Domain: xkcd.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to xkcd.com.
Comments · 12,563
-
Re:Neutrino Radiation
Neutrion? Do you have a link. The only think I've read about lethal doses of neutrinos is this https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ which suggests you'd have to be about 2.3AU from a supergiant undergoing core collapse. (yes, XKCD, but plenty of citations).
-
Re:Enjoy it while you can.
This puts it well:
http://xkcd.com/1576/ -
Re:Water as rocket fuel
Well yeah, but in the case of this book/movie, they used liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen engines like NASA uses currently.
Looking through Up Goer Five, it looks like all the stages of Saturn V used liquid H and O for fuel:
-
Re:They want us to make it easier for them?
Hmm. Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/936/
-
Re:Never reuse passwords
This is too hard for the average user to use. While it is good security policy it simply isn't going to happen.
A much more achievable goal is to get people to use a couple of different passwords which they then grade into the 'don't care if compromised' 'care a little' 'care a lot' 'O fuck no' category. Also I think people should be steered away from the alphanumeric random password idea and towards an easy to remember string of words. maddisoncompromisedmarriagelost is a hell of a password to brute force.
Oblig xkcd https://xkcd.com/936/
-
Richard Stallman is stilll playing
-
Re:Password cracked?
You got it wrong. It's "correct horse battery staple". Proof.
In keeping with proper slashdot etiquette, I must now insult you. So here goes: you democrat!
-
Re:Systems that only allow likes, vs likes and dis
It works both ways of course. Many people have been trained to "like" everything they see on social media platforms like YouTube.
There is also the obligatory XKCD problem. A large number of up-votes is just as useless as a large number of down-votes in many cases.
-
Re:Change the channel, Marge
OS X doesn't suffer from the 'mobilization' of the desktop
That isn't quite true. It is suffering from 'mobilization', and also 'socialization'.
Snow Leopard (10.6) was the best release ever. Since then it has been going steadily backwards, albeit slowly.
I remember reading one of their '200 new features in the next release' that mentioned Facebook 46 times. That was when I knew it was all going to be downhill.Apple got an early lead in the race to the bottom by taking away great things like expose, but then they seemed to falter a bit.
Linux and especially Microsoft were, as usual, late to the party, but have since caught up with Gnome 3 and Windows 8 respectively.
We'll have to wait and see who manages to get to their 'Hitler' version first.
-
Oblig. xkcd
I am always reminded by this XKCD when I see articles like this:
You can read just about anything into anything if you squint hard enough.
"Star Trek's latest iterations — the 'reboot' films directed by J.J. Abrams — shrug at the franchise's former philosophical depth."
I was going to say "Of course they do. It's two films so far. About four hours of material." But then I thought about the first two or three original movies...
-
Cyber Spies!
Rocket Kitten, a cyber espionage group that mostly targets individuals in the Middle East...
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1573/
-
Re:Just more censorship
-
Protected fontInspected the source for the page: They're not using a font to render the logo, they're using an image... Why?
To prevent people from downloading and re-using a font? Or do I not recognize the font because I'm simply one to whom all fonts look the same?
see the Anonymous post above:Obligatory XKCD
https://xkcd.com/915/ -
Re:The market for this
If drinking was taking place then as long as the engineers are within the Ballmer Peak when they design the self driving carts there will be no issues.
-
Self driving cars...
I'm going to love self driving cars. I will never own one, they'll have to tear the steering wheel out of my cold dead hands, but pranking self driving car owners will be funny as hell: https://xkcd.com/1559/
-
Obligatory XKCD...
-
Re:Business and Bitcoin? What could go wrong?
