Slashdot Mirror

Let me help you out with that: http://xkcd.com/605/

Of course, time will tell whether you're correct. I doubt it, though. ISPs are digging in with carrier grade NAT and other hacks.

It's like the x86 ISA... every time someone comes up with a new, improved ISA it loses to someone else who just puts another bag on the bag on the bag on the side of x86. When will ARM triumph and supplant x86? Before or after the heat death of the universe?

There's lots of cameras deployed without microphones. Also pretty sure sound doesn't make it to geosynchronous orbit strata of the atmosphere...

You're implying we could read lips from GEO. Good luck with that. Even if the Hubble Space Telescope (which is at low earth orbit, not geosynchronous) were pointed at the earth, the best resolution you could manage would be about 30 cm.

http://www.spacetelescope.org/...
https://what-if.xkcd.com/32/

In theory it might be possible to read lips at GEO, but you'd need a HUGE telescope, or smaller binocular-configured telescopes with a wide-enough baseline, to get the job done.

And nitpick: there's really no "strata of the atmosphere" at GEO. Contributions there from the Earth's atmosphere are miniscule. It's pretty much plasma and magnetosphere from a few hundred km altitude on upwards.

Time to upgrade the bandwidth calculations for a station wagon full of SD cards.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

Oh, the batteries! We would need so many. So, so many. They're not exactly environmentally friendly. How about something with better energy density and reliable continuous output? You know, something that would actually work. The best part is you don't have to worry about it being "not out of reach of technology", nuclear power is firmly in our grasp already.

Orbiting at 7.66km/s, it also travels almost exactly 1000 miles in the time it takes to play I'm Gonna Be (500 miles) by The Proclaimers.

Peer review filters out the stuff that is obvious crap, stuff that doesn't even fit the form of a proper scientific article. The purpose is not to say that articles are true, but rather to get rid of articles that are obviously wrong.

  If the scientists are lying about their data, it's hard for peer review to catch that. That's why reproducibility is important. If it's a result you care about, you can reproduce it.

Well, reproducibility is part of peer review. If anyone is making decisions based on the results of one paper, they're idiots. Even if the research methodology was flawless, and the researchers are brilliant and honest with all their data, certain results can still come about as a result of chance. Obligatory xkcd

I wish we'd put more emphasis on reproducing published results, though. I've mentioned this before, but I feel like this would be the ideal work for grad students during their first few years, before they're deep in their own research. They need to get papers published, there should be journals devoted to publishing data from reproducing results. Students get experience writing papers and conducting research and everyone gets stronger peer review in their fields.

Obligatory http://xkcd.com/859/

This is not actually news though it's one more study on the pile. My wife is a physician and her instructors in med school pointed out that the relationship between salt and high blood pressure was based on correlations, not a causal chain. Basically it was a logical hypothesis that people started acting upon before it was ever established as fact. A lot of patients with high blood pressure problems (apparently - I'm not a doctor) have issues relating to osmotic gradients and other biological functions where salt is involved. So the theory went that by controlling sodium you could help control these problems. A good theory. But a good theory isn't a necessarily fact and it sounds like a lot of medical effort went into controlling sodium before anyone actually could test to see if it really mattered. Apparently the answer is turning out to be that it doesn't matter nearly as much as we thought.

Oblig XKCD

Or it's Google Maps.

In every Federal election, either the Democrats or the Republicans advocate for peacable overthrow -- that's how elections work.

When people say "peaceable overthrow" they mean actual substantial changes in policy, rather than just rotating new people into position. There really aren't a lot of big differences between the parties. Obama has wound down the war, but with ISIS, now it looks like it will be wound back up. Gitmo is still open. Even Obamacare was designed by Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts.

But what the "overthrowers" fail to realize, is the reason there is little difference between the parties, is that both have coalesced around the median opinion of the voting public. Our government is about what we, on average, want. America is a prosperous country, that mostly respects individual rights. So any advocates of global socialist utopia, anarcho-syndicalism, or whatever, will have a hard time convincing many people that they can do better. Things are pretty okay.

Well, Rule 34 is always in play.

Frequentists vs. Bayesians

Anytime you re-analyze data you run into this.

Think about it. There are a million ways you can analyze any dataset. There are millions of datasets out there to analyze. There are millions of people who can independently decide to go back and do a re-analysis.

So, the issue is that if somebody goes back and does a re-analysis and the results are boring, nobody publishes. However, if the results are controversial, it gets published. Since there are so many permutations, you're guaranteed to find something exciting.

