Slashdot Mirror

I thought it rewires the liver

http://xkcd.com/323/

Non-obligatory XKCD. 'Number of living humans who have walked on another world.'

The overtext says, "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."

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/1244/ Jokes aside, it's true that if you want to redirect an asteroid a robotic mission makes the most sense.

It's good to see the EPA finally considering relaxing some of its uptight, business-hostile regulations. No wonder the US is losing ground to the developing world when for a few decades it has pushed this regulatory regime that holds industry back and has really harmed wider adoption of nuclear energy.

You're trying to be sarcastic, but your words are quite literally true. 0.25 mSv is:

• 12x the radiation you get from a chest x-ray
• 6x the radiation you get from a 5 hour airliner flight
• 3.5x the radiation you get from living in a stone, brick, or concrete house for a year
• about half the radiation dose from a mammogram
• an eighth the radiation dose from a head CT scan
• 1/28th the radiation dose from a chest CT scan

If the 0.25 mSv limit were applied consistently to other aspects of our lives, we'd ban mammograms and CT scans, limit people to a dozen chest x-rays in a year, restrict pilots and stewardesses to just 30 hours of flight time per year, and severely curtail brick, stone, and concrete as building materials. If the proposal someone made below to reduce the limit to 0.025 mSv were carried out, we'd have to ban air travel and chest x-rays altogether.

The article uses up to advertising. I.e. benefits may be 89%, but they also can be less.

For related XKCD see http://xkcd.com/870/.

I'm really not sure how sports fits into this. Yes, testosterone gives better performance in sports. Barry Bonds was fined for it. As was the Chinese women's swim team.

As far as chess, first mandatory xkcd. Another good reason is how women are treated in mostly male fields. There's very few women who play Magic: The Gathering or chess for this reason (yes, I've been to the tournies). On the other hand, more women are interested in studying academic subjects -- there must be some reason more women go to college than men right?

Men must be biologically weaker!;)

What kills me is that different sites have different password restrictions that infuriates me.

Yeah, that. Though I basically do what the article says and have "weak" passwords for things like Slashdot, and stronger ones for things involving money. I'd like to be able to use my strongest password everywhere, but many places don't support that many characters. yes it's longer than "correct horse battery staple"

Obligatory XKCD:

http://xkcd.com/936/

XKCD is terrible, as usual. 4 dictionary words has low, low fucking entropy.
95% of all English is done with less than 5000 words. Most people only ever use a fraction of that. When tasked with coming up with a "random" selection of words, most people will use an even smaller fraction. Your 5000 word bank is going to be closer to 500 once you task a human with thinking them up. And they're going to be mostly nouns and adjectives. And when you task the same human to come up with a new set they're going to pick the same words.
Instead of 5000^4 you're looking at 500^4 or 1000^4 if you're lucky. And then of course most systems will simply truncate your password if it exceeds a certain length. Just a few years ago most sites simply truncated anything beyond 8 characters.

A typical keyboard will have 94 different characters ignoring whitespace, though many systems will reject a handful of them.
Consider even just a 64-character set [a-zA-Z0-9!?]: 64^6 > 500^4, 64^7 > 1000^4, and 64^9 > 5000^4.
Using an 80-character set means an 8 character password beats 5000^4.

Users should be generating random passwords using a full 94-character set. They should only dumb that set down if the site rejects certain characters. (The easiest thing to do is to just generate a new password and try again.) These passwords should be at least 8 characters long, though ideally they should be as long as the site allows.

But users won't do that unless it's easy for them. So why not use javascript to have the user's machine automatically generate a suggested, random password using the full character set your site allows, while meeting your complexity and length requirements? On the registration page you have an area that shows the suggested password with a "regenerate" button the user can click to churn through a few of them if they want. Then make the user type that password in twice, as usual. This introduces no security issues as long as you don't host user-generated content (XSS) on the registration page.

The only problem is the typical issue of people forgetting their passwords. They can do the same things they've always done - remember a few and reuse them, write them down on paper and hide that piece of paper, or forget them and reset them as needed.
Having to reset your password(s) when you forget them is an inconvenience, not a risk.
Using good passwords means that when a site gets hacked you don't have to worry/hurry as much (assuming they didn't store them in plain text and didn't use MD5 or some shit).
Writing passwords down and hiding the paper at home is a minor risk. Leaving a post-it with the password on your monitor at work is a moderate risk. Using shitty passwords is a major fucking risk.

Telling people to use shitty passwords so they can remember them is the wrong fucking thing to do. The fact that the passwords you suggest are shitty in a different way doesn't change that fact.

What kills me is that different sites have different password restrictions that infuriates me.

Yeah, that. Though I basically do what the article says and have "weak" passwords for things like Slashdot, and stronger ones for things involving money. I'd like to be able to use my strongest password everywhere, but many places don't support that many characters. yes it's longer than "correct horse battery staple"

Obligatory XKCD:

http://xkcd.com/936/

http://xkcd.com/1321/

Obligatory XKCD

http://xkcd.com/927/

Obligatory really old XKCD: http://xkcd.com/37/

It's a lot harder than you think :)

Are any of the vunerabilities related to a wrench? http://xkcd.com/538/

http://xkcd.com/1253/
I hope this continues like this. For it is funny :)

...But in principle, physics can be simulated by an algorithm. Therefore a human brain can be modelled at the particle level and run in simulation.