-
Re:Business and Bitcoin? What could go wrong?
also, the system itself will go bad. the system is composed of intrinsically weak human beings. only in the low iq fantasy life of conspiracy theorists with mental illness are human systems perfectly infallible. in reality they are full of holes and bad actors and weak points and fail many times on a daily basis, the larger the organization. that's why airtight conspiracies of more than a handful of people are impossible and why most conspiracy theories are jokes to anyone without mental disease and with a sufficient social intelligence
so under your alternate legal system, the system itself will commit the worst atrocities
but that's completely off topic. your comment has nothing to do with *technology*, only legal systems, society, and human organizations
this is technology being no protection from bad intent:
-
Re: Business and Bitcoin? What could go wrong?
you're right, my answer isn't a real answer
the real answer to the problem, how to get around any encryption in the world, now and forever, is this:
same with mt gox: all the fancy blockchain technology doesn't mean shit when you hand the keys to a thief
so, like i said: technology is no protection from bad intent, and never will be. you can only fight bad human nature with good human nature
the facts of life. now shoot the messenger or admit the reality you live in
-
Wait what?
meaning you won't be able to watch movies like The Hunger Games and World War Z through the service anymore
Well, this would have been a big loss indeed. If I had been able to watch those movies through Netflix to begin with, not being in US.
It's absolutely mindblowing how much distributor-to-distributor backstabbing goes on in US and it just doesn't matter here because they never got around to get their stuff here in the first place. Obligatory XKCD.
-
Re:LISP
I prefer this one: https://xkcd.com/297/
-
Re:LISP
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/224/
-
Re:wan port
The problem is there's currently no model of security that works for nontechnical users that doesn't involve an outside party.
That's one problem. Another is that most technical users think that they are smart enough to get up security that can outsmart the NSA and hackers. 99.9% of technical users are wrong about that. And even if they're right, http://xkcd.com/538/
I suspect that almost all technical users would be safer if they used gmail or outlook.com rather than whatever home-brew imap/postfix thing they set up on their home or work Linux server (or Windows server or whatever). But we're uber-geeks so we'll pound our chests and insist we can do better.
This access point seems likely to be as safe as any of the best APs, and since it will be updated regularly I bet that in 2 years it will be safer than any other AP you buy now (unless maybe you do regular OpenWRT updates. Maybe.)
-
OB xkcd
-
Re:Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Actually packages can only be at two locations: "your house" and "still in transit".
-
Re:do we need emojis at all?
Here's a video on the subject.
It's worth spending the time to watch it (heck, it's worth spending time to watch most of Tom Scott's videos - it's Sunday, you don't have anything better to do anyway), but the jist of it is that the goal of the Unicode system was to have a single representation which would be able to encode *all* existing electronic documents. Emoji were already existing as a special feature of documents (text messages) send over certain Japanese phone systems (this is why we call them emoji, rather than "smileys"). If you wanted to represent those messages in Unicode, you need to have code points for emoji. To omit them from Unicode means there are existing electronic documents which *cannot* be converted into Unicode, meaning you're still stuck with standard proliferation, the very thing which Unicode was intended to fix.
Now that rationale only goes as far as the existing emojis. It doesn't extend to the new emoji. The reason for those
... well ... that's because emoji escaped their Japanese origin, and the worldwide community is wondering why there are six different emoji for sushi and none for <insert other regional cuisine here> -
What about sandwiches ?
So, now we have to say "machinectl shell systemd-run do make me a sandwich" ?
Looks way more complicated.
-
Could be worse, Fesora 19, Schroding"er's Release
It could have been worse. Fedora 19 was the "Schrödinger's Cat" release, and it broke number of software installation tools . Many old scripts in bash, ruby, or perl would read "/etc/issue.net" or "/etc/fedora-release", and now had to parse the Unicode content with a single quote and two text words embedded in the text. For many old, simply written shell scripts, in particular, it broke them _very_ badly.
For many of us, Fedora 19 was known as the "Bobby Tables" release. ( https://xkcd.com/327/ )
-
Re:PBS show of cellphone cancer recently
A third party documentary title Mobilize suggested cellphone radiation may be cause head and cheast cancers. ANd that telecom lobby was quashing research into this.
Au contraire: cancer causes cell phones.
-
In case that's not impressive enough
-
Re:Comparison?
So is medical science not "real science" because we've had quite a few stories over the last few years that a ton of results from medical research and drug trials can't be reproduced.
