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If you go back and listen to executives from the music or film industries talk about when they started to get approached by folks from Apple, Amazon, or others from the digital era, you'll hear similar stories. There was a lot of distrust between the sides, and what was needed was someone who could bridge the gap, speak both their languages, and help each side appreciate the problems of the other. People in many other industries think that technology is magical and that anything is possible, so they won't accept excuses or explanations to the contrary. 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.

This isn't about arrogance or bad attitudes. This is simply about two companies from different worlds, trying to get on the same page, and it's no surprise that they'd have these sorts of difficulties. They'll eventually start talking to each other, it's just a matter of when and under what conditions.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/33/

you are so wrong, it almost hurts

Fuck computational linguists

Along those lines, the Obligatory XKCD....and SMBC's Lifecycle of a Physicist

http://xkcd.com/793/
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id...

The difference is that a locked file cabinet is trivial to circumvent without the cooperation of the key or combination holder. Once they had the warrant the police wouldn't bother with the courts, they would hire a locksmith or some other such expert to break open the cabinet or safe. Apparently the encryption on the hard drive in this case is much more difficult if not impossible for anyone at the state level to break it within a reasonable time period. So to avoid waiting 5 years and spending lots of $ on super computer time, they went to a judge to see if the threat of jail would shortcut the process.

Oblig: http://xkcd.com/538/

Today's XKCD is timely.
http://xkcd.com/1386/

Sure, the body would burn up for most vehicles -- the shuttle sees a temperature of around 1500 C for 15 to 20 minutes which I'm confident would do the job

According to Randall Munroe, the corpse wouldn't burn up on re-entry.

Somehow that reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/606/

BTW I'm still playing Guild Wars 1 - an old good but dying game...

http://xkcd.com/1262/

Oblig. xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1346/

Can you explain it to me like I'm five?

"Oh my God, where are your parents!"

"Developers tell us that they are not sure how to start app development on the Web, with so many different tools and templates that they need to download from a variety of different sources."

So the plan of having too many tools to do development is to create another tool? Man, that's some awesome thinking right there. Reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/927/

Obligatory xkcd.

When El Nino leads to a new record high temperature by a large margin (for argument's sake, in 2015), the denialists will quietly adopt this as their new standard for 'normal' and in 2025 they'll be saying "warming is a hoax because temperatures haven't risen on average since 2015."

http://xkcd.com/1321/

Since when are three objects considered a swarm? If that's acceptable it should be appended to the list.

The main purpose of AP Statistics (and AP Calculus) seems to be to teach limited subsets of the functionality of the TI-89 calculator series. The programmability features of that calculator are never taught in American schools.

Not that AP Computer Science is much better. Its main purpose seems to be to teach the Serious Programming Language du Jour, currently Java. Any algorithmic learning has to happen in between the struggles with that language.

I'm not pleased with the College Board's position in American society.

And of course, XKCD has an excellent cartoon about just this sort of problem:

              http://xkcd.com/327/

It looks like little Bobby "Tables" has grown up, discovered herself, and changed her name and gender to Roberta "PHP".:

Get him!

... that "digital magazine" mention is the really scary part. That's wasted effort with a 98% chance they'll get it wrong.
Obligatory xckd: http://xkcd.com/1174/

http://xkcd.com/350/

http://xkcd.com/1299/

He also told me that the FBI
was behind the assassination of Martin Luther King.

[Citation Needed]

http://xkcd.com/562/

Somehow I expected that the Voynich manuscript would come up. It's not a very good argument though. We don't know if the contents of that thing are even supposed to make sense. You can't decrypt /dev/random. In general, where you have data, you have context. That context helps deciphering the data, unless care is taken to make that impossible. And with "care is taken" I mean "cryptography is applied". If you make up a new language, it probably won't be a cipher that is better than encoding that information in an efficient way and running it through a cryptographic cipher.

Well. You could encrypt something and then map that back into a grammar and speakable words, but that's cheating.

That is why I threw out book codes or one time pad codes as an example. They're unbreakable without the pad. As in NEVER.

You also ignored all the issues those have and which I mentioned.

Today's symmetric ciphers commonly have key lengths of 128bit or 256bit and usually there aren't even purely theoretical attacks that are significantly faster than brute-force. If you have a cipher with very conservative safety margins, such as ChaCha20, and a key length of 256bit that is pretty much unbreakable without the key too.

