!

Answer is... A! (Wild surprise from the audience)

Which is worse?

A. Being an average flight crew employee B. Being an average nuclear power plant worker.

Answer is.... neither is "worse" you insensitive clod. "A" undergoes more radiation exposure but they both unfortunately have to work long and weird hours.

But we need to get around the same stigma that has hamstrung fission reactors - that "radioactive" means "cancerous death" to the electorate.

Wow... people like the original poster are the true problem. Everyone else, let's try to understand the actual facts about radiation. Obligatory xkcd:

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

... Approximations xkcd.com/1047

It doesn't have an approximation of pi: 355/113 (one part in 10,000,000).

I think you are refering to Approximations https://xkcd.com/1047/

I have a few exercises I give my students in which they have to make a guess at a quantity and then make a calculation to back it up. My favorite: If you marked off a tract of land in a 3x3 foot grid, and one person stood at each intersection, how many square miles would accommodate the entire world population, and what would be a country of comparable size?

Oblig: https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/

The obligatory Obligatory XKCD

And, for "real programmers write in....:" The Story of Mel.

What math concepts are they going to learn in a dumbed-down high school CS class that will help them enough to justify that kind of expense?

Variables and functions. See http://xkcd.com/1050/. It's the one where an ex-student is proud of the fact that in 20 years no one has asked her to solve for 'x'. This comic wouldn't exist if people were actually seeing how they probably actually do use some basic algebra, but they just don't know it. And at least if they saw it very blatantly being used in programming, they could at least understand why it's part of their school curriculum.

http://xkcd.com/301/

http://xkcd.com/350/

relevant infographic

On the plus side, your fencing skills would improve.

https://xkcd.com/538/

I can write a comment and lose all the earlier mod points, or just try to find a suitable downmod and let the stupidity stand unchallenged.

Third option: You just take a deep breath and move on. Focus on moderating further threads.

Let others reply and correct. You are not the only being on this site. xkcd 386 is supposed to be a joke!

Even if something wrong does end up as +5 insightful, nothing is ever perfect. Let is go.

I wonder if there's an inverse version of shibboleet that would be helpful when newbies ask for support in knowledgeable forums.

Oh hey, you're THAT guy. https://xkcd.com/1627/

Alternatives: Quit redirecting mobile users to the substantially inferior m.slashdot.org. ... or make m.slashdot.org not inferior.

Ob xkcd (not precisely the same problem, but captures the root problem): https://xkcd.com/1174/

NEVER say those last three words again!

(For example, many users are frustrated by Samsung's TouchWiz skin, as well as the bloatware resulting from deals with carriers.

https://xkcd.com/859/

(An unmatched left parenthesis creates an unresolved tension that will stay with you all day.

MSN Chat wouldn't happen to be this?

Obligatory XKCD

Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1508/

I think we need to wait till the year 2047 to answer the question, or maybe the year 4095.

Or maybe 2059.

Sadly no details in TFA about what this firewall does. Is it just a NAT box? Is it a full-fledged IDS with dashboards that can flash “TERRORIST HACKING ATTEMPT” in big red letters while everybody scrambles to cyber battle stations with klaxons going off?

*sigh* I remember when the word cyber was a verb that meant to have online sex on IRC. Hmm, actually, that gives me a strange new way to interpret stories about cyber stuff! Not unlike oblig xkcd (oblig for this comment anyway).

Is there nothing that doesn't somehow tie back to XKCD?
https://xkcd.com/1257/

Is there nothing that doesn't somehow tie back to XKCD?
https://xkcd.com/556/ [xkcd.com]

Seriously, this is cool - but the Trump name drop is as bad as apple-baiting.

Well, Trump certainly does have a history with offshore wind farms. He and his lawyers managed to delay the implementation of a wind farm project off the coast of Scotland for several years. It finally went ahead after he lost three successive court judgements.

His objection was that the turbines would spoil the view from his golf course.

If Trump was a real scot that episode would have ended just like that XKCD cartoon except Trump would have shown up with claymore and a wearing a kilt, his comb-over waiving gracefully in the wind as he charged the wind turbines yelling: “They may take our lives, but they’ll never spoil the view from our golf-course!” with a really piss-poor imitation of a Scottish accent.

Here is another relevant XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1257/

Is there nothing that doesn't somehow tie back to XKCD?
https://xkcd.com/556/

Seriously, this is cool - but the Trump name drop is as bad as apple-baiting.

Woosh.

(BTW, my understanding is that you need very complex adaptive optics to get clear views of small stuff on the surface from space. The optics correct for minor atmospheric issues. Same issues that make stars appear to twinkle.)

