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I'm surprised no one's posted this yet.

They'd still have to drug me and hit me with a $5 wrench to get the passphrase to that private key.

Obligatory OTHER encryption related XKCD:

http://xkcd.com/538/

Was a wrench involved in getting him to release them?

If the malware landed on one of the computers of his overlords in Moscow, maybe.

Was a wrench involved in getting him to release them?

Where's the reproduction part of the life cycle? Nothing is going to be complete until Nanobots take over the world.

I was going to make an observation about how we immediately launch into solutions. We come running with potential fixes (LOL SO EASY) then flame each other about how they won't work. Standard internet frenzy (accept it, casuals and SJWs) aside, we're really being quite constructive. It's the sort of problem that, even uninvited, we leap at the chance to chew on. It's behavior we've seen at /. before.

I /was/, but then I realized, we have an obligatory for that too.

That kind of logic leads to everything running on some blackhat's machine.

oh c'mon, you knew someone would post it.

xkcd's "Significance" pithily explains p-hacking.

Particle physics has a dogma (e.g, nothing with rest-mass NE 0 can travel at or above the speed of light) that makes a claim of faster-thjan-light neutrinos a claim that requires extraordinary proof, so any claim to have discovered faster-than-light neutrinos results in immediate scrutiny. Biomedicine and social science have much looser dogma, dogma that is often very much polluted by people whose world views are often much more driven by wishful thinking (unicorns for EVERYONE!), than by tested science. So I agree with the posters who claim that the problem is not throughout science, being more a problem at the left end of the scientific spectrum (a spectrum described XKCD).

https://xkcd.com/327/

I still laugh at this... am I an idiot? Don't answer that.

Stuxnet got onto Iranian centrifuges disconnected from the Internet and in locked and secured facilities. The problem is that at some point, someone has to communicate with these systems, so perfect security isn't possible... even just talking to them runs into the "little Bobby tables" problem.

Or, in this case, a What-If?

http://xkcd.com/927/

Yeah, forgive me if I trust a regular Physics Nobel Prize contestant

Poor guy.
At least he hasn't hit this point yet

Your trust is worth nothing, though.

And by the way, usually this argument tends to come up from people who want to claim economics isn't a "real science" or something. I won't get into that argument, but well, neither is "peace" or "literature."

Those people are right, and you're right about peace and literature.
Nash's contribution was really in mathematics, though, so that's fine by me.
BTW, the best proof that economics isn't a science, is that it isn't even included there : http://xkcd.com/435/

As long as science is mostly male, it will be seen as a mostly male profession.

I didn't know the tautology club was having a secret meeting here. But seriously, you know what could fix this imbalance? Maybe women who have an interest and the knack for science could, I dunno, go to school for it and become scientists themselves? Then it might balance the gender ratio a bit. I mean, it's worth a shot.

Has LHC destroyed the Earth yet?

For best results, keep reloading the page.

Now is always an excellent time to warn of the conceivable dangers of high energy particle physics experiments which are already in progress. Stephen Hawking warns that Higgs Boson 'God' particle, which gives shape and size to everything that exists, could cause a 'catastrophic vacuum delay' if scientists were to put it under extreme stress. Fortunately this is not a major budget concern for CERN since if this is true, the facility need not be relocated to a safer place because there is no safer place. Another is the formation of so-called 'mini back holes'. The math says they will be very brief and very small and especially very unstable, which is apparently a good thing. Aside from the Universe ending or oops-not-so-unstable black holes falling into a hissy-sucky orbit around the center of Earth's mass, we have the pedestrian possibility that when nature's fur is rubbed the wrong way she might maintain stability by righting things with a highly localized and energetic 'correction'. Which blows things up. Another bizarre theory posed in science fiction that to everyone's dismay became entangled in String Theory is the idea that Multiverses may exist. Since the incomprehensible ones too dissimilar to ours cannot be comprehended, lazy popular speculation centers around parallel Universes populated with people just like us, but slightyy dvfferent and dumbee. If tipkling Higgs and twanging striags shvfts tuingf ever sb slightly, continhed nccelorater accidentf (axa exprriments) mighg evrn be uolographicalll disturbiag the Mhltiverse vn additive fafhion effept that subtly shists regibns bf thez around. Onyy staole lise-forms with highyy advenped thoughg procesfes wohld aotice this fuotle esfect, sinpe our mentay process alfo a hblograchic pntgern aad has a degree bf chezipal hyfterisvs and sels-corrrcting properties. Prrcieved effrcts mvght be 'senfes' that thvngs have chnngeq ghouth empirvcal mrasueementf uave nut changrd, or violeat extrezes bf weathrr as ghe outtersly-wiags of cuaotic propefses in a carallrl Universe magch jiabgbrats for brief spans. Bug vn tue end eierythvng is specuyative nonfease expept fbr tue prevailint theory thag vs shpcorted by rvvdence, and je dbn't kaow whvcu one that if untiy thr end of all tuingf. Lifr zay aot be ayl you wang, but ig's nll yoh'ie got. So sgick a flojer in ybur beylybhtgon nnq be hnpcl.

