Slashdot Mirror

He assumes constant or rising speed of spreading of the disease and constant or increasing contact with the diseased.
While ignoring ANY possibility of lowering of those factors by various means.

From governmental blockades of travel, through people avoiding contact on their own, up to changes in weather as we are moving into a winter which will make moving of humans and viruses across continents slower, harder and easier to spot.

In short...
http://xkcd.com/605/

Add one to that count. I tried building a fusion generator last night when I was drunk. Just like all the other attempts mine didn't work either.

Perhaps you just suck at building fusion generators, like the Apollo 13 astronauts sucked at stirring.

Well, what do you expect, when you send Forrest Gump into space.

Add one to that count. I tried building a fusion generator last night when I was drunk. Just like all the other attempts mine didn't work either.

Perhaps you just suck at building fusion generators, like the Apollo 13 astronauts sucked at stirring.

It's "Duty Calls". http://xkcd.com/386.

A lot of people have no business being in charge of the security of a server. Those are the same people who need the media to bring an exploit to their attention. They might fix Heartbleed but they never fix CVE-2014-wxyz and others and their server is probably already compromised or could be anyway. Some of the hackers will help keep your system up to date, since they don't want some other hacker taking one of "their" servers.

I found Heartbleed very simplistic and how it went unnoticed for so long is impressive. Why the hell did it let you specify the number of characters to send back and never check that? https://xkcd.com/1354/

Right now, solar power in the US accounts for 0.39% of ALL power generated by the country (or 3% of total renewable energy generation).
Right now, wind power in the US accounts for 2.08% of ALL power generated by the country (or about 16% of total renewable energy generation).

Electricity generation in the USA used to be zero. Lighting and such were done by flame type devices. There used to be zero automobiles, now there's more than 1 per adult in the country. Nuclear electrical generation used to be zero, now it's close to 20%.

Expecting a 500-fold uptake on solar and a 100-fold uptake on wind?

Sure, why not? Hawaii is a limited market and very much an ideal case for it, but look at how fast they're installing solar.

Your plan appears to call for approximately 1/4 the solar and wind mine does, how different is that really when you're complaining about the OOMs difference between my ideal and current production, when your ideal is less than an OOM different than mine?

Otherwise, you seem to like your .39% argument, as for your post from the last week. This comic works both ways. Sorry for taking so long to reply to it, by the way. Not sure how I missed it and I was busy that weekend.

The pebbles don't have a substantial gravity wells to escape. With asteroids you can use minimal thrust and exploit orbital dynamics to hit earth's atmosphere and fall in.

I agree. It's as if the OP has never played Kerbal Space Program.

Obligatory link.

http://xkcd.com/538/

We also have the 2005 referendums in France and Netherlands that told us People had enough of this mess

Don't be an idiot.
1. Those referendums said no such thing. They were about accepting a set of laws under the name 'European Constitution'. Most of the people who voted didn't have a fucking clue what any of the laws were and didn't want to know. They just collectively wanted to vent their nostalgic love for their old currencies and similar hatred for the newfangled Euro.
2. It is not a mess. It's doing great and improving every day. You haven't the faintest clue what an ineffective and internationally unattractive clusterfuck Europe would have been without the EEC and the EU.
3. Representative democracy. There is a reason for the existence of specialization and that reason is efficiency.
I really feel for many of the good politicians: they work their ass off to understand the material to be able to make tough decisions and then literally millions of fuckwits who have no idea about any part of their job or the subject matter come along and bitch at them, tell them they should do it differently and to generally go fuck themselves.

Honestly, imagine the second dumbest idiot you know who has no idea what the fuck your job is about, let him abuse you, tell you how to do your job and then just smile and say you're doing your best.
Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/793/

A good engineer would offer to build them one that goes to 12.

Obligatory (and amazingly on-topic?) XKCD.

Wake up America. Seriously. Wake the fuck up. Even if you do, I think it may be too late.

Don't do it!

