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Yeah. That can be a problem.

Just because you don't have your own server doesn't mean there isn't one. Somebody has to actually run the server somewhere. Or is it clouds all the way down?

Something like that...

Obligatory xkcd

...doesn't mean you should.

>> it's now possible to write sophisticated, high-performance applications

Why couldn't we have gotten a real object oriented language with real classes instead of souping up this painful, nested function oddity that was original only meant to add a little eye candy to 90s era web pages?!?! OK, yeah I get it https://xkcd.com/927/. But come on! Javascript sucks! Now it sucks with more power! And there is less incentive to ever replace it with something that doesn't suck!

Could it be that so many web application developers are young, started out with web applications, have never developed with better tools and don't know what they are missing?

In 20 years will we have car manufactureres developing engine control computers programmed in the Arduino IDE?

But what about *my speech*?

Ob. xkcd link Free Speech.

Using a laptop at home with a big ass-video card?

An oldie but a goodie: http://xkcd.com/37/

then this is a solved problem.

I think You have missed a key piece of the views on "piracy" by Many on /., which is summarized nicely by Randall Munroe here.

What on earth are you talking about? There were only three star wars movies made, and I've watched all three multiple times. None of them had any character called "JarJar Binks".

http://xkcd.com/221/

Holy shit are you serious?

I feel *very* obligated to post this...
http://xkcd.com/538/

http://www.xkcd.com/221/

a vulnerable server can expose its private SSL key to an attacker

A vulnerable server can expose anything in the server process's memory space to the attacker. Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/1354/

There's a very interesting xkcd what-if on this. Turns out nowadays aliens would have a better chance at finding us based on the reflected light anomalies created by our atmosphere, rather than picking up radio transmissions.

Then one tanker car ~= 6 Great Pyramids!

Why cannot we force all websites and services to comply with a common password complexity rule? There is a wide variation in the rules that phone companies, banks, utilities and various online services enforce when I create passwords. As a consequence, it becomes difficult to decide on a password-generating algorithm to create and remember passwords across these websites/services. So, coming back to the question, can we not have a standard password complexity rule which every website/service has to stick to? Instead of those irritating, little info boxes near the password field listing different passwords rules for different websites, we could have a URL pointing to the standard password rules which in turn would be maintained by an independent organisation. Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/

Or OBLIG XKCD LINK: http://xkcd.com/936/

Yep, global warming impact is severe, alright. Coldest winter in recent memory, that warming sure is a bitch!

Ok, that comment was just begging for the obligatory XKCD link.

https://xkcd.com/1321/

The water to irrigate the Sahara to Iowa's levels falls (assuming typical tropical rates of 10 inches per year) on 6.48 billion acres, which would require a tarp costing $47 trillion (based on the best bulk price I found easily). That's about two thirds the net worth of all US households.

The price for the tarp works out to be $0.02 per gallon gathered, roughly ten times the average price of water in the US. Then we'll have to add on the cost of the pumps, too, and the management and environmental costs associated with putting something that large into the ocean.

Except that QE is the purchase of investment vehicles (bonds) that return their cost. You're right, though: You're back to your original point where you don't understand economics.

That does bring up a good question, however: What is the price of the water produced with these rain barrels?

If we want to pay back the production cost of one barge in a single productive year, each gallon of water must be sold for only $0.023. The US average price per gallon of water is $0.002, so to compete with the current US market, you'll need to spread the cost over a decade, at least, and we're still assuming minimal production costs and free labor.

Now would be a good time to account for not having that world-record rainfall. The average in a good southern tropical location is only about 100 inches annually, so your barge probably wouldn't break even for 100 years, if it even survives that long. 100 years is a very long time in salt water, even with corrosion resistance. In comparison, the desalination plant would break even in only 7 years.

I'm left with the same conclusion as I had in my earlier comment: No sane politician or corporate investor will want anything to do with a project this absurd. It's not a matter of how you scale up or where you get the water. A giant rain barrel left open to the sky simply isn't a cost-effective means of water production. Small ones only work because they have a relatively large surface gathering water for them.

