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Obligatory XKCD

"Hey, did you hear about that kid who interviewed at Xerox for the Client Manager position? They asked him why a tennis ball was fuzzy, and he said, I shit you not, 'Because they're too ornery to shear'! Yeah, that guys a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. I mean what type of asshole doesn't take our well thought out interview questions seriously! You better not hire him!"

I don't know if such a conversation is likely to take place, but if it does, seems like it would only close a lot of doors you wouldn't want to go through anyway.

Also, oblig XKCD.

http://xkcd.com/1293/

Workflow

fallacies like 'precedent'

A fallacy is another name for a heuristic. For example, one of Wikipedia's core principles is verifiability of claims to reliable sources, which any logician would identify as the appeal to authority. Likewise, the use of precedent in common law is an appeal to tradition. Fallacies are wrong when all premises are known true or false, but this is rarely the case in the real world. Applying strict logical reasoning to the incomplete information that fallible humans have everywhere but in the artificial world of mathematics produces an unhelpful result of "neither certainly true nor certainly false given the premises" the vast majority of the time.

But in a lot of cases, certainty is not needed as much as a preponderance of evidence. Someone just wants to know whether it would benefit him more to act as if a particular claim is true or as if it is false. Fallacies compensate for limited information by guessing which premises are more likely true given what information is available. For example, appeal to authority works in an encyclopedia because overall, reliable sources tend to come closer to truth than the average kook with a blog. And precedent adds predictability over time to the judicial system: similar facts produce similar rulings.

> I need to somehow automagically figure out what device you are using,
> the screen sizes, interface capabilities, etc. and CUSTOMIZE
> my style sheets (one more nail in the fucktard coffin) just for your device.

Dear web-developer... PLEASE stop strying to customize for what you think my browser+device combo is. You are a pain in the ass. I use 3 different browsers at times, all on Linux...

1) Firefox under linux. When I go to live365.com internet radio, with the native user agent, part of the player selection menu is missing, and I can't play music, When I fake the user agent as Firefox on Windows, it works properly.

2) When I go to various sites with Opera, on my desktop, they seem to think it's "Opera Mobile", and I get the crappy mobile site. Mobile sites are such a bleeping joke that XKCD laughs at them... http://xkcd.com/1174/ http://xkcd.com/869/ I have to lie about the user agent to get the desktop version web page.

3) Ditto for uzbl, which is a webkit-based desktop browser. Some web sites see "webkit" and think it's a mobile browser.

Dear web developers... if I *WANTED* to go to "m.bad.example.com" I'd go there. If I ask for "bad.example.com", without the "m", please respect my wishes.

Hint for web developers... you can get away with one web site for mobile and desktop. Smartphones no longer have 240x160 pixel displays. Retina screens can have resolutions equivalant to regular desktops. And smartphones have this ability called pinch-and-zoom. A couple of rules to follow...
1) Allow resizing, so that pinch-and-zoom works.
2) Avoid Schlockwave Trash, and you'll be viewable vy iphone/ipad users

> I need to somehow automagically figure out what device you are using,
> the screen sizes, interface capabilities, etc. and CUSTOMIZE
> my style sheets (one more nail in the fucktard coffin) just for your device.

Dear web-developer... PLEASE stop strying to customize for what you think my browser+device combo is. You are a pain in the ass. I use 3 different browsers at times, all on Linux...

1) Firefox under linux. When I go to live365.com internet radio, with the native user agent, part of the player selection menu is missing, and I can't play music, When I fake the user agent as Firefox on Windows, it works properly.

2) When I go to various sites with Opera, on my desktop, they seem to think it's "Opera Mobile", and I get the crappy mobile site. Mobile sites are such a bleeping joke that XKCD laughs at them... http://xkcd.com/1174/ http://xkcd.com/869/ I have to lie about the user agent to get the desktop version web page.

3) Ditto for uzbl, which is a webkit-based desktop browser. Some web sites see "webkit" and think it's a mobile browser.

Dear web developers... if I *WANTED* to go to "m.bad.example.com" I'd go there. If I ask for "bad.example.com", without the "m", please respect my wishes.

