Slashdot Mirror

https://xkcd.com/538/

Since you asked,

https://xkcd.com/538/

https://xkcd.com/538/

Bam! My first obligatory post on Slashdot.

Someone has probably posted it while I typed this though...

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/538/

Yeah, because I'm sure that the engineering costs are small in order to build a new system and win 2-3 years of "opaqueness" until everybody gets accustomed to systemd.

obligatory...

Another text in this collected wisdom authoritatively cites Aristotle as saying that Pythagorus invented the Scroll Lock key. Literally. It's a little key you lock the scroll with.

No, that was Steven Chu, and I have a citation.

I thought it was called Ballmer peak...

What about green jelly beans?

You forgot to sign this Summer Glau

https://xkcd.com/406/

That is why it is equipped with a small catapult.

Obligatory xkcd

Also, this is still relevant. If you are going to punish sites for not having mobile versions, are they also going to punish sites for forcing visitors onto worthless mobile versions? I appreciate added readability if the content is all still the same, but with the resolution on today's smartphones, I can view a desktop site just fine.

Obligatory xkcd reference.

Kitty!

XKCD also covered mobile sites in Server Attention Span.

Agreed. XKCD covered it concerning apps, but it's usually not much better with mobile versions.

What happened with Google? It's like every change they make these days is to make things worse. And I say this as a person who's generally a big Google fan.

There are so many times when I wish "Shibboleet" were a real thing.

Ablation was also covered by XKCD What-If 13 in brief, worth a read if you need some levity in your day.

Obligatory XKCD

You can play the android version of the bot here: https://play.google.com/store/... It comes with a good tutorial on how to play. Relevant xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/1002/

the equation is just n^2+n = n but you need to be a math prodigy to do the visualizations on your own without a computer.

The number crunching part isn't hard or even difficult to understand, people from all backgrounds have done it on lowly 8-bit machines running at a few MHz. All you need is time:

A Bunch of Rocks

Obligatory

1. That's not "a" study, it's from a metastudy. The simple fact of the matter is, while the news makes a big deal of any study that shows a statistically significant difference between genders, most of these statistically significant differences are barely above the level of noise.

2. Where are you getting that quote from the paper? A search for those words doesn't reveal that.

There absolutely are some very demonstrable differences in certain psychological regards - mainly sexual. The most obvious of these, for example, is the fact that women are more likely to be attracted to men and men to women. But that's far from the majority of studied sexual differences that get so much play in the press. " With very few exceptions, variability within each sex and overlap between the sexes is so extensive that the authors conclude it would be inaccurate to use personality types, attitudes, and psychological indicators as a vehicle for sorting men and women. "

3. Girls are far less likely to get involved in chess to begin with in all countries (again, the fact that children mimic sex distribution of behaviors of the previous generation, no matter what they are in the particular society one is in), so one shouldn't be surprised that this is reflectected in the highest levels. Chess, as a competitive sport, has always been predominantly a "men's sport", internationally. But as XKCD notes, this is changing. The Polgár sisters are a great example. Their upbringing was an experiment by their father; to see what would happen if children were raised with extensive training in a specialist intellectual topic from an early age. One ended up an International Master while the other two ended up as Grand Masters, with Judit ending up one of the world's most powerful players of any gender. Their father's choice removed gender self -selection from the picture.

4. Oh please, you're not seriously going to pretend that there weren't tremendous pressures in Victorian society for women to not be involved in STEM-style careers, or that they weren't usually expressly banned from such. Even women who took them up as hobbies (usually well-to-do women) were often strongly advised against it, that it was harmful to a woman's delicate composition to be mentally straining one's self (a risk of the catch-all Victorian women's distorder "hysteria"; the cure for "hysteria" was to refrain from all serious physical and mental activity). This is the culture that ours came from, and it's been a slow incremental process of moving away from it ever since. The fact that you'd call "citation needed" on that is absurd, that's like "A normal human hand has five digits [citation needed]."

5."I'll see your 50% and raise it to 100%" - how does this even make sense? Women are 50% of the population (roughly). Nobody is talking about disinteresting men from pursuing STEM careers. There's already interest there. The goal is to try to also get more interest from women, to work against the carryover cultural connotations of STEM as "men's work".