Also:
http://xkcd.com/1425/

Lithium Ion batteries were dropping in cost at 14%/year, but for the past 5 years have been dropping at 16%/year.

Plot that curve out a bit, and think about what that is going to do to the gasoline business, and when...

Awesome, you have definitely convinced me!

http://xkcd.com/605/

Ballooning

The secret? The secret is it makes you feel good to read them. Makes you feel like you've learned something without doing the hard work.

Hearing about lasers and raindrops puts me in mind of this recent XKCD What-If posting.

The xkcd "What If?" article "Steak Drop" seems to say that while the outer surface may be charred and even blasted off, the interior remains completely untouched.

Then again, IANA Astrophysicist, Cartoonist, or Chef.

From what I've heard about the awfulness of the "second season" (i.e. the "Galactica 1980" reduced-budget un-cancellation) I suspect mention of it may prompt fans to exhibit a similar response to that of the definitely non-existent "Matrix" sequels....

(At this point I suspect so many people get the intended reference that I don't even need to name the strip, let alone link it.... what? You *still* want the "obligatory XKCD" for that?!! Oh.... okay, then.Obligatory XKCD.)

They have rocks. And space. That should be enough...

http://xkcd.com/505/

XKCD 606

Why no labels? This is an issue that comes up again and again, and there are plenty of good reasons:

1) You irrationally single out a single aspect of crop improvement. Where are the labels for hybrids, open pollinated lines, crops developed with mutagenesis, crops developed with induced polyploidy, bud sports, crops produced with somaclonal variation, crops produced via embryo rescue or with wide crossing in their lineage, ect.? We don't label them. We don't label them because corn produced via a doubled haploid hybrid is still corn, an apple that is a bud sport is still an apple, and a zucchini that is genetically engineered is still a zucchini.

2) You tell the consumer nothing. I modified my computer; tell me what I did to it. If I say that a crop is genetically engineered, tell me what that means. Tell me what I did, why, what it means, what are the benefits. Is it insect resistant, herbicide tolerant (if so which one), virus resistant (if so which ones), drought tolerant, how do those genes work, why are they used, what are the benefits? Unless you already know what is what (see point 4), saying that something is GMO doesn't actually tell me anything, does it?

3) You do not correct any misinformation. People are afraid of GMOs. Unfortunate, not scientifically justified, but true. Non-GMO labels are everywhere, even on crops where there are no GMO varieties, as a marketing tool. I saw non-GMO labeled figs and non-GMO labeled basil the other day..there is no GMO figs or basil on the market, anywhere. Remember that old XKCD comic about marketing? Make no mistake, this is both marketing for the companies that convenient sell non-GMO crops, as well as ideology. Professional activists at Greenpeace and the Center for Food safety have made a career of denying science and spreading fear. A label does nothing to correct that and can very easily be taken as a sign there is something wrong with the food, when there really is nothing.

4) You can already tell what crops are and are not genetically engineered. Corn, soy, canola, cotton, alfalfa, sugar beet, summer squash, papaya. Learn about them, and you can know. Too hard for you? Too damned bad, this is your ritualistic impurity beliefs, you take responsibility for it. Just like Kosher or Halal, you can avoid what you find questionable, or buy specially labeled things.

So, you want to select one thing, tell nothing about it, and correct no deficiencies in public knowledge? That's not informing people, that's a lie of omission. It is no different from the 'Evolution is just a theory' labels. Yeah, it was technically true, but taken so far out of context that it was deceptive and everyone knows it. This labeling nonsense is politically motivated crap and everyone knows it.

XKCD did it first
(Seriously, is there a geek-topic that guy hasn't written a cartoon about?)

here

Using Rosebud. http://xkcd.com/109/

obligatory xkcd

http://xkcd.com/325/

And the subjects of your Jedi powers act like this ?
https://xkcd.com/1437/

Just to tune that even further, a proper link would not read "a proper link" but XKCD #1437. :)

Nice. But please use a proper link

Obligatory XKCD...