Hint for web developers... you can get away with one web site for mobile and desktop. Smartphones no longer have 240x160 pixel displays. Retina screens can have resolutions equivalant to regular desktops. And smartphones have this ability called pinch-and-zoom. A couple of rules to follow...
1) Allow resizing, so that pinch-and-zoom works.
2) Avoid Schlockwave Trash, and you'll be viewable vy iphone/ipad users

http://xkcd.com/407/

I'm skeptical of this system because it is at least the second (after 'Red Flag', possibly more of them than that, certainly a lot more if you count 'nationalist linux forks' generally, rather than just Chinese ones), and past attempts havent exactly set the world on fire with their success.

More generally, though, I'm skeptical largely because (at the present time) you basically have to shop like Richard Stallman (and possibly even harder than he does, if some TAO-level group has designs on you) to have a chance in hell to even see all the security-relevant software/firmware that goes into your system in anything other than a mixture of OSS components, proprietary userspace applications, and firmware blobs (often doing not-even-a-debugger-knows-what on the various totally undocumented application-specific processors hanging off various busses). So long as that's the case, even if your OS is FOSS and you've audited the hell out of it (odds are you haven't) and you have a robust security model designed to keep applications in check (obligatory XKCD, odds are that it will all come to nothing because your lowballing vendor has a BSP full of proprietary shit, your GPU vendor won't offer anything but a binary blob unless you abduct the entire Board's families and threaten to return them one slice at a time, and you don't have a clue what various surprisingly punchy microcontrollers and very-low-end ARM cores attached to dangerously useful (and mostly unexamined) busses are doing in their own memory spaces.

They have an advantage we don't, though.

They're the ones doing the hardware manufacturing.

If Team China manages to solve these problems(especially acute in cellphones because the cellular baseband which makes wifi interfaces look like GNU-paradise by comparison in terms of openness and robustness), then I'll be damn interested, no matter how much their 'yet another shitty fork of something that they could have just audited' linux-derivate OS bores me. If they don't manage to solve them, or don't even bother, that this is just some balance-of-trade enthusiast crying into his beer about Android's ubiquity in the Chinese smartphone market, who cares?

I'm skeptical of this system because it is at least the second (after 'Red Flag', possibly more of them than that, certainly a lot more if you count 'nationalist linux forks' generally, rather than just Chinese ones), and past attempts havent exactly set the world on fire with their success.

More generally, though, I'm skeptical largely because (at the present time) you basically have to shop like Richard Stallman (and possibly even harder than he does, if some TAO-level group has designs on you) to have a chance in hell to even see all the security-relevant software/firmware that goes into your system in anything other than a mixture of OSS components, proprietary userspace applications, and firmware blobs (often doing not-even-a-debugger-knows-what on the various totally undocumented application-specific processors hanging off various busses). So long as that's the case, even if your OS is FOSS and you've audited the hell out of it (odds are you haven't) and you have a robust security model designed to keep applications in check (obligatory XKCD, odds are that it will all come to nothing because your lowballing vendor has a BSP full of proprietary shit, your GPU vendor won't offer anything but a binary blob unless you abduct the entire Board's families and threaten to return them one slice at a time, and you don't have a clue what various surprisingly punchy microcontrollers and very-low-end ARM cores attached to dangerously useful (and mostly unexamined) busses are doing in their own memory spaces.

If Team China manages to solve these problems(especially acute in cellphones because the cellular baseband which makes wifi interfaces look like GNU-paradise by comparison in terms of openness and robustness), then I'll be damn interested, no matter how much their 'yet another shitty fork of something that they could have just audited' linux-derivate OS bores me. If they don't manage to solve them, or don't even bother, that this is just some balance-of-trade enthusiast crying into his beer about Android's ubiquity in the Chinese smartphone market, who cares?

These schools are also in Arkansas and Indiana.

You mean occupied Northeast Texas?

Would the 100k cover lawyers expenses if you used this method?

XKCD:Security

Mandatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/538/

I was thinking this one: http://xkcd.com/463/

https://xkcd.com/801/

http://www.nelson-haha.com/

https://xkcd.com/801/

ob xkcd

I think that's the first in /.'s history when a goatse picture is actually on topic.

ob xkcd

curses, foiled again by slashcode!

Most of the water has been a part of a dinosaur, according to Randall Munroe

... really nice when my pipes freeze I want to slowly thaw them, and be able to see any leaks. I could run out and buy a heater tape for $10 and a light, or one.

Sorry for posting an XKCD link, but this one could have been created in anticipation of your post :)

Also, by 2019, there will be more Lego mifigs than humans. Major changes in targeted advertising will be required to exploit this new market.

The robots have their own server where they can share info. So the cloud because a database on a server and the world wide web is actually just a database where they share info.

yes, they do and it is so because everybody buys server time from everybody else. You just be careful with that cable.