Actually, the problem of atmospheric turbulence causing blur is not as bad looking at the Earth from space as it is the other way around. The biggest problem is rotating the large telescope required quickly enough to track what you're looking at. There's a great discussion of the problem here.

Shhhh......you're ruining another excuse to swordfight in rolly chairs.

http://xkcd.com/303/

I know it's fun to be snarky about the fallibility of the cloud at times like these, but in fairness, I think one has to measure these unexpected outages against the productivity gains of having a convenient centralized point to synchronize your project online, especially for historically decentralized teams like your typical open source projects.

The notion that "git is decentralized" is obviously tempered against the requirement to synchronize everyone's repositories, right? Still, I agree... the whole "github is down, I can't code today" is an even weaker excuse than something like "it's okay if I'm goofing off - I'm compiling." One of the benefits of git (and Mercurial as well, which is actually my system of choice) is that it's trivial to make a local branch and start working on some new feature. If you're working on a project, then by definition you have an entire copy of the repository locally - it's not like you need to connect to github just to see your code or check in changes locally. Even if you can't see your bug/todo list, that just means it's a great time to make a branch and start some other little project, like doing some refactoring or code cleanup - or even, heaven forbid, some documentation.

https://xkcd.com/327/

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

Obligatory xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/1357

Really, freedom of speech does not mean anyone has to listen to what you say! And if you go out of your way to make your ads obnoxious, I have every right to block them. Because just as you have the right to speak, I have the right to ignore you.

A petabyte of storage isn't really anything when you are talking data center sized storage. It wouldn't even be a gallon jug full of microSD cards.

if your boss told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?

http://xkcd.com/1170/

Seriously, you shouldn't follow orders blindly and you should be responsible, but xkcd is funny.

I agree with you that the number of printable ASCII strings of a given length that include at least one lowercase letter, at least one uppercase letter, and at least one digit or punctuation character is smaller than the total number of printable ASCII strings of the same length. But it's about increasing the average security of an account, especially if the distribution is currently skewed toward more easily guessed passwords. If you make the least complex password more complex, you increase the expected time to compromise an account. That said, sites I've developed encourage use of passphrases by giving the option to substitute length for complexity: you don't have to include a digit or punctuation if the password is at least 16 characters long (after stripping leading and trailing spaces), and you can turn off password masking if you know nobody else is viewing your screen.

Counting sheep is good for going to sleep,

No its not

https://xkcd.com/927/

Easy solution, just bet at a 10:1 ratio against their 95% confidence interval. If someone really believes in their confidence interval, then they should expect to on average double their money from that bet despite the unfavorable ratio. Unless it's this kind of study

https://xkcd.com/1235/

http://xkcd.com/1624/

And yet it's the simplest, easiest to use version control system I've ever used.

Not everyone agrees that it's easy to use.

Frankly, your personal observations may be subservient to what you expect to see. The changes from climate change are generally going to be so gradual that you may not even notice that you've moved the bar.

https://xkcd.com/936/

https://xkcd.com/936/

Obig. XKCD
https://xkcd.com/992/

"Mary's Virgin Explanation Made Joseph Suspect Upstairs Neighbor."

However AmiMoJo has a special relationship, so he can post whatever he wants.

It's true. Years ago I bought a $5 subscription to get rid of the ads on mobile (before adblock was available). There was actually a problem processing it and I felt most embarrassed having to get support involved to process it. Strung that baby out for years.

Ever since then I've enjoyed a special relationship with the /. editors. They grudgingly tolerate my impertinence, and occasional wrath directed at them (especially around the who beta era, when my signature was less than cordial). They know I'm cheap, the kind of bastard who subscribes for $5 once a decade, but they also know I spend more time posting here than working and these days that's becoming a rare thing.

Thing is, I just love the down-votes I get whenever I post some SJW bullshit, so I'm kinda addicted now. Sometimes I travel and get withdrawal because I'm stuck on an aircraft with no internet for 12 hours. Well, I mean they have internet, but I'm too cheap to pay for it.

I used to come here for the insightful commentary and interesting debate, now it's mostly just to annoy MRAs and anti-feminists. I can see you have a rather high ID so are probably a millennial who joined yesterday, but the trick is to learn to let go and not read every single story. Just skip over it if you don't like it, or go to firehose and vote for something else. You could even submit some bullshit of your own, and I'll happily down-vote it and then re-submit a more click-baity, left leaning version myself. Your welcome.

Obligatory xkcd.

ObXk https://xkcd.com/1013/

Luckily Roku has a search that dives into your apps installed to find shows/actors/etc.....but you know the story from there: https://xkcd.com/927/

Give it a rest. We've heard this a billion times.

maybe not all of us.