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We're practically military already.

This is stupid! Why don't they have a standard way of doing things!?!
Standards have a way of biting you in the ass, for example this standard way of abbreviating the year.
It seems ironic that an abbreviated name was used for a problem caused by abbreviations.
But that's a perfectly normal abbreviation!
No it's not! This other system of abbreviation makes much more sense!
No, the first kind of abbreviation makes more sense in some contexts because of these reasons.

And so we have come full circle to why we can't just have one method of doing things, and thus why we can't have nice things.

Also, obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/927/

Extrapolation:
http://xkcd.com/605/

Obligatory link.

http://xkcd.com/1357/

Your point is that if all your friends jump off a bridge into shallow water, you should too?

Well, yes

.

Very true. Every time I hear GP's argument I can't help but think of this.

captcha: electron

The Balmer peek

http://xkcd.com/927/

Dunno there's anything more to be said.

Look, I grew up on metric. I like imperial measurements for their practicality. I don't think why would I care how many feet are there in a yard, or a mile, or whatever. Feet and inches are used in contractor trade. You use them when building homes. I never, not once, had a need to convert between feet and miles. The metric system is great if you want to do back-of-the-envelope what if computations. For use within any given field of trade, its usefulness is diminished. Whether you know your furnace's output in kW or BTUs doesn't really matter - both are equally arbitrary and for an HVAC guy, whether a technician or an engineer, it doesn't make any difference what the units are.

Now, if it was up to me, would I want US and UK to go to metric overnight. Sure. But I think that in spite of recognizing the overblown arguments as to how "bad" the imperial system is. It's not. Not in practice.

When this XKCD comic came out, I switched all of my thermometers to Celsius. It took a couple of days to get used to the change, no big deal. 96 kph doesn't mean anything to you because you aren't measuring the distance you need to travel in km. If I am driving between Portland and Seattle, I don't care what units everything is measured in as long as I know how long it will take to get there. If I know that it is 278 km to Seattle, suddenly 96 kph is a very meaningful number. Also, if I know it is 278 km to Seattle from Portland, I have an idea of what 278 km is spatially and km in general suddenly have meaning.

It's all about references.

There's always a relevant XKCD.

I think the City of London police saw this: https://xkcd.com/386/ (Duty Calls) and misunderstood it. Now duty calls them to govern and correct the internet.

If the sheeple ever get a clue and figure out how rigged this game really is and fucking WAKE UP from their hypnotic zombie groupthink daze, maybe they can write-in somebody who takes no money.

It's always the same rhetoric, the defeatist attitude blaming the faceless "sheeple" masses because they dont care about whatever comparably trivial thing you're so emotionally invested in but too lazy and incompetent to do anything about.

Of course you're so englightened, you dont need to "wake up", you see everything for what it is but everybody else is just mindless sheeple. Whatever excuses you make for yourself that help you sleep at night.

"Focus isn't a big problem"

WRONG.

Laser focus is a MASSIVE problem over long distances. You need to understand Gaussian optics [2nd year physics at uni] and diffraction spreading to get this right, as simple ray tracing is not sufficient to describe how the beam actually behaves.

To focus the beam down to a meaningful, and useful, size you need a very large lens. How large? Well it depends on how far the beam is going, but let's consider "to the moon" as a useful yard stick.

XKCD mentioned this briefly in one of the "What If" episodes.

But for a more rigorous treatment here are some physics notes giving an example. The example given there is quite nice: a 2.5m telescope/lens/aperture/device on the surface of the earth will project a laser "spot" on the moon that is 254m in diameter at 633nm laser wavelength. You can do the calculation yourself to find the aperture needed to focus a laser to something "useful" that could cut or drill through metal on the surface of the moon from the earth and you find those relationships reversing: the lens needs to be hundreds of meters in diameter!!!

4 minute battery life which must rely on increases on battery energy density and weight for any improvements? Manual control with only stabilisation because visual tracking and collision avoidance for all the scenarios listed in video still sucks because sensors are heavy and lack fidelity and recognition is hard? Prototype still hasn't even solved the "cleanly wrap around wrist without shit in the way" problem? Where do I put my money?