For comparison, the estimated total number of fundamental particles in the observable universe is somewhere in the range of 2^265 to 2^282. Maybe you would be satisfied 384bit keys? "2^100 times more states to check than there are particles in the universe" has a nice ring to it.

but that's just because that's the weakest link. You don't waste your time with the tough stuff if you can find something softer.

No, that's because modern cryptography is so strong that trying to break it is pretty much futile. If the cryptography was a viable target, it would be targeted, because then you could break all the implementations at once.

Added to what I said above, I think systems that are secure must be simple. Very simple. As in no more then a couple pages of code. Why? Because complicated code is code that can't be debugged. Keep it simple and you can make the code perfect. Total confidence that there is zero error. As in 1+1=2 perfect.

Simplicity is good, I agree. However, many actual cryptographic algorithms are rather compact. AES is just a few pages of code. So is ChaCha20.

As I said before. The cryptography is not the problem. Usually it's not even the code for the cryptography. Granted, there have been some cases of sidechannel attacks, but those can be (mostly) avoided with proper care.

A perfect OTP implementation won't help you if your application is leaking random memory blocks (including your OTP) to an attacker heartbleed-style.

The sort of thing you'd trust to keep out the literal devil.

The devil applies "simmer in a pot full of literal liquid hell fire" cryptanalysis, I believe. Apart from that, 256 bits of security should be enough against that guy.

Obligatory xkcd reference.

Someone read to much xkcd, I see.

Leave it to Microsoft to screw up the map.

You don't want to do that

http://xkcd.com/1204/ "Google defends the swiveling roof-mounted scanning electron microscopes on its Street View cars, saying they 'don't reveal anything that couldn't be seen by any pedestrian scanning your house with an electron microscope.'"

Obligatory XKCD.

What! You mean a grumpy slashdotter can't just come up with a remarkably brilliant solution to solve the world's problems in just 30 seconds of thinking?

http://xkcd.com/793/

That depends on what kind of ship it is, how it is powered, how big it is, etc. A small enough ship - or one with an exotic enough propulsion system, could wind up being undetectable to us.

Then again, if the aliens had FTL travel, they could equip a small projectile with it, crank it to 99% of the speed of light, and crash it into Earth. The resulting explosion would likely end all life on Earth. (See https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/.) Even if they began the projectile's journey by Pluto and we detected it immediately, we'd have about 6 hours until impact. Plenty of time to panic, but not enough time to come up with an effective defense.

Further, tectonic activity has literally subducted and melted the entirety of the early Earth's crust, so the first billion years of our history - anything that happened/was built on the Earth's surface (even the ocean floor!) is completely gone and unknowable. Oblig: http://xkcd.com/1194/

http://xkcd.com/927/

Enjoy!

You could be exactly right; everybody else knows to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

Or maybe the universe is so competitive that anyone who announces their presence eats the bad end of a relativistic weapon.

Maybe we have already seen evidence of such things. As far relativistic weapons go this seems to be a pretty cool explanation of their effects.

XKCD put it quite well:

http://xkcd.com/1377/

Maybe the reason we can't see anyone is the only ones left surviving are the ones that blend in with the background.

I would be interested in what the voter/incumbent ratio is in those other democracies. I would be interested in their taxation model, and their services model. I would be interested if their leaders are directly elected or elector-elected. Obviously your two Senators cannot do everything that needs to get done, so are they going to appoint people to handle the local details?

Obviously it would be ideal to adjust details such as number of senators and etc. if there were no state governments. There are a lot of things that would need to be adjusted, but without the gigantic bureaucracy of 50 state governments a lot could be done.

We would end up with massive cronyism with 6 years to wait to get rid of them...if we could.

We already have massive cronyism in federal government, and this problem is significantly worse in many current state governments.

I think the local governments are incompetent and poor because the lions share of the tax money is going to the Federal government.

Interesting thought. The federal government will always get more tax money than the state governments. We have gone dramatically too far down that road to turn back. We are currently spending over 700 billion dollars each on military and social security. These two gigantic budget items are each a bit larger than the total tax revenue from all 50 states combined. These two items not going away anytime soon (admittedly, neither are state governments, so this entire discussion is basically moot).