6. " Are there laws or even customs, that prevent girls from entering a STEM field and excelling in it" - it's like you didn't even read my post.

7. "But what if it is bilogicial — as seems perfectly probable?" - not according to the actual research. And if one person wastes their time trying to become a physicist when they'd have made a better fry cook? Well whoop-di-freaking-doo. The world is still a better place.

Either it's sarcasm or you're an idiot, because it's easy to release carbon. What's hard is putting it back in the bottle.

No what's hard is convincing people that what was happening 18 years ago isn't happening now.

The IPCC AR5 notes the lack of warming since 1998:

[T]he rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012) [is] 0.05 [–0.05 to +0.15] C per decade)which is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012) [of] 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] C per decade. IPCC AR5 weakens the case for AGW

OMG is that actually a negative warming in the range of possibilities reported by the IPCC?

No, that's cherry picking 1 range to reach a predetermined conclusion. I can show that oil, gold and beanie baby prices always go up, ALWAYS, if I pick the right start and end dates too. I have a lot more valid choices than you do though, because you had to pick that very narrow anomalous window in modern human civilization.

For more chuckles, let's look to XKCD:
XKCD Extrapolation

You are also deliberately ignoring the melting of ice (by volume, not just area) and the acidification the oceans, which are absorbing CO2 at a faster than expected rate. Both of those factors slow the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, just as ice melting in a glass slows the rate at which the temperature changes. The slower change in temperature does NOT mean there is less heat/energy in the glass/planet though. Once the ice is gone, for example, the drink's temperature will rise much faster than while the ice was melting.

Under water might be the best place for the ship to be. The water has a great stopping effect for the radiation. See this WhatIf ( not a comic, actually science) for a great example.
Admitedly, the fish don't know to stay away.

https://xkcd.com/882/

https://xkcd.com/243/

101 posts and not a single one with technical content.

You must be new here.

Ah ha! There's another one, it has to have a you-must-be-new-here generator module.

Also it needs to have a module that does systemd posts.

Obligatory slashdot referencing xkcd: https://xkcd.com/301/

101 posts and not a single one with technical content. Somebody should create a slashdot post generator, with modules producing output of these kinds:
- internet meme repeater ("year of Linux on the desktop", "stallman eats his own toes", "thou shalt not compare to nazi");
- xkcd repeater (its output is prefixed by the string "obligatory" and displays a strong prevalence of this one);
- project deprecator ("this software is so stupid, I could write a better one with one arm tied behind my back, except I'm too smart to actually do it");
- Google/Apple/Microsoft PR ("it's not Google who kills kittens! It's their subcontractors!");
and, last but not least,
- Slashdot deprecator ("slashdot is no longer a nice site to read these days").

http://xkcd.com/1508/

You knew there was one.

Look here and it explains exactly why the password policy in a whole big fat whopping gob of companies has been really dumb for a long time. Let me string 3 or 4 long words together. Let me keep it for a year. Let me have the last sentence of page 286 of my favourite book, or the last stanza of my favourite song. And they won't be able to crack it. Give me the last paragraph or chorus (if you dare) and they won't break it till the end of time. No numbers, no punctuation, and no problem either.

You mean this? (Obligatory XKCD).

You know, I think I should change my work password to "Correcthorsebatterystaple1" (2, 3, 4...) just because of the idiot policies. :-)

I think this XKCD says it all.

xkcd

That's no moon. It's a space station!

If you quote Star Wars, Roman, that joke will become older and more tired than you can possibly imagine.

"I find your lack of original conversation disturbing."

Because a physics model isn't an abstraction?

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/435/

Obligatory xkcd

My thought being "they can't hack/steal what they can't physically access."

Oblig xkcd reference

https://xkcd.com/651/

The tiller was used because the first cars were about as slow as boats, so they were steered with a tiller like boats. However as cars became faster and more powerful the tiller was no longer adequate, and thus the wheel was adopted as it simply worked better. Yet your example only proves the point: since the 19th century there has been NO CHANGE in this UI for steering a car. Once the wheel was invented, no one wanted to go back to the tiller and no one even invented some other way to steer a car. There is something optimal in the use of the steering wheel that makes any other refinements and changes useless.

