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http://xkcd.com/605/

And then by 2023 we will be consuming 25 hours of media per day.

Nobody is being honored or praised here.
Anti-Card activists are simply practicing intolerance towards intolerance.

And even that is done merely through them calling for a boycott. I.e. Passively.
They are not going around spreading anti-Card propaganda and making shit up about him, calling him a pedophile and mentally ill, nor are they joining political movements aimed against him personally.
You know... like he does from his bully's pulpit.

As for the movie... could have used half an hour more.
But not of the Peter and Violet subplot. Which would be ridiculous today.

What do you mean there was a sequel to The Matrix? Perhaps you are confused.

Because Little Bobby Tables.

http://your.site/dumbass.php?id=10; DROP TABLE catalog; --

The birds have nothing to fear. Remember, they are dinosaurs (Obligatory xkcd).

Microsoft Warns of Zero Day-Attacks

Doesn't sound so bad.

I have been saying this for ages. It is embarassing that the concept of "antivirus" still exists.
Its main purpose is to enforce a huge blacklist of .exe files that can harm you. Instead
of keeping track of million of apps that are evil, why not just apply some least privilege
principles and sandboxing already so that we can run an application without granting it
access to all our resources?

It comes as no surprise that everything gets moved to the web nowadays. One can safely
open a website without worrying that all his personal data can be accessed (such as Firefox
stored passwords). On the other hand, opening an application requires complete trust in the author,
which is simply too much to ask most of the time. Look how well "apps" have evolved in mobile
platforms. It is quite natural to prefer apps to websites, because it can be easier to have something run on startup
and be easily accessible whenever you want, as opposed to having to go through a browser. They
generally have less overhead and are more powerful. If Windows had a decent package manager
and proper privilege separation we would probably be living in a different world today.

For anyone who claims stuff like "but Windows has UAC", obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1200/

In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered "safe".

That's the funny thing about SQL injection attacks - it can turn a SELECT into a DELETE or UPDATE. So you may have *meant* your GET request to be a simple retrieval, but a successful attack could make it do so much more.

Which is a great segue to the obligatory xkcd comic!

http://xkcd.com/327/

Here is the essential part missing from the summary:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:441582b9204dad5a26199aa51c7746d641f95b21&dn=users.tar.gz&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337

The file is called users.atr.gz, and is 4 GB.

As already shown by http://xkcd.com/1286/ , this looks like a fun project for a lonely rainy week-end...

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

-Randall Munroe

when i read http://xkcd.com/1286/ apparently password hints were exposed in the clear. not cool not cool...

Appropriate (what if) xkcd

http://xkcd.com/1286/

As for E.T. I wouldn't give up quite yet: http://xkcd.com/638/

I have to admit, I was secretly of hoping that when we got LIGO online, we'd see stuff that was clearly transmissions from intelligent beings...

The parent post is bullshit. And even if it weren't...

Based on the chart you've linked to and the yearly background radiation levels, the levels for 2 weeks in the Fukushima exclusion zone, you might equally conclude something very different with a bit of extra knowledge. The radiation levels are a bit lower than just after the incident (some due to physics and some due to unrealistic assumptions about soil, etc.) and also vary with distances from the radioactive fuel source.

Japan is still trying to figure out if 1mSv or 20mSv or 5mSv is the appropriate yearly limit extra for anyone who would live in the exclusion zone. From the chart you posted 2mSv is what you get for just having a head scan and 4mSv is what an average person gets from background radiation.

Now for a geek that doesn't play with many radiation emitting toys and lives in insulated basements, receiving little UV exposure from the sun or non-concreted ground, might mean he is missing out on 4 or so mSv per year and it might make sense to stick a uranium rod under your floorboards or move to the Fukushima exclusion zone! Well, that or go outside occasionally and eat bananas.

and this chart shows how what was released from Chernobyl compares to all coal and nuclear emissions ever combined.

Just need to point out that it does not. Especially since it only includes things like the effect to a single person, for very narrow times/events. This chart, while amazing, is not comparing total levels of anything!

http://xkcd.com/435/

Er, no. Fukushima alone has put out about order of magnitude more radiation than every coal plant in the history of the world ever. This response completely debunks the article you linked to, and this chart shows how what was released from Chernobyl compares to all coal and nuclear emissions ever combined.