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

-Randall Munroe

It depends largely on weak web-facing CGI pages that don't sanitise inputs before passing them as arguments to a shell script.

So this is the bash rough equivalent to an SQL Injection Exploit?

Mod parent up!

Especially handling user generated content without testing it and feeding directly to Bash through CGI. I personally fail to see what all this is about. Are we also considering that most databases or PHP have a similar bug, since if you do not sanitize the user input it is an opened door to havoc?

Even more secure than that would be to set the password to "The dog chased 3 chickens around the house." Lots more entropy. Maybe not for kids as their typing skills aren't that advanced yet and they'd likely typo the account locked.

The concept of using gobbledygook as a password and formulating mnemonics to memorize it is silly. The human brain can remember entire words just as easily as it does individual letters and numbers and full phrases almost as easily. The English language has some 450,000 official words and probably about as many unofficial words. That is a massive pool from which to draw.

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/936/

"You will arrive in 5 minutes... 8 hours... 20 seconds... 92 years... 23 minutes... 18 days..."

>The ultimate high ground is certainly not the moon. Anything you lob at the Earth from there must first get out of the lunar gravity well, which would require a pretty significant expenditure of fuel.

Not really - the moon's gravity well is radically shallower than the Earth's, far shallower than the difference in surface gravity would suggest (the moon's surface is far closer to it's center, and thus gravity falls off far faster with altitude.) I can't be bothered to do the math, but if xkcd is to be believed the energy to launch a given rock from the moon launch would be about 20x lower than from Earth. Meanwhile that rock would have 20x more kinetic energy when it slammed into Earth than if it were being slammed into the moon.

More to the point the Moon offers shelter, concealment, an essentially unlimited supply of rocks to throw, and plenty of nuclear fuel as a root energy source. High ground involves more than just altitude after all - there's a world of difference between "having the high ground" and "being treed". If you're in open space you're pretty much treed - everyone can se *exactly* where you are, and you have no resources except those you tak with you.

As for lauching from the far side of the moon, that would probably be wise if you wanted to take your victims by surprise, and if you want to hit something specific you'll have to precisely navigate the non-trivial gravitational field of a binary planet regardless of where the launch point is, circling half way around the moon isn't going to make things that much more difficult when you're trying to throw a dart and hit a bulls-eye hundreds of thousands of km away across a constantly shifting gravitational landscape.

But then again, why would you need to take them by surprise? What good does it do to get a few hours warning that a city is about to be reduced to a smoking crater? You can't even begin to evacuate in that amount of time. At best you could try to intercept the incoming projectile with a high yield missile, presumably nuclear - in which case if you were successful then instead of vaporizing the city you end up covering the state with radioactive buck shot - after all blowing up an projectile doesn't significantly change it's trajectory. Plus that interceptor was probably a hell of a lot more expensive to build and launch than the rock it hit. Now multiply that by the fact that it's 20x cheaper to throw a rock at the Earth from the Moon than vice versa, and you get 20x the yield on impact, and the Moon has a 400x gravitational force multiplier on it's side. For every rock we could throw at them they could throw 400 smaller rocks back, each of which would do just as much damage as ours.

And of course they would have every bit as much warning as us about incoming projectiles crossing the 385,000km void - launch a missile at the moon and they can launch a cloud of gravel to intercept and destroy it. Make it heavy gravel and the interception doubles as a counterstrike.

http://xkcd.com/605/

Simplistic extrapolation will provide you with a simplistic answer.

Per XKCD, it's far more likely they'd forcibly put each of your fingers on the phone than do something elaborate with your printed fingerprints.

However— IIRC there's a lockout after a certain number of attempts, and IIRC from the first video it can take several tries to fool the sensor. So with ten fingerprints to choose from, not to mention different *parts* of each finger you could have used, it's less than probable they would succeed.

(And the look on the officer's face when he realizes you used your nose: Priceless.)

A joke about an unfortunate truth keeps being funny until the unfortunate truth is eradicated.

Alternatively, obligatory xkcd

What? It's an ass-phone. He said as much. He also said it was big. I can't imagine extracting something large from your ass would be an easy task. (Thankfully, I have no experience with it. But he wears skinny jeans, so he probably does.)

obligatory

Religion does not concern itself with ultimate causes. That is complete nonsense. It concerns itself with following an unprovable tenet [ftfy]. Science can tell us about everything the religion claims has an effect.