American rainfall ranges from about 5 inches to 30 inches per year, which (at 10 inches per year) gives us about 12500 gallons per year for a 2000 square foot collection area. Conveniently and coincidentally, that much water costs about the same ($25) as a cheap plastic rain barrel on Amazon. To equal the production of the one desalination plant (7500 acre feet per year), we'd have to gather rainfall from an area of 9000 acres, or half the size of Manhattan. The easiest way to accomplish that scale of collection would be to dam up a valley, possibly diverting existing rivers and tributaries. In short, build a reservoir, like politicians and corporations already have in many places that can fill them.

I've been mimicking Randall Munroe's style all day, so it's fitting that I'm reminded of a basic test for whether an idea makes sense. Building a reservoir on land where there is already ample rainfall makes sense, and people are already doing it. Building a completely man-made structure to gather rainwater for transport elsewhere doesn't make sense, so people don't do it. You can blame conspiracies all you want, but that won't change the basic fact that such a project is a ridiculously expensive way to get water.

They have probably been around for a while and once reached middle aged, bought a nice ass-car.

heheheh

I, for one, always include at least one ' in a passphrase. Just to see whether the server admin did his homework.

Someone can still point a wrench to your head and ask for your PasswordSafe master password. What would be your truthful answer to the following question: "Do you know your online banking password, or any other password that can be used to retrieve your online banking password?"

From the article: "Passcodes that have a length of 20 or more can contain any character type an end user wants, including all lower case letters." And sites like Phil's Hobby Shop have lowered "complexity" requirements for sufficiently long passwords. I'm glad the passphrase concept is catching on. To what extent can xkcd be credited with awareness of passphrases?

Because polar vortices are not a result of AGW

Absolutely! Indeed, the kind of temperatures we saw in the US because of the polar votex used to be normal a few decades ago. So I guess that answer your questions: North America. Obligatory XKCD.

Other valid answers:
- Western Europe (here are the years in which winters were severe enough to hold an outdoor skating contest in the Netherlands; making a graph is left as an exercise to the reader)
- Australia
- The antarctic (yes, the ice is melting overall)
- Greenland, where ice sheet decline, is a boon for agriculture - Pretty much any place that has seen shifts in habitat (here come West Nile Virus and Malaria)
- Pretty much anywhere where there are glaciers

A better question would be: "can you name any area of the world that didn't have its climate disrupted as a result of global warming?"

Yes.

I am full metric. I use mm squared (damn /. not accepting either  or 2).

If the difference between staying alive and being murdered is a matter of split seconds? You tell me. Keep in mind, the villain you're theoretically facing probably didn't bother to steal a smart gun. His is definitely going to fire; are you sure it's worth your life to risk the chance that yours might not?

You're making the assumption that such a security device is not reliable. Is there evidence to support that?

Yes - cops refuse to carry them. Now, why would a cop refuse to carry such a weapon, if not for the fact that they believe it to be unreliable?

Just one additional point. I do not carry firearms because I'm not prepared to kill people. I've lived my whole (almost half a century) life in a large urban area, at times in high-crime areas, and that's never been an issue. What are you afraid of?

Strawman - fear has nothing to do with the decision of carrying something a person can use to defend themselves. If you choose to not carry a means of defense, on the off chance that you find yourself in a life threatening situation, that's your right and decision, and I won't demean you for making it, just as I expect you to not demean my right and decision to provide myself the means to defend myself and my loved ones, if the need ever arises (which, like the majority of people, I pray never happens).

Accusing me of being "afraid" is disrespectful, and seems an obvious attempt at marginalizing a point-of-view you disagree with.

Not a strawman. My apologies if you were offended by my characterization. However, if it isn't fear (of the unknown, of some notional threat, or of your own mortality) that drives you to the conclusion that the threat of deadly force against others is the way for you to feel secure in your person, then what drives you to (at least in your mind) threaten anyone who may stand in your path with gruesome, painful death?

That may strike you as hyperbole, but that is, in fact, how your choice appears to me. The act of carrying a deadly weapon for "protection," to me, implies a willingness to inflict death, or at least grievous bodily harm on another human being. Such extreme measures suggests a strong driver -- in my mind, most likely fear.

Please understand, I'm not trying to demean you or your choices. It's just that I honestly don't get it. And I'd like to understand your point of view. If you would explain, I would much appreciate it.