Or use an Arduino. Toooootally fake.

Mos def. I mean, look at the shadows along the edges, and the borders between the colours. Moiré patterns all over the place! I use Photoshop professionally, and I'm telling you, it's photoshopped.

Hmmm, almost

Strawman. You said, "you'd best do it using correct grammar." No mention of what sounds good when said verbally, or of what people would normally say & understand it as.

Grammatically, that is correct. I'm not saying I didn't typo. I did. However, it's grammatically correct and has the same meaning both ways. There is no real difference aside from the irrelevant one of how it sounds when said. This is the internet. We're not saying any of this. We are typing it.

Remember, we were all pushed head-first out of someone's vaginal tract. Why are we acting so dignified?

spf, dkim, dmarc, so many ways to try and accomplish the same thing and none of them work well because nobody trusts any of them fully and few people have them fully implemented... Obligatory xkcd

Because he thinks someone is wrong on the internet.

To quote from XKCD:

"Getting to space is easy. It's not, like, something you could do in your car, but it's not a huge challenge. You could get a person to space with a small sounding rocket the size of a telephone pole. The X-15 aircraft reached space just by going fast and then steering up. But getting to space is easy. The problem is staying there."

What if #8?

"This crowd takes up an area the size of Rhode Island. But thereâ(TM)s no reason to use the vague phrase âoean area the size of Rhode Islandâ. This is our scenario; we can be specific. Theyâ(TM)re actually in Rhode Island."

Nothing to do with DST, though. But that's probably because this xkcd makes sense, and DST does not.
http://xkcd.com/1335/

biometrics. where the five dollar wrench becomes the five dollar hunting knife.

I wish I could dredge up some examples, but I seem to remember seeing some things which some of the astronauts said in the middle of a crisis which made them sound like it was just a little thing, when the rest of us would all be screaming "we're all gonna die we're all gonna die".

"Houston, we have a problem" when an oxygen tank has just exploded and practically ripped the service module in half. Yup, that seems like a good start.

I posted this earlier in the thread, but it seems more appropriate here, as you mentioned it explicitly:
Obligatory XKCD: Houston

Remember in the Challenger explosion, when the guy kept reading off telemetry after the explosion? I seem to remember him finally looking up and saying something like "There appears to be a malfunction."

Obligatory XKCD: Houston

But... but... the future is in opinionated blogs! Why would they offer good news or shows? Sensationalism and rants is what get people to watch! I'm eagerly waiting for the first "Reality News show".

Probably relevant xkcd comic

Will millions of people really want to charge and fuss with their watch at least once a day?

A fair few people stopped really using watches when smartphones took off. If they want a watch primarily as a timepiece then yeah, "dumb" watches are less hassle, but if a person likes the non-time functions of a smartwatch then maybe the daily charge isn't so bad. Just because it is on your wrist doesn't mean it should be judged entirely as a timepiece, so comparing the time between "charges" to a ye olde watch maybe isn't the best comparison.

Math > programming

This XKCD comic comes to mind...

Obligatory xkcd-planation: http://xkcd.com/678/

> L. Poettering, on the other hand, seems to relish in breaking things

http://xkcd.com/1172/

Obligatory xkcd

No Mr. Bond, I expect you to bleed! *psychotic laugh*

Technically, that's from "Goldfinger" (which, coincidentally, I re-watched on TV last week), not "The Man with the Golden Gun", but it's all good... Here's the related XKCD, Centrifugal Force

Yeah, that's just the thing. If any of those big browsers are on my machine (and I routinely use them all and more besides), it's because I waited for the emerges to finish. That's a nice thing about Portage: if emerging a package requires a tool you don't already have, Portage automatically schedules that for building, too. Well, KDE still does take longer than Chromium--but it's a whole DE, not just a browser. And to think that I once thought that Firefox and Seamonkey were awfully time-comsuming to build.

And yes, I'm no fan of Google's agile-inspired release model for Chromium. They must enjoy fencing.