Similarly the first graphic UI's were full of experimentation. Even the first Mac OS's had the menu bar in the window, but was moved out in early beta phase as the idea was that it was easier on the user to simply look always in the same place for the applications' commands, and has remained there ever since. Windows traditionally had the menu bar inside the window, with very little exceptions. However your example shows the same thing I am trying to get across: they DON'T change once they've made a decision.

X11 window managers actually gives you more choice - you can have either way or both. I think an argument can be made for either one. It seems that today, at least in Linux land, there is a tendancy to put the menu bar as something permanent on top (at least in Unity), but many desktops still keep the in-window menu bar.

To be honest I don't even like Mac OS X or Windows style menu bars. I actually use i3-wm as my hands are always on the keyboard. The mouse is a useless thing in my honest opinion, but for drawing and things like that it is indeed useful. Most of my work is at the keyboard, so I like the UI to be controllable with the keyboard. The menu bar is for some users needed, but I have different work habits from the era before we had X11 so I would say I'm more an exception than the rule.

In any case, my point stands: if it works for the user, don't change it. Every change involves an investment of time and energy which must be considered - is the amount of time to be gained by this new UI really worth the time it takes to learn it?

Obligatory XKCD

That is not really surprising as coding is an exceptional case.
There was even some scientific research about the effect of alcoholic beverages on programming skills:
https://xkcd.com/323/

And for all those researches that failed Introduction to Statistics - what you utterly failed learn is Correlation does not imply (and sure as hell does not prove) Causation.

Seems like you're the one who failed statistics since correlation does damn well imply that there is some relation that should be investigated. Or as Randall Munroe put it:

"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'"
--xkcd #552

Stop parroting quotes that you don't even properly understand.

Obligatory

http://www.xkcd.com/295/

If I see a bunch of 1 star reviews saying it breaks after several months of use, I'm going to go onto the next product.

You have to bear in mind that sometimes the 1 star reviews are quite useless/fake. I was looking at a water heater on Amazon recently and there were a lot of one star reviews claiming the product broke and was terrible but most of the reviews were actually for a different and older version of the product which was no longer in production. I've also seen 1 star reviews that were clearly designed to astroturf the product.

Point is, presume any review has ulterior motives unless you have evidence to think otherwise.

Obligatory xkcd

Another xkcd

If I see a bunch of 1 star reviews saying it breaks after several months of use, I'm going to go onto the next product.

You have to bear in mind that sometimes the 1 star reviews are quite useless/fake. I was looking at a water heater on Amazon recently and there were a lot of one star reviews claiming the product broke and was terrible but most of the reviews were actually for a different and older version of the product which was no longer in production. I've also seen 1 star reviews that were clearly designed to astroturf the product.

Point is, presume any review has ulterior motives unless you have evidence to think otherwise.

Obligatory xkcd

Another xkcd

Why would anyone pay for this?

Because some of us don't take all of the pennies from the "Take a penny" plate, and we don't take all the free chips home.

Servers cost money to buy, power, cool, and replace. Networks cost money. Getting that cat video to you isn't free, why do you expect that you get to take and give nothing?

Obligatory:
https://xkcd.com/191/

I think ultimately the answer will be Hurd, Stallman and co will keep it ideologically pure and eventually it'll get bigger as more people abandon corporate Linux.

The recent http://xkcd.com/1508/ shows human civilization ending in around 2042. There's a pause afterwards with no OSes run, and then in 2059, GNU/Hurd.

One of the survivors, poking around in the ruins with the point of a spear, uncovers a singed photo of Richard Stallman. They stare in silence. "This," one of them finally says, "This is a man who BELIEVED in something."

As others said, it is your type no one wants to deal with.

I never said "the GPL is this" I said my understanding of it was X. I am no lawyer, nor do I have a couple hours to dedicate to reading a license I already know I don't break (I don't distribute, at all). I was asking a damn question and get attacked by morons like you that have nothing better to do than rage at someone that was wrong on the internet.

Here is something for you, now go chill out.

https://xkcd.com/386/

http://xkcd.com/927/