Religion is not some monolith that concerns itself with any one thing. I don't know what's up with this "ultimate cause" thing, but religion is generally about deriving rules for how to live. Sometimes the rules come from metaphysical explanations, sometimes from prophets (who may or may not have some heightened spiritual awareness, depending on the religion and the prophet), and sometimes from traditions (that themselves came from who knows where). As for whether science can tell us everything...can science tell us why it's good to not kill other people? Why it's good take a day of rest every seven days? Why it's good to say "thank you" for everything, even when the only one you can thank is God? Sure, science can tell us that the sun can't actually stop moving in the sky, and I don't personally care for the sort of person that's bothered by that. That story wasn't told because it was historically accurate.

He seems to thing science makes predictions. That is incorrect. There is a lot to science. In best case, it's make predictions. But gathering data is science, deriving forecast is science.

Science exists to...well, actually, there's a whole academic field devoted to figuring out just why science exists, what it's good for, and how to determine the value of a scientific explanation. Mr. Gobry thinks that science only exists to make "predictive rules" and not deal in Truth at all. And of course you have to run experiments (or other forms of factual investigation) to make those rules; that's Science too. But if there are no predictions to be made, you end up with string theory.

To get a sense of the energies involved: if you're a light-year way from a supernova, the neutrinos will kill you, even though they barely interact with matter at all.

Complete and utter bullshit. You are pulling numbers out of your ass. I give you the truth. I stopped reading your post after that sentence.

Alright, screw mod points this time. This is a discussion that needs more voices.

This is an article about the definition of science. The fundamental point is incredibly sound, and explains a lot about anti-scientific culture by explaining something about pro-scientific culture: even the people who are pro-science don't really know what science is. Science is not the pursuit of truth. Science is, as he says repeatedly, "the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation". Nothing more, nothing less.

Statistics is a dangerous thing that can prove anything. For example, running accepted statistics on the human population of Earth and population expansion rates (or the height of Twitter timelines) leads to the result that the human species will likely go extinct in about 800 years. And most people will never understand how that result happened, whether it seems to make sense or not. Do you know what magic is? It's not fireballs and heal spells. Magic at its most basic is trying to affect the outcome of the future with some action you don't really understand. If I were to turn my cap before pitching a baseball, believing that doing otherwise may jinx the pitch, that would be magic. It is also perfectly meaningful for me to say that because I do not understand exactly what an LED is, or how it is made, from my perspective it is made of and from magic.

As to whether "religious affairs are obviously beyond the realms of science, and are no obstacle in the quest for truth and understanding": real science, by definition, is outside the realm of religion. But the so-called "science" being criticized in the article is not. Science and religion are separate because science does not deal with Truth, and therefore no religious Truths are at risk. Even if we were to talk about something contentious like evolution, "science" does not tell us that evolution is True. Science tells us that we can ask the question, "Assuming that evolution is true, this other idea should also be true; let us find out". Asking that question has led scientists to predict practical applications (though not nearly as many as the laws of Physics and Chemistry).

The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.

XKCD rubber hoses

Ehh, it's a $5 wrench, you uncultured swine.

The only reason this is on-topic for Slashdot

Religion is a subject of Science, as Science can already explain it pretty well (and show that it has no validity).

Good luck with that, Windlord.

The fact that you think there's one thing that can be facilely labeled "Religion" and then scientifically invalidated reveals that you haven't studied comparative religion at all. There's about 3000 years of material you'll need to catch up on - be sure start with the Hindu classic "On Breathing" (and pay attention to the demiurge concept - Tolkien's fiction is very informed by Hinduism) although you can skip all the Blavatsky and anthrosophist stuff in the 19th century. Oh, and you might want to check out Rosch and Lakoff's work on categorization and prototypes, since if you're a computer guy you are very unlikely to understand what a set or group actually is outside of the realm of Cantorian mathematics.

Remember, if you think you are an expert in something you haven't seriously studied.... helllooooo Dunning-Kruger!