We could afford and feel entitled to the best people in our local governments if they were the ones controlling the dispersment of tax revenues. Last I heard, the pentagon could not account for a trillion dollars. Thats a lot of schools, hospitals, roads, and jobs that were lost.

"Not able to account for" is not the same as "missing". But yes, I do not see any reason to argue whether the federal government is inefficient and/or spends too much money. This behavior seems to be a foundational requirement for all governments. My position is that state governments are more wasteful, and less functional than the federal government.

I do not feel inclined to give control of any more tax revenue to the state governments who have already proven to be inept and/or malicious in their handling of funds at a truly ludicrous level. I think the most logical conclusion, based on my observations of state governments, that if we transferred a significant portion of federal funds to state control, the currently pervasive financial misconduct would only increase by a factor of how much more money was available.

...courtesy of xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1127/ .

atory xkcd

Bah, how hard can standards be? They're called "Standard" for a reason!

http://xkcd.com/927/

I think that to pass the Turing test, you have to tell the judges that the entity they are about to talk to *might* be a computer program. Eliza worked because people had never encountered a computer that even tried to be remotely human - so the assumption was that this was a real person from the outset

An interesting aspect of the Turing Test is that it's dependent upon sociological factors. Back in the 60's, like you said, it was assumed that the thing on the other side was a human. But as time goes forward and we get flooded with clever ads, chatbots, brand-dropping honeypot girlfriends, smart cars, automated grocery tellers, and AI in general, we'll be more suspicious of the humanity of EVERYTHING around us.

It'll be harder for AI's to pass the Turing Test as time goes on.

It'll also be harder for us to pass the Turing Test. It's a jarring experience to answer the phone and have the person swear at getting voice-mail.

http://default-environment-sdqm3mrmp4.elasticbeanstalk.com/

Seriously, type with this thing for more than 5 phrases and tell me that this thing would even fool your grandma.

It reminds me of every ALICE bot I've seen on IRC ever, and I have a sneaky suspicion that it's code is at most slightly modified from the ALICE bots, as it told me that it has a "Celeron 667" that is "nice" that it "plays games with", setting its likely date of origin somewhere around 1999/2000.

It does get partial extra credit, however, for attempting to convince me that I'm a computer.

I wasn't just referring to the last reply. Even in your first reply to Noah, you asked him to "lay off the weed". Overall, I found Noah's tone to range from supportive to apologetic, while yours ranged from dismissive to smug. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

Because XKCD, and also XKCD

Because XKCD, and also XKCD

AH! I see you are unfamiliar with "How Standards Proliferate".

Netflix provides TOECDN to anyone they just call it Open Connect CDN.

I disagree. His first year was pretty great to me. His second year started a soft decline, and it got pretty bad as we got to 2008. Now, good comics (in my opinion) are the exception, rather than the rule. This lines up to when he graduated and then went to xkcd full-time (after a short contract at NASA, which I'm given to understand ended because of budget, not because of problems with him).

His target audience seemed to shift from upper-level physics students with a more-than-passing interest in computers, to people with a middle-of-high-school level of education and nerdiness, with many comics seeming like "look at this thing I read about on wikipedia today!". This is totally understandable -- he was not in classes anymore, he's not being exposed to Karnaugh maps as a new concept or anything like that, so we get bad puns and graph comics and "Get out of my head, Randall!"-baiting.

To be fair to the comic, the early xkcd probably resonated exceptionally well with me because I'm about the same age and was taking very similar courses at the exact same time, and then I went off and worked on computers while he went off to be a t-shirt salesman. Very divergent career paths.

Of course, some of the comics seem custom-designed to be pasted into a teacher's slides (as opposed to being a student's doodles). That's good in a different sense -- I wouldn't necessarily read that for enjoyment. I haven't actually read xkcd in ages but I was confident I could find a recent one that fit the bill, and was not disappointed: http://xkcd.com/1354/ does a good job of explaining a concept to somebody not familiar with computer software, while not being terribly entertaining, especially to those who already knew the concept.

I have more fun with his "What If?" scenarios.

But it follows this: http://xkcd.com/1377/ which is more than balances it.

"Effect" is also a verb, meaning to cause something to happen. The way it's used ("will not effect the function of the existing object") could mean it will not cause the function of the object to happen, and since they're talking about explosives, could mean that the act of adding the nanoparticles won't cause the TNT to explode.

Oblig xkcd