This is why you're supposed to establish your methods BEFORE you collect the data, and then stick to the methods you established to analyze the data. Otherwise your 95% confidence turns into a more realistic 1% confidence.

In practice, though, I'm sure the initial analyses are just as prone to this kind of problem. It just gets REALLY bad when you look backwards.

What do you think that USB port was for?

oblig XKCD: http://www.xkcd.com/1321/

WHY THE HELL AREN'T WE PUSHING FOR a standard that can keep pace and inform users trivially/ steadily

xkcd

Scientific consensus means that the thing has been sufficiently studied and reproduced that the confidence is extremely high. This isn't just about "soft" sciences. This is true even in high energy physics. You gather some data and there's a statistical chance that it was all due to noise in the measurements or coincidence. Other people gather some more data and the chance that the conclusion is incorrect goes down. Lots of people gather more data, and one of them finds a counter example, but then more people gather more data and that counter example fits with the expected error bar. This is the consensus process. It isn't about feelings or opinions or subjective truths. It's about increasing confidence and reducing error to the point where the entire community of researchers is confident the findings are reliable and can be assumed true.

Scientific consensus isn't the same as truth. It's just the best proxy for truth we can have. Scientific consensus about Newton's Laws was wrong - but it was only wrong at then-unmeasurable scales and precision. The consensus was incredibly useful, even though it was slightly wrong, because the conclusions it gave were widely reproducible and produced predictions with very high confidence that other researchers and engineers could rely on.

Scientific consensus about climate change isn't "consensus" because some scientists "convinced" other scientists or because it's too hard to do repeatable experiments. It is consensus because repeated experiments and measurements and analyses have consistently increased the confidence and reduced the noise in the predictions.

Nothing is ever proven true. Things can be proven false. And things can be proven to be more and more and more likely to be true and less and less likely to be false (because we repeatedly fail to prove them false). At some point things are proven to be SO likely to be true that there is consensus that we might as well treat them as true until someone comes up with a paradigm shift (ala Newton -> Einstein).

The quote in this article assumes that there's never an error bar on scientific measurements. There always is.

http://xkcd.com/882/

Obligatory xkcd: Meteor.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Someone should tell the FAA to go fly a kite! What if someone should decide to do aerial photography from a kite and then sell the images? What? You don't think that could happen? http://xkcd.com/kite/ "I've checked FAA regulations, and it seems that as long as the kite is under five pounds I don't need to notify them before flights." Randall Munroe (xkcd) Of course there are kites and then there are 'KITES'... http://www.guinnessworldrecord... Richard P Synergy flew a kite to an altitude of approximately 4,422 m (14,509 ft) above the point of take-off on 12 August 2000 near Kincardine, Ontario, Canada. The massive kite, with an area of 25 m (270 ft), was designed and built by Synergy himself. At its maximum altitude the kite had 7.31 km (4.5 miles) of woven kevlar line connecting it to a winch on the ground. The record-breaking flight lasted 8 hr 35 min. The kite was a high tech delta, having 270 square feet of nylon kite skin, measuring 30 feet from wing tip to wing tip, and 18 feet tall, sporting hollow fiberglass spars 1.5 inches in diameter, flying on 270 pound woven Kvlar line 3/32 inch in diameter. It's a bird, it's a drone, nah it's a helicopter cat... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Never mind the FAA, PETA might have something to say about this one >;-)

..has acheived a physical presence in space. The cube satelites are calculated to land on the far side of the moon, the contents of which are to be used to bootstrap the construction of a covert machine factory. It's gonna achieve apotheosis soon. We're totally screwed unless we nuke the moon now! Humanity depends on it.

Posting annonymously because I have reason to suspect that the singularity knows that I know about it.

Admittedly I am still skeptical it wouldn't be gamed cheaper than actually prioducing the result intended, but I like where you are going with that idea, it reminds me alot of the xkcd commentary on automated spam: http://xkcd.com/810/

That said, I think I have more faith in people's ability to reverse engineer, and lose control of secrets than I do in the ability of a system to regulate. At the current technology level, I really do suspect that any patent system will be more hamper than helper, and giving people incentive to share their ideas is likely no longer necessary, because their consent to sharing is widely irrelevant.

http://xkcd.com/768/

Facebook has provided this. Just hit settings and turn off autoplay videos and you get a lovely little play icon.

This article is another big whine on behalf of users who don't bother to actually hit a settings button or Google a problem.

