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3. What if programmers ran Congress.

holy shit

guys

government is complicated.

3. What if programmers ran Congress.

holy shit

guys

government is complicated.

3. What if programmers ran Congress.

holy shit

guys

government is complicated.

http://xkcd.com/1102/

Cite correctly bitch: XKCD. Those tooltips will now magically attach themselves to raw pictures.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/695/

That's from XKCD. No need to use an aggregator site.

See the semi-obligatory XKCD here.

Of course correlation implies causation - or at least suggests it - it just doesn't prove causation.

As the obligatory XKCD points out (I think).

See the semi-obligatory XKCD here.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Magna Carta was practically signed at swordpoint.

This is why I included an obligitory xkcd in the original submission, but I think conflating the leveraging of power in digital domain with the threat of violence and civil unrest have been a too subtle for the editor.

http://xkcd.com/857/

Here

That's a paraphraseof Joe Stalin's “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Except that the election results matched what the polls predicted in fifty out of fifty states. So this conspiracy theory requires the participation of not just the vote counters, but also the pollsters, journalists, and even Randall Monroe.

Obligatory xkcd

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/la...

Nope. I had intention to start a flame war. It was the A.C. above who went off all flame-war-y I did indeed know what the submitter meant, and they were making a false religious insinuation of the sort that is supposed to slip under the wire and go unchallenged in a technical forum where being challenged on correctness is the norm.

For reference: https://xkcd.com/386/

66% accept notoriously weak passwords such as "123456" or "password"

How should a web site determine whether a given password is "notoriously weak"?

66% make no attempt to block entry after 10 incorrect password entries

Where does "10" come from, and how long should entry be blocked? We don't want customers to become ex-customers when they discover that they have to make international telephone calls at a dollar per minute or more to get their accounts unblocked.

60% do not provide any advice on how to create a strong password during signup

One site I manage uses the following, with a link to Wikipedia's page about password strength and xkcd's comic about passphrases: "Either 8 or more characters using at least one letter and one digit or a phrase of 16 or more characters using at least one letter, and not easy to guess"

and only 14% display a password meter

I don't know how it's possible to "display a password meter" to users of NoScript.

Funny, I got my password from xkcd. UNCRACKABLE

Nonono, you can't just use that one, you need to roll your own using a random number generator!

And without giving too much away, I know mine counts as secure, because it starts with a "4"!


/ Actually, I kinda wonder how many real-world accounts out there have "correct horse battery staple" as the password.
// Probably enough to make Randall cry.

Eh. It kinda works. If your goal is to invade Amazon accounts using the method laid out in the strip, it's that much easier to do because by allowing you to use anything for a password, they're more likely to have people using simple repeat passwords that, even if not common for everyone, are common for the user. If those sites had more stringent requirements, you couldn't use your childhood dog's name as a password like you've been doing for various account passwords since high school.

But yeah -- this xkcd was probably the more applicable strip.

And there is an easy, very easy, defense http://xkcd.com/936/

If she had done that, there would be no need to e-mail passwords to herself.

https://xkcd.com/385/

17. Oblig. XKCD:
http://xkcd.com/860/

Obligatory XKCD.

Not all farm land is suitable for growing vegetables, but it may be suitable for grazing. The big problem we have is that the herds are larger than what the growth on a certain land area can sustain and therefore carbohydrate supplements have to be purchased.

This handy infographic puts that in perspective.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/la...

Land Mammals

Sir, your are in danger of angering the Gods!
https://xkcd.com/224/
or at least making them snort beer onto the displays...

Oblig. xkcd: https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/

... they'll grow up believing that God created it all 10,000 years ago.

Ah, I see you're a fan of Fermi estimation, too. :)

Tufte (and iirc, Feynman) also cited reliance on Powerpoint on the Columbia disaster...

Zombie Feynman strikes again!

http://xkcd.com/934/

My 70 year old parents have been running Mint for four years, largely without incident. It's on a dual core Atom / 2G / 80G. I kinda want to trash that box, but the damn thing refuses to break badly enough.

Note that just about any (grand)parental use case outside of browsing fries this implementation. The sole "major" issue we've had is when Dad tried to get Picasa going on Wine. I'm sure it's possible, but it was far simpler for him to install it on his Windows laptop.

Obligatory

XKCD

... studies have repeatedly show [sic] that ....

Any time someone mentions "studies" without providing the date of the study, the name of the institution and researcher(s) conducting the study and the specific scientific journal the results were published in, you know they're blowing smoke.

In other words, 285.

If I punch him enough times, will a flood of shiny coins spew from his unconscious body?

Possibly.

Oblig xkcd. He is the weakest link in the unbreakable encryption of his bitcoin wallet.

http://xkcd.com/292/

Yes, gotos are really that evil.

The ability is off by default, you have to go pretty deep in the options to turn it on, when you do turn it on, you get all sorts of warning telling you to watch out. And if you do turn it on and do something stupid, you may get malware

Alright so Joe Smith goes and installs an app requiring access to SMS, dialer, contact lists, phone number, network stack and file system. Most apps ask for everything as a matter of course and no user has any idea why. Seems like more than enough access to fuck over Joe Smith to me... what about you?

http://xkcd.com/1200/

It's that same easy substitution, i.e. $sql = "SELECT fname, lname from people where id='$id'" that leads to data breaches.

Sorry. XKCD

How about we just skip to the end of the chain?

Unless you created a pocket universe, started a creation event, formed stars from the resulting big bang cloud, fused a solar system worth of hydrogen into heavier matter, collected the matter into a planet in the perfect orbit, formed a primordial soup, created life from the soup, evolved the life to create coffee bean producers, harvested the beans, processed and roasted the beans, ground them, and finally pressed them yourself, then it's not proper coffee.

I'll just train the butterflies, and let their wings do the work for me.

Err, is that "obligatory XKCD"?
http://xkcd.com/378/

makes sense, but Hilarious. Kind of reminds me of that +1 standards xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

http://xkcd.com/1337/

Oh, wait...

Oblig: http://xkcd.com/435/

And yet your boss, his boss and his boss's boss are probably either MBAs or lawyers. Go figure.

Don't forget - Applied sorting.

A former cowboy became President of the United States. Oh, that was in 1901. And the U.S. overthrew the government of Guatemala to help out a fruit company. Oh, that was in 1954.

...and in 1979: https://xkcd.com/204/

The obligatory xkcd

You might at least give credit where it's due.

Because obligatory.

So now that you have found the fatal flaw in my plan, I revise it:

Don't seal it off. Make it into a swimming pool.

(Or maybe just don't seal it off.)

So, I take it you're not a fan of Lysol or Purell?

Correct.

But IANAB, so maybe the remaining 20,000 germs aren't as big of a deal as I think they are.