Ok, lets use the information from stack exchange. They quote the uranium limits from coal plants as being less than 10 parts per million. Lets use 10% of that as the baseline. 1 part per million. The annual coal emissions are on the order of 1.7 billion *tons* of CO2 per year. 1 part per million would be on the order of 1700 tons of uranium per year. By contrast, Chernobyl had about 180 tons of nuclear material, and blew up once... Fukushima had about 10 times that much at the facility, the vast majority of which never left the facility. Three mile island contained all but trace amounts of the core material.

So in the history of nuclear power, coal has released somewhere in the neighborhood of 85,000 tons of uranium into the atmosphere, and all of the nuclear accidents combined have released... wait for it... less than 300 tons.

Wow, just wow.

Er, no. Fukushima alone has put out about order of magnitude more radiation than every coal plant in the history of the world ever. This response completely debunks the article you linked to, and this chart shows how what was released from Chernobyl compares to all coal and nuclear emissions ever combined.

In fact the paper that the article you linked to is based on doesn't even support what the article says, but I guess you didn't read it.

oblig

http://xkcd.com/927/

Ok, here you go : http://xkcd.com/793/

Long since documented by our buddy Randall: http://xkcd.com/927/

http://xkcd.com/927/

And now I'm typing to kill some time between hitting "reply" and posting. La la la.

http://xkcd.com/927/

http://xkcd.com/927/

There are already a few home automation hubs (if I understand what he is suggesting correctly), such as Pytomation.

The main challenge is as far as I can see there is yet a single protocol to bind them all, and even then it would be yet another protocol. For this reason, there have been attempts to create protocol exchanges (not sure the right term), that act as central system that can speak to different sensors and control systems using the specific protocols.

Its not clear what he is offering that existing solutions fail at? It doesn't help that the site doesn't sum things up in one paragraph and instead requires us to parse the whole presentation before understanding what he really is proposing.

#927

Moore's Law isn't even a law... it's a prediction

No, it's not even a prediction... it's an empirical observation on historical data. It tends to be self-fulfilling, but there's no reason that it must continue to any arbitrary horizon. Using historical trends can be useful tools for predicting the future, except when they're not.

As much as I hate xkcd links, this one is hanging above our ultracentrifuge.

I shouldn't have to install IE if I want to set up a little virtual ecosystem.

Indeed. I was trying to research which phone to get this morning on my ipad. Click farms, popup ads, articles which are clearly nothing more than ads. And a few reviews by people who spend wayyyyy too much time thinking about mobile phones. "The bevel was UNACCEPTABLY bumpy, but the WORST PART was the PURELY DECORATIVE SCREWS! Negative a billion points out of five!"

I guess if your job is to talk about phones, and all the phones are pretty similar, it's very easy to develop strong opinions about trivial details. Oblig XKCD

For today's ten thousand, to "buffalo" means to bully. "Buffalo" is also the name of a city in New York, and a synonym for bison, so the sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" means "Bison from Buffalo (that are bullied by other bison from Buffalo) bully still other bison from Buffalo", or "It's tough being a herd beast in Upstate New York".

Perhaps more appropriate.

People do care. That's why high up people in the government and NSA have been making public appearances to justify what they are doing. If no-one cared they wouldn't bother. The real problem is that everyone is largely powerless to do anything about it.

In a couple of years an election will come around, and whoever you vote for they will carry on spying on you.

Very relevant: http://xkcd.com/1172/

This has been bugging me for years, but I don't understand enough to either substantiate or falsify my thoughts. I also don't want to try and convince people that it's right since it sounds crazy even to me, but please tell me if you can find something wrong with it... I know that there are some extensive theories and observations involved, and I'm very aware of the relevant xkcd... http://xkcd.com/675/

All that said, it's very interesting to consider the possibility that there's a common cause of the observations that prompted dark matter/energy theories. I've read far too much about physics on Wikipedia trying to disprove the notion, with little success. All I've managed to do is find more and more curious aspects of things that would be *solved* by the idea.

I'd be very interested in someone finding evidence to falsify the possibility of dark matter and energy sharing a common anti-gravitational cause. I've been trying to find a contradiction for a very long time, and have found nothing conclusive.

If we consider that the