If the difference between staying alive and being murdered is a matter of split seconds? You tell me. Keep in mind, the villain you're theoretically facing probably didn't bother to steal a smart gun. His is definitely going to fire; are you sure it's worth your life to risk the chance that yours might not?

You're making the assumption that such a security device is not reliable. Is there evidence to support that?

Yes - cops refuse to carry them. Now, why would a cop refuse to carry such a weapon, if not for the fact that they believe it to be unreliable?

Just one additional point. I do not carry firearms because I'm not prepared to kill people. I've lived my whole (almost half a century) life in a large urban area, at times in high-crime areas, and that's never been an issue. What are you afraid of?

Strawman - fear has nothing to do with the decision of carrying something a person can use to defend themselves. If you choose to not carry a means of defense, on the off chance that you find yourself in a life threatening situation, that's your right and decision, and I won't demean you for making it, just as I expect you to not demean my right and decision to provide myself the means to defend myself and my loved ones, if the need ever arises (which, like the majority of people, I pray never happens).

Accusing me of being "afraid" is disrespectful, and seems an obvious attempt at marginalizing a point-of-view you disagree with.

If the difference between staying alive and being murdered is a matter of split seconds? You tell me. Keep in mind, the villain you're theoretically facing probably didn't bother to steal a smart gun. His is definitely going to fire; are you sure it's worth your life to risk the chance that yours might not?

You're making the assumption that such a security device is not reliable. Is there evidence to support that?

Just one additional point. I do not carry firearms because I'm not prepared to kill people. I've lived my whole (almost half a century) life in a large urban area, at times in high-crime areas, and that's never been an issue. What are you afraid of?

oblig

Subtly insightful: All fast-food fries must be timed so enough is available when rushes come in, but there's only a few minutes' window before it cools too much. Resource management and a keen sense of timing are very desirable qualities for a fry cook. Of course, that same skill set is necessary for managing a supply chain. You have to get parts ordered with sufficient lead time so they'll arrive before the production facility runs out, but you also don't want to be wasting storage space (and the associated facilities budget) holding more stock than you need.

My point is that the same skills Starcraft competitions rely on are very close to what certain business sectors need. Perhaps you successfully built your own fan base as a gamer, and now can turn that into a marketing career. Maybe you were able to perfectly balance defenses, and now have a well-trained sense of how to build and evaluate defense-in-depth security. There could be a good career in government work for you. Even if the only thing you were good at was predicting your opponents' strategies, that could be spun into a successful career as an industry analyst.

Don't discount skills just because they were used for something fun.

... as the US are lacking the proper Nazis for the job: https://xkcd.com/984/

https://xkcd.com/927/

It's pretty simple. It has nothing to do with not being involved, or energy efficiency, or anything like that.

It's the fact that the logic behind it, the whole "it's kinda like a gold standard" type BS, is wrong, and there is nothing, nothing, more likely to upset a geek than someone on the Internet being wrong.

We need to bring back those days of long compile times: xkcd - Compiling

Then don't watch it. You are completely free to watch the original trilogy, in their original versions, on laserdisc, over and over again.

Too bad they never made any sequels...

Here are some cereals that should be OK for a Paleo diet.

After "pushing out their CEO" for political / free speach reasons

Free speach [sic], you say? Obligatory xkcd. The CEO has a Constitution-enshrined right to say whatever he wants without fear of criminal prosecution, but Mozilla also has a right to boot him out of the company for it.

"Insightful" my ass.

That XKCD is downright fucking scary - it attacks the very foundations of free speech. Heckling and browbeating people into silence is just as much an attack on free speech as any government prosecution.

I lost a fuckload of respect for XKCD's author.

So much for Voltaire. "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

You, XKCD's author, and your continuously-searching-to-be-outraged ilk are not defending anyone's right to say anything with your spineless "support" of free speech. No, you're a bunch of corrosive jackasses trying to set agendas you support but all the while attacking the very foundations of civil, democratic society.

I'm actually starting to hope you win your war to stamp out speech you don't like. And then have someone like Pat Buchanan come into power just to shit all over you miserable close-minded twits and your self-congratulatory "tolerance" that brooks no dissent.