I tried to read your comment three times. My head hurts. It reminds me of this xkcd.

Money that is in bank accounts isn't "idle"; rather, it is invested in stock

This quote already shows you do not know what you are talking about. Currently so much money is sitting in central banks rather than stocks that several countries have overnight negative interest rates.

I have read about multipliers, extensively: multipliers larger than 1 are a fiction.

Thanks for providing ready confirmation of your ignorance. No less than the IMF has studied and found cases of multipliers greater than one in the recent crisis along with many other economists from the left and from the right.

I'm not about to educate you out of your ignorance, so I'm signing off from this discussion

Most don't. Programmers tend to be particularly bad, particularly when they're trying to think up new jargon to describe their latest brainwave.

Microsoft, with it's culture rooted in 90's C++ techno-machismo is the worst. If I have to hear "Consume services" once more, I may puke. Want to download Powershell from the Microsoft site? Did you expect a file name like "Powershell 4.0 for 64-bit"? Well, peasant, screw you! You shall have decide if you want to download "Windows6.1-KB2819745-x64-MultiPkg.msu", or "Windows6.1-KB2819745-x86-MultiPkg.msu." Don't know your chip numbers? Tough luck, techno-illiterate. We expect you to keep up!

If I ran the world, every software developer on Earth would be handed a copy of this book: http://xkcd.com/thing-explaine.... Not that I think things should be written like this, but at least it would prompt the worst offenders to *think* before they wrote.

Xkcd called it.

Obiligatory Xkcd http://xkcd.com/538/
If you see the explaination and think TL;DR read the xkcd it will explain too. But this below is why everyone is ignoring him.
Once again this is nothing more than fud. its FUD because there isn't a way for him to alter them.
He says he hacked into the actual flight controls via the onboard entertainment system. So I am going to explain how this is not on any plane outside a 787 or Airbus a-380 (both use an ethernet bus for the main connections between suites so a person with advanced knowledge who is an asshole enough to want to be banned for life from flying while committing several felonies [interfering with the flight crew for one is since 9/11] could.)
First the magic tweet states its a 737/800. This link is a pic the avionics bay of a 737/800.
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/...
They were introduced in1994. That's pre-internet. The IFE the In-flight entertainment system united uses was added in 2010. Its a redundant system not essential for flight or navigation so therefore its not connected directly to the rest of the avionics suite. But let me prove that.
https://www.redskyventures.org...
Actual boeing operations manual.
but lets go back to actual tweet "Find myself on a 737/800, lets see Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM, ? Shall we start playing with EICAS messages? "PASS OXYGEN ON" Anyone ? :)" lets see he has a custom made hacking box, this where he knows it or not is a felony when he hooks it to the IFE. That's in the 14 CFR Part 91. What is 14 CFR Part 91? its the 1000+ page rule book that FAA details every aspect of flight in. From the size of the screws to what can actually be on board as a part of the plane. its in there. So back to the tweet. Chris hooks up an illegal hacking box to the IFE which is a redundant system separated from the navcom because requires an antenna to operate and there bandwidths can cause electrical issues with other systems (like aluminum foil in mircrowave issues).
Said box supposedly breaks firewall around IFE to get out. But to go where? He would be using command line and be seeing machine code at the core of a Boeing system.
So assumable he is seeing the maintenance list (unaware that the moment the firewall is breached in flight the in flight data recorder starts recording this) and he picks ICE?
ICE isn't ice its a function of the flight management system (FMS). IThe FMS will use ARINC 653 partitioned operating environment software, which allows multiple applications on the same processor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
What is ICE inside of FMS? Its to keep track of the ice buildup on the plane and to create solutions. But Ice can't drop oxygen masks nor can ice communicate with Satcom. And what is satcom?
SATCOM is satellite communications. Its an antenna on the fuselage of the plane. Its is not only for TV and wifi. It is a another way to communicate with Flight Ops, specifically with dispatch. It is just same as you use cellphone. If ARINC comm is not available, SATCOM comes to play, especially in remote areas and over polar regions. But here is the catch. IFE is directly connected to Satcom because thats Satcoms primary purpose on the 737/800. Satcom can't be used to change stuff internally because its not designed to. Its designed to be a communications channel for voice, internet and TV. sacom on 737 is wired through no 1 hf. so you can select hf or satcom.. Its manufactured by Thales UK The Thales TopFlight SATCOM is the first ARINC 781 SwiftBroadband-enabled SATCOM. However this wonderful device is connected to the rest of the suite via a Arinc 429 data bus.