This caught my eye, because it is so far beyond human capability, you might as well say, "unicorns can be wired in series to produce any level of artificial intelligence desired." A simulation running at the particle level, hmm. I think that's in the realm of "not enough time left in the universe to produce a meaningful result before final proton decay."

Obligatory xkcd: http://www.xkcd.com/505/

If those folks could just pick up a cheap Areo subscription

There won't be any such thing as a cheap Aereo subscription though.

Once Aereo starts paying broadcasters their requested fees their product will cost as much as any basic cable subscription, because the bulk of the cost of the service is the content, and Aereo needs to cover service costs and make a profit on top of that. Aereo's entire business plan (from a revenue standpoint) was based on using OTA provisions to cut out the content costs, making their only cost the service itself. The SCOTUS ruling has put an end to that.

Aereo can "win" in as much as they may be able to force the networks to negotiate with them, but that's it. And TFS got something very wrong here: the 1996 cable reforms mean that the rates are de facto set by the networks and not the government. The older statutory royalties provisions will not apply here; for various reasons this is not how business is done today, and every last cable company is now paying rates set by negotiations.

Consequently Aereo's backup plan of simply paying less than the cable companies for the same content will also fall flat on its face. They are going to pay full price, the same as anyone else, and they're going to need to find a way to structure their business around it to make it viable. Otherwise, to invoke XKCD, this is the copyright equivalent of thinking you can protect a laptop from the government with encryption. Aereo will simply get wrenched; this isn't a battle that can be won with legal tricks, as evidenced by the SCOTUS ruling.

xkcd

And clicking the icon takes you to 927

http://xkcd.com/538/

Brings new meaning to "brute force" hacking. Or is that whacking?

Anyone else notice its starting to look more like XKCD?

https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/

... use frameworks the new guy is likely unfamiliar with because there are so many. Time for a new web GUI standard; the existing attempts keep falling on their face and try to turn JavaScript into a GUI OS language, which it wasn't meant for. We need fresh standards, dammit!

This sounds familiar.

http://xkcd.com/927/

Obligatory:
http://xkcd.com/603/

The obligatory xkcd that covers this situation.

Who cares? Isn't the critical question always what editor they should program with? Everyone knows that real programmers use vim. Long live vim!

Here: something to distract you while I go duck under a desk

Oblig xkcd.

no they are not, don't get carried away by romantic notions of a geek cartoonist. http://xkcd.com/1211/

Several major physiological differences are: birds have very light skull relative to body compared to dinosaurs' massive one, birds have no teeth or tail

In further news, stock in the Crescent Wrench company skyrocketed shortly after techies started carrying lots of USB sticks...

C-x M-c M-butterfly.

The best way to program for sure.

Madame butterfly?

No, it's a reference to this.

You do realize that IMDb is a type of wiki, right? The tags are user-submitted. They're good for some stuff, but probably not so useful for the sorts of things Netflix likely needs them for. Besides which, IMDb is owned by Amazon, so there's likely all sorts of legal issues in using its data for their service.

http://xkcd.com/651/

http://xkcd.com/538/

oblig

The obligatory on this matter: http://xkcd.com/1338/

You should know what happens when you ASS-U-ME.

Obligatory response.

Throw out HTML, throw out CSS, throw out JavaScript. Take the best *ideas* from them all, use C# (nothing to do with Microsoft though) and create a common framework on all platforms embracing those *ideas* and use OpenGL as the composition engine.

I'd try to explain the problems with this line of thinking, but I think xkcd does a better job.

There is a git repository on I2P.
git.repo.i2p

I assume that git over darknet is less censorable than git over clearnet, but never forget that this is always a possibility.

How can anyone still be surprised?

Because they are one of the lucky 10000...

Oblig. http://xkcd.com/242/ :)

Scientists: http://xkcd.com/242/

oblig. http://xkcd.com/875/

Everybody removes Hitler from Google searches on their first try at censorship. http://www.abyssapexzine.com/wikihistory/ http://xkcd.com/1063/

Then you need this: Faucet Power

Relevant XKCD

What are they doing reading an article about DST then?

Obligatory Onion link and XKCD link

Nope. Because boom, headshot

under stress, panicked, depressed, worried, happy, horny, angry, or hungry.

Where is 'drunk'? http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ba...

Have to try coding horny though. Is it any good? :)

What, nobody make the XKCD reference yet? Too proud?

http://xkcd.com/1361/

People in Silicon Valley have a tendency to think that everything else is trivial, and fail to recognize the value in doing things in a different way...kinda like physicists.

Reminds me of the "antibiotics" episode for Sliders: Prof Arturo says something like "This confirms my opinion that biology is what you do if you don't have the maths for real science."