After "pushing out their CEO" for political / free speach reasons

Free speach [sic], you say? Obligatory xkcd. The CEO has a Constitution-enshrined right to say whatever he wants without fear of criminal prosecution, but Mozilla also has a right to boot him out of the company for it.

When you can have your ability to earn a living taken away from you, even though you have done nothing that violates any law, then you have effectively created a society where there is no free speech.

After "pushing out their CEO" for political / free speach reasons

Free speach [sic], you say? Obligatory xkcd. The CEO has a Constitution-enshrined right to say whatever he wants without fear of criminal prosecution, but Mozilla also has a right to boot him out of the company for it.

Someone please tell me I'm reading that wrong. The fas.org website has a network map labeled "Topographic" with a link to a .ppt file containing nothing but a larger copy of the same image. Did this guy write their website?!?

I'll just leave this here

https://xkcd.com/1162/

Hmmm. Fat is more energy dense than coal.... I have a modest proposal!

Coal plants cannot do that kind of damage.

Coal mines and coal mining can however.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Seriously, though if you're trying to make nuclear energy look bad, please don't compare it to coal unless you're trying to actually make it look good. Ignoring the mine fires which have rendered quite large areas utterly uninhabitable and are projected to last for centuries (not to mention afterwards leaving the ground dangeroudly prone to sinkholes for milennia).

You might want to read this too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Basically, it's a question of scale.

https://xkcd.com/1162/

Nuclear energy is many many orders of magnitude more energy dense than coal. What people generally don't realise is quite how vast the scale of coal mining is. You need a lot to generate energy for an entire country. Not just a lot, but the most insanely huge unimaginable amounts. The sheer scale of the thing is incredible.

As a result the coal energy industry churns through many billions of tons of rock, coal and ash each year. With that come all sorts of nasty things including radioactivity and heavy metal contamination both of which do leave land more or less unusable. Then there's the other bits and bobs like fly ash slurry spills and so on.

The only reason you don't hear about it as much is that most of the mining now happens in poor countries or in the middle of absoloutely nowhere (i.e. Austrailia). Coal mining is so polluting and so destructive there is no way it can happen anywhere near civilisation in a developed country now.

It's actually easy to crunch the numbers. In terms of deaths per kWh and land rendered unusable, and a whole bunch of other things, nuclear wins.

Yes there will be accidents. Better engineering will reduce the rate and severity of accidents because engineering tries to compensate for the human factor and others. It's impossible not to have accidents when you're talking about supplying power to billions of people for a hundred years. Such things are not possible.

But if you opt away from nuclear, you're choosing to pander to your fears with the deaths of energy workers, without actually making the situations you fear any better.

Maybe https://xkcd.com/695/

Compare the amount of livestock to the rest of the wild mammals on the planet, it's quite staggering, and i doubt many would expect the numbers to look like this:

http://xkcd.com/1338/

One major problem is that human beings over-generalize. It's very easy for a field where there might be a "natural" split on the basis of ability and inclination of 60-40, that quickly becomes 90-10. Why? Because every member of the minority is subject to far higher scrutiny (see the famous "you suck at math", "women suck at math" (XKCD comic). Their errors are remembered, their abilities questioned.

Now, this is *not* deliberate discrimination. This is how the human brain works. We see a pattern and we over-generalize from it.

However, in the end, it does mean that a substantial social injustice is done. People who have both ability and inclination are driven out of the profession (who wants to be in a profession where every mistake you make will count for 5 times everybody else's in the opinion of your peers).

So, I see no great leap that we consider changing the the "natural" outcomes of a system to compensate for certain defects in human reasoning systems by building in certain other compensating elements.

To make a *rough* analogy, in a "natural" setting, the physically strong dominate the physically weaker. As a society, we've decided this domination is not ideal, and we've passed laws to restrain the natural interactions between people. At this point, this unnatural intervention is so all encompassing, we don't even blink at the idea that physically strong individuals are denied their natural dominance. (And indeed, lose the culture among the strong that they would otherwise enjoy.)

Obviously male dominance in the executive suite (or tech) is a far more subtle matter calling for far more subtle compensations, but lets not fool ourselves. Pretty much every reader here is already the recipient of interventions on their behalf. And no surprise, the world is a lot better for it.

http://www.xkcd.com/1337/