A large percentage of medical studies are funded by manufacturers, and it's fairly well understood that most of those don't get published unless they produce the "right" results. And those that are published are often really "preliminary", based on too little data to be considered reliable. But if a test on 10 or 20 patients gives the "right" results, there is a lot of marketing pressure to get the paper published right away.
This easily explains the growing problem of medical products that are found to be worthless (or even harmful) to the patients, after years of heavy marketing has produced large profits.
There's also the age-old problem that studies with "negative" results usually don't get published at all. As usual, there's a good xkdc comic that explains the methodology in a way that even the minimally numerate reader can understand.
-
Re:Time investment
Dude got nerd sniped. I wouldn't be able to resist. An interesting puzzle mysteriously shows up? Yes please. Basically how I got into programming and math in general.
Of course all they're going to get are people who aren't savvy enough to use ad/tracking blockers and duckduckgo...
Speak for yourseelf. Somebody is monitoring your searches and evaluating you remotely like some lab rat in a glass cage. To me that is ceepy just like all other surveillance, nothing else, just creepy.
-
Re:Time investment
Dude got nerd sniped. I wouldn't be able to resist. An interesting puzzle mysteriously shows up? Yes please. Basically how I got into programming and math in general.
Of course all they're going to get are people who aren't savvy enough to use ad/tracking blockers and duckduckgo...
Heh. Google Foobar popped up for me last week. I blew two hours solving problems before I pulled myself away and got back to work.
-
Re:Time investment
Dude got nerd sniped. I wouldn't be able to resist. An interesting puzzle mysteriously shows up? Yes please. Basically how I got into programming and math in general.
Of course all they're going to get are people who aren't savvy enough to use ad/tracking blockers and duckduckgo...
-
Obligatory XKCD quote...
-
Re:What does Science have to say about this?
Placebo Blocker http://xkcd.com/1526/
-
Richard Stallman is now playing
-
Re:Ah, *that* Kieth Henson
Well, it works in Kerbal Space Program...
-
obligatory xkcd
yadda yadda https://xkcd.com/1217/
-
Re:24/7 here we come...
Well, I was going to point out that you were probably referring to https://xkcd.com/678/, but you got the reference wrong, if that's what you were shooting for. The correct reference is "It has not been conclusively proven impossible".
-
The First Rule of Model Train LayoutsThe 1st rule of Model Train Layouts: Do not talk about model train layouts.
(2nd rule: No nesting)
-
The linked maps are mostly meaningless
Because petitioners tend to be people, and people (oddly enough) cluster around regions of high population density.
-
Butterflies, silly! Obligatory xkcd
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/378/
-
Re:Space is for cows.
Space cows come back Pittsburgh Rare
-
Re:Unfortunately
-
Why? What advantages does this have over ZFS?
> a modern COW filesystem with checksumming, compression, multiple devices, caching, and eventually snapshots and all kinds of other nifty features
Instead of yet another FS flavor of the month, or year, (Reiserfs, Btrfs, Bcachefs, etc.) and all the man-hours wasted re-solving the same old problems how about just doing it right the first time (ZFS) ?? Because this is what it is turning into. What advantages bachefs have over ZFS??? There is no way in hell I'm going to trust an unproven, buggy, and incomplete FS when we already have one that works.
Fixing the Butr free space shenanigans would have been a step in the right direction: An existing debugged FS.
Reminds me of this xkcd #927: Standards
-
Based in parts on "Mars Direct"
The basic plan in the book is a variant of Mars Direct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct, which was a proposal for a much cheaper way of getting to Mars than previous proposals. The primary cost savings are in making some resources on site (especially fuel for the return). If you haven't read The Martian you should. The book was excellent. Also, relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1536/.
-
Obligatory xkcd
To keep slashdot tradition going:
https://xkcd.com/695/
https://xkcd.com/1504/ -
Obligatory xkcd
To keep slashdot tradition going:
https://xkcd.com/695/
https://xkcd.com/1504/ -
Opportunity
until the Opportunity rover finally beat it out in 2010 (and that little trooper is still going, by the way).
Obligatory XKCD link.