That's news to me. Thanks for telling me. Default setting adjusted.

Also relevant to your "everybody already knows" attitude, there's an XKCD for that. No, everybody does not know about it.

The best known standard quip about standards itself has multiple versions and attributions. How meta:

"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 2nd ed., p. 254

"The nicest thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Ken Olsen

“The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.” -- Grace Murray Hopper

See also:

Obligatory (but who set that standard?): xkcd : Standards
Why are there so many plugs and sockets?

‘Mediocrity finds safety in standardization.’ -- Frederick Crane
‘It is not enough that X be standard, it should also be good.’ -- Rob Pike (Window Systems Should Be Transparent)
The two above can be found on the cat -v page on standards"
"Standards are like toothbrushes. Everybody wants one but nobody wants to use anybody else’s." -- Connie Morella

Obviously they use the spacebar to toggle the heat on and off. https://xkcd.com/1172/

Oblig. XKCD.

Try to visit the recent XKCD here, as example: http://xkcd.com/1416/

On Chrome is usable, on Firefox the entire system almost freeze (using Linux Mint on a AMD Athlon II X2 250).

I need a platform that supports reading flash cards.

What are you trying to do? Referring to? It's a completely different technology!
Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!

http://xkcd.com/171/

It's an honest question. I've seen many of these on the web over the years but some of the (IMHO) better ones use the web in some clever way, use long contiguous panels, or feature odd page layouts (3099 panels anyone?). How well does xkcd translate to book form?

It's an honest question. I've seen many of these on the web over the years but some of the (IMHO) better ones use the web in some clever way, use long contiguous panels, or feature odd page layouts (3099 panels anyone?). How well does xkcd translate to book form?

It's an honest question. I've seen many of these on the web over the years but some of the (IMHO) better ones use the web in some clever way, use long contiguous panels, or feature odd page layouts (3099 panels anyone?). How well does xkcd translate to book form?

I imagine if Kang and Kodoss ate all the humans

See Drop Table People

Oh you meant "Eat table people". My bad.

It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation -- a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.

http://xkcd.com/about/

And somehow you manage to find a way to feel superior to both.

What If, not exactly the classic xkcd comics, but worthy a book even if he don't expand even more the articles over what was posted in that site.

That's because I only posted the raw image. The links all went to http://blog.xkcd.com/2014/07/2...

I stopped reading at 1334 because (1) Google isn't the only search engine in existence, (2) there are plenty of useful results on the second page of search results, (3) there is no joke present in this comic, and (4) Munroe is merely using his massive cult of personality to proselytize his personal Google habits.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/store/tou...

Just thought I'd express my opinion that Randall Munroe is a genius. The amount of work he puts into some of his comics really makes him unique.

Unrecognized command. Type "help" for assistance.
guest@xkcd:/$ help
That would be cheating!

Pure UNIX!

Why didn't they plan ahead for this sort of operation in the beginning, making it painless and 'reliable' ( as possible ).

That's a joke, right? We are talking about one of the two rovers that was sent to Mars on a mission planned to only last 90 days. They didn't see "flash memory wearing out from use" as a contingency they needed to plan for.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/385/

Seems to me that the evangelism and product referrals come from a tiny, but vocal minority.

There, fixed that for you. Never forget, that the same "minority" that take issue with changes to the product, also tend to be the same minority that espouse your product from the mountain tops and get people actually using your product. This small group also often includes consultants, IT admins, and other influencers, who if sufficiently dissatisfied have a great deal of power to persuade current users to switch to another product.

Yeah, because every change breaks someone's workflow.

But bear in mind the "lies about being harmed in order to manipulate" thing is a stereotype about women that misogynistic fucks absolutely love.

And, of course, the "abusive woman-hater" is a stereotype about men that misandristic fucks absolutely love.

It's one big terrible positive-feedback loop, and I'd be happy if the people from both sides of it would go away and stop bothering the rest of us. Relevant XKCD

Oblig: http://xkcd.com/385/

On top of this, at least in my city, you can get a big ass-free CRT TV for free,

My hobby...

Take a look and think about this: http://xkcd.com/1338/

FYI, the whole CFC thing was about ozone depletion, and is not the largest contributor to climate change (and it has nothing to do with butterflies). If was just especially bad because in addition to making the Earth absorb more heat from the Sun, it would also make our skin absorb more cancer-causing UV light. So yeah, I'm glad that shit isn't in our hairspray anymore.

XKCD has covered this possibility:

http://xkcd.com/505/