Although I'm not particularly a Mac fan, obligatory xkcd.

In other words, for some significant subset of the people still using XP who aren't doing it merely because of compatibility with old software, perhaps a browser and a few other basic resources would be enough.

The link you are probably after.... http://xkcd.com/538/

GE 26 Watt Energy Smart CFL - 100 Watt Replacement, about $250 each -- rated at 8,000 hours

As it turns out, your $250 "GE 26 Watt Energy Smart CFL - 100 Watt Replacement" bulb is now on sale for $13.40 each:

http://www.amazon.com/Watt-Energy-Smart-CFL-Replacement/dp/B000UYF80S

If we extrapolate, by tomorrow the price should be about 4 cents each.

And then you sit there waiting 20+ minutes, and when it gets to 100%, it then goes back to 0%, because that was just the time to complete one file ... but there's no indication of how many files need to be processed, so you're just left hanging.

I wonder why people even other trying to give estimates on time to completion.

http://xkcd.com/612/

Because marketing demands it, but doesn't actually care enough to demand we do it accurately.

And then you sit there waiting 20+ minutes, and when it gets to 100%, it then goes back to 0%, because that was just the time to complete one file ... but there's no indication of how many files need to be processed, so you're just left hanging.

I wonder why people even other trying to give estimates on time to completion.

http://xkcd.com/612/

The scene where Trinity is hacking into a power grid using nmap was actually accurate. Too bad the Matrix never had any sequels.

Why not SQL injection?

And I think the point is that providing incentives for producing children out of wedlock (which is provably harmful to the children) and discouraging the involvement of the father is resulting in a lot of lost potential.

I think this xkcd is appropriate. The "were they going to have sex anyway" part. Anything and everything is an incentive for people to produce children.

It's not the welfare that creates single parents. It's people themselves.

Let me put this in perspective with something conservatives love to defend: guns. Would taking away or regulating guns help the problem (of crime, of mentally ill people shooting up the schools, whatever it is liberals complain about)? No. Same thing here. Taking welfare away isn't going to make women and men more conservative and respectful of Christian values

Guns don't kill people. People kill people
Welfare doesn't create single moms. People create single moms.

Read a web comic about your type of business's usual web sites.

Obligatory xkcd...

http://xkcd.com/703/

I believe this is what you were looking for.

sudo make me a sandwich

As my signature says: make it yourself

sudo make me a sandwich

Obligatory xkcd

Thank you! I'll be here all week! Try the veal! Be sure to tip your waitress!

xkcd has this covered as usual:

http://xkcd.com/1279/

http://xkcd.com/1279/

http://xkcd.com/1279/

Once per synodic period (779.94 days) you will lose 10 days or so during superior conjunction, or ~ 1.3% of the time. NASA gives its spaceships at Mars a vacation (for the rovers, generally a long integration X ray spectrum of some rock).

So that's what they're doing when they're analysing a rock "really well" http://xkcd.com/695/

http://xkcd.com/1070/

That's "little Bobby Tables".

Almost any non-negligible productivity improvement is going to recoup $500 over the lifespan of an LED monitor.

Agreed. Obligatory XKCD.

For a programmer earning $80,000/year if you can shave off 1.5 seconds 50 times per day you'll recoup the investment in 5 years. Shave off 6 seconds 50 times per day and you recoup the investment in 1.25 years. I use a multi-monitor setup and have recouped the cost many times over and I'm not even a programmer.

There was this xkcd about this topic. Its conclusion is similar. Check the hover-text to the last image.

bigass truck.

http://xkcd.com/37/

tic-tac-toe

The only winning move is to play, perfectly, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.

FTFY

You forgot the obligatory xkcd link.
Here it is : http://xkcd.com/1098/

I'm no astrophysicist, but the respectable Randall Munroe suggests that "However big you think supernovae are, they're bigger than that."

According to this What If, you'd get more photons hitting your eye from a supernova seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth than the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball... by nine orders of magnitude. So while stars are really massive objects, supernovae are apparently unimaginably energetic phenomena.

We have had increasing automation for more than a century and unemployment has been all over the place, without long term trends

Yep, extrapolation trumps all logic. Nobody ever went wrong following Alan Greenspan right, the infinite extrapolation guy ?

if the NSA wants to know the number, they'll have to send a hot femme fatale to seduce you

Or they could think of an easier way.