Anyway, speaking as someone who *has* spent years studying the subject, I'd say many (if not most) religions can be scientifically shown to be invalid. By contrast, the superset Religion cannot be trivially invalidated, and can be empirically shown to have pragmatic and utilitarian validity, which is probably why less than 20% of the people that have ever lived have proclaimed themselves to be atheists.

But hay, I know on the Internets everything is all sciencey an' all right up until it comes to talking about religion - there, it's totally OK to skip actually studying something (like say, theology) before dismissing it... oh, XKCD to the rescue!

http://xkcd.com/675/
http://xkcd.com/793/
http://xkcd.com/1112/

Religion is a subject of Science, as Science can already explain it pretty well (and show that it has no validity).

Good luck with that, Windlord.

The fact that you think there's one thing that can be facilely labeled "Religion" and then scientifically invalidated reveals that you haven't studied comparative religion at all. There's about 3000 years of material you'll need to catch up on - be sure start with the Hindu classic "On Breathing" (and pay attention to the demiurge concept - Tolkien's fiction is very informed by Hinduism) although you can skip all the Blavatsky and anthrosophist stuff in the 19th century. Oh, and you might want to check out Rosch and Lakoff's work on categorization and prototypes, since if you're a computer guy you are very unlikely to understand what a set or group actually is outside of the realm of Cantorian mathematics.

Remember, if you think you are an expert in something you haven't seriously studied.... helllooooo Dunning-Kruger!

Anyway, speaking as someone who *has* spent years studying the subject, I'd say many (if not most) religions can be scientifically shown to be invalid. By contrast, the superset Religion cannot be trivially invalidated, and can be empirically shown to have pragmatic and utilitarian validity, which is probably why less than 20% of the people that have ever lived have proclaimed themselves to be atheists.

But hay, I know on the Internets everything is all sciencey an' all right up until it comes to talking about religion - there, it's totally OK to skip actually studying something (like say, theology) before dismissing it... oh, XKCD to the rescue!

http://xkcd.com/675/
http://xkcd.com/793/
http://xkcd.com/1112/

Religion is a subject of Science, as Science can already explain it pretty well (and show that it has no validity).

Good luck with that, Windlord.

The fact that you think there's one thing that can be facilely labeled "Religion" and then scientifically invalidated reveals that you haven't studied comparative religion at all. There's about 3000 years of material you'll need to catch up on - be sure start with the Hindu classic "On Breathing" (and pay attention to the demiurge concept - Tolkien's fiction is very informed by Hinduism) although you can skip all the Blavatsky and anthrosophist stuff in the 19th century. Oh, and you might want to check out Rosch and Lakoff's work on categorization and prototypes, since if you're a computer guy you are very unlikely to understand what a set or group actually is outside of the realm of Cantorian mathematics.

Remember, if you think you are an expert in something you haven't seriously studied.... helllooooo Dunning-Kruger!

Anyway, speaking as someone who *has* spent years studying the subject, I'd say many (if not most) religions can be scientifically shown to be invalid. By contrast, the superset Religion cannot be trivially invalidated, and can be empirically shown to have pragmatic and utilitarian validity, which is probably why less than 20% of the people that have ever lived have proclaimed themselves to be atheists.

But hay, I know on the Internets everything is all sciencey an' all right up until it comes to talking about religion - there, it's totally OK to skip actually studying something (like say, theology) before dismissing it... oh, XKCD to the rescue!

http://xkcd.com/675/
http://xkcd.com/793/
http://xkcd.com/1112/

Check out Kerbal Space Program. You can build rockets, send them into orbit, land on the moon, and learn about concepts like apoapsis, retrograde burns, orbital transfers, and learn astrophysics -- plus it's simple enough I've seen multiple dads who have a blast playing with their kids. It runs on Linux/Mac/Windows and has a good free demo.
 
...but does it really teach orbital mechanics? Oblig XKCD says yes;)

Or, they simply use a $5 wrench.

Don't be ridiculous, we're talking about the US government and not some thugs.

It would be a $5,000 wrench.

Or, they simply use a $5 wrench.

If they simply want the information, the $5 wrench works. If they want it to be admissible in court, then it doesn't work so well.