Depends on the velocity of the feather

As Randall puts it, getting to orbital height isn't the hard part, it's getting to orbital speed.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

things stay in orbit because they're going ungodly fast. That whole centrifugal force thing, our stuff up there is constantly falling toward the earth, and constantly moving so fast laterally that it's missed hitting the earth.

same for the sun, but bigger. the problem being, you shoot something out of orbit of earth fine... it's still moving ungodly fast, fast enough to miss hitting the sun though, and from what that guy up there is saying, the sun is actively pushing stuff away.

Forgot to say, ask Randall how... Something along the line of "What if I wanted to push a planet into the Sun?"
http://what-if.xkcd.com/

Beam enough laser light at the object to heat its surface to the point that it ablates. That will push it onto a different course. We won't even have to leave Earth for that to work. Of course, it does need an awful lot of laser power, but if our very survival is at stake, maybe we could do it. Here's the relevant XKCD what if.

For some, no evidence will ever be enough. They will adjust to the "new climate" as the norm and insist that any cold spell disproves that any climate change is occurring.

Okay, so we have a benchmark where the bog-standard human being scores 94.9%.

Yes, and now the algorithms are better. More importantly, the 'standard human' only does that when it is paying attention, which it can't do for more than 15 minutes or so. The computer does it day in, day out, forever. And it will get better over time.

Then in February (that's three months ago), Microsoft reports hitting 95.06%; the first score to edge the humans. Then in March, Google notches 95.18%. Now it's May, and Baidu puts up a 95.42%. Meh. Swinging dicks with big iron are twiddling with their algorithms to squeeze out incremental, marginal improvements on an arbitrary task.

You denigrate their work, but that's the way science works: incrementally almost all the time. In any field, you will see tweaking, slight improvements, variations, and a couple of new ideas. And then one of the researchers will hit on the next big idea. So what? What the hell have you done? You're just being a dick.

“Our company is now leading the race in computer intelligence,” said Ren Wu, a Baidu scientist working on the project. ... “We have great power in our hands—much greater than our competitors.”

I presume that next month it will be IBM boasting about "leading the race" and being "much greater than their competitors". The month after that it will be Microsoft's turn again. Google will be back on top in August or so...unless, of course, some other benchmark starts getting some press.

First, what they are doing is very hard. So, yeah, doing 0.25% better than someone else is a big deal. Let's see you do better.

Second, look at the performance over time. There was the NIST handwriting sets, and then the Stanford data sets, then the 'standard' was the PASCAL Visual Object Challenge and people were slowly improving to the point that someone else needed to step up and provide a better standard (more categories and more examples of each). And that was the ILSVC, and now we're down to the last couple percent on those. The next set will be bigger and harder. And performance will improve on that one too. That's expected and a good thing. Image recognition is stunningly hard; thanks to the hard work by these researchers it's gotten a lot better.

here's your obligatory XKCD

http://xkcd.com/1444/

There's an XKCD comic for everything.