Standard data forensics procedure is to write-protect any storage device which contains evidence, copy it bit-for-bit, and do all the decrypting and data analysis from the copy. The 10-try limit may protect your data from a random thief who lifts your phone, but the only way it's going to protect you from the government or any other technically-capable hacker is if Apple baked the limit into the flash memory-reading hardware.

And there's always this.

You can put a complex password on your iPhone:

1) Settings->Passcode, enter your 4 digit passcode.
2) Flip the "Simple Passcode" switch.
3) Set your new arbitrary length complex password.
4) Enable the "Erase Data" setting which wipes the device after 10 incorrect password inputs.
5) Enjoy entering your complex password every time you want to access the phone.

The encryption on these iDevices and the Macs is non trivial to crack. Combine this encryption with a properly strong password and that wipe feature and even the Police would be shit out of luck. I know of a case where a guy resolutely refused to provide police with the password and crypto-key for his MacBook. The cops shipped the laptop to Cupertino who sent it back after a few weeks having failed to crack the drive encryption. The cracking would take longer than the expected lifespan of the universe. Your only hope of getting into a properly password protected and encrypted device be it an iDevice, an Android device or a Windows phone is if there happens to be some software vulnerability that enables you to bypass the login screen.

Or, they simply use a $5 wrench.

Standard data forensics procedure is to write-protect any storage device which contains evidence, copy it bit-for-bit, and do all the decrypting and data analysis from the copy. The 10-try limit may protect your data from a random thief who lifts your phone, but the only way it's going to protect you from the government or any other technically-capable hacker is if Apple baked the limit into the flash memory-reading hardware.

And there's always this.

It could be a 4096-bit private key with uberultra fugu-based quantum encryption:

http://xkcd.com/538/

62% to 70% isn't exactly groundbreaking for something that varies greatly. This increase looks suspiciously like selecting results for passing a statistical test instead of using a statistical test to verify the significance of a given result. Relevant xkcd: Significant.

Also, there is no such thing as anonymised phone data.

Of course, you understand it, you wrote it.

Not necessarily. Haven't you ever found yourself in the situation that you're reading through a piece of code you have written yourself and you just can't figure out what you were thinking back then when you wrote it? If not – lucky you! I have. And I know many other coders have. I hate citing xkcd but this strip nails it: Future self. Documentation is not only good for newbies or colleagues, but also for yourself. As soon as I realized that, I started writing much more meaningful function descriptions (doxygen) and comments. I frequently have to analyze strange program behavior or crashes and I always hate it having to read through a whole function to see and understand what it is doing (because just assuming it does something by reading just it's name hardly ever is enough). A brief explanation would be such a time saver! Coders re-stating that 'good' code documents itself so there's no need for additional documentation, in my opinion, are either short-sighted or antisocial (i.e. no team players). Either way, I disagree with them heavily.

You didn't say so, but I'm assuming you're encrypting your message using the book page as a one time pad,

Yes, I missed describing part of the mechanism. You use the page to generate the one time pad, once again via simple rules that you only keep in your head. You certainly do not use the ASCII code of each letter/space/punctuation sign as one byte in the pad. This will not make it anywhere close to random - it will be way worse than counting decay particles, but I think that it will be good enough. I am not trying to improve on something that we know works, here. I am trying to avoid incriminating keys that the characters have to keep secure, and that can be seized to compromise the communications.

Steganography isn't much protection when someone knows there might be hidden messages.

Once again, I am going for good enough. Sure, the attacker may know that a few bites in the picture 'may' have been changed. (The characters won't be dumb enough to exchange pictures only when they want to exchange a message.) If the message is short enough, and the picture large enough, it will be very hard to tell there's something amiss, and much much harder to prove it in a court of law... Not that it really matters.

Remember, by picking other bites, and picking a different one-time pad, you would get different messages, just as meaningful.

http://xkcd.com/224/

Obligatory xkcd

Was there not a piece the other day about how ACM and other such groups are seeing declining relevance? Oh yeah, this is computer tech, it is always more fun to reinvent the wheel then use the same one as old fogies.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/94/

Be damn careful what you wish for. Be DAMN CAREFUL!!!!

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

"Wake Up Sheeple!"