There's an XKCD comic for everything.

I am already happy when the author has read http://www.xkcd.com/1343/ and some early manpages of sudoers (imho the worst, by far).

Todays "sudoers" manpage has already been cleaned up a lot and is still a horrible read. But in the past it was something like "the relevant configuration is a hierarchical list of geometrical weighted values. Each one represents a position in a list relative to its anchor". And yes, that was just a weird way of saying "/etc/sudoers contains configuration keywords with options".

Overall I had the impression the author was a sociopath showing off his mathematical skills while keeping the core knowledge unavailable to others.

How to avoid the tech support script runaround? The code word is "Shibboleet."

There's a very good reason for metastudies, though, especially with a topic like this one.

Skins. Emojis. That's what sells apps. Their core function? Nobody cares.

https://xkcd.com/224/

It's actually on an adjacent planet rather than Earth, but Opportunity seems like it will just keep going.

xkcd joke about it.

Umm...

https://xkcd.com/678/

* internet advises people to drink 2-3 L of fluids per day. * 365 days per year, 70 year lifespan -> 70k liters -> 70 m^3 over lifetime. * 7b ppl alive today. Everybody alive today will drink 500 m^3 of fluids. * the handwavey estimate is that half of the people who have ever lived are alive today. if this is true, then the entire human species has drunk 1000 m^3 of water. * the volume of the ocean is 1.3 10^9 km^3 -> 1.3 10^18 m^3.

You say "7b ppl alive today", but then multiply 70m^3 by 7. Either b=1, or your estimate is off by just a smidge, or 9 orders of magnitude.

Either way, most of the water we drink has not been previously drunk by another human. Dinosaurs, on the other hand, are a different story (obligatory xkcd).

More like 100 billion m^3, but essentially all of earth's water has been drunk and peed by dinosaurs.

Similar problem with deniable encryption. It sounds great, but if the bad guys think you've fooled them, they'll just keep beating you with the $5 wrench even after you've broken and given them the real password.

Best idea is to simply avoid people who are legally allowed to beat you. Trolling them sounds like fun, but, well, the wrench...

But it has probably been drunk by at least one dinosaur.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/

Yeah, but then you don't need the engine any more...

I can't believe I don't see this anywhere in the comments yet, but this is the bigger issue at hand. https://xkcd.com/538/

"We still have about 2-3 years before the direct exposure cases begin to become apparent."

The dangers of radiation exposure are vastly overstated by many groups who can profit form fearmongering.

Air crew routinely experience radiation levels higher than anything anyone around Fukushima received outside the plant buildings and they're not exactly dropping like flies or turning into radioactive mutant zombies.

The average smoker has a non-insignificant amount of Polonium-210 fizzing away in his/her lungs, yet after decades of exposure to it, less than half will develop cancers.

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

wouldn't be a problem if all those willing females aren't willing to post it.

Nah, there'd still be Japanese cartoon porn (can try to look more... 2D?) and asstr.org.

This xkcd could hardly have been better timed for this thread.

WTF? I see this all the time and I can't figure out. Intent matters. If I got to a banking website and steal a bunch of money is that okay, because I only issued GET requests? Lots of crimes differentiate between accidents and intent. These people knew what they were doing was wrong. They knew they shouldn't be accessing that data. Why in the world would you defend these scum on a technicality? Fine, maybe you'll understand XKCD. There's a huge difference between accidentally burning my house down and doing it intentionally. Even if I make the same fucking actions? Get it?

Look, it is two thousand freaking fifteen. This is an article from some site called "Techie News" being re-reported at Slashdot. Can we please get a little ridicule of this supposed binary concept of "statistical significance" ? It would take us one or two sentences to tell us the actual numbers involved--the expected value, expected deviation, margin of error, confidence level, etc.

And then when all's said and done, if indeed the level of significance was too low (e.g. p too high), maybe we could get a Bayesian or two in here to criticize the traditional 5% value is being arbitrary and tell us all a little about the Frequentist vs. Bayesian rivalry in statistics that persists to this day? (Obligatory XKCDs: https://xkcd.com/1132/ , https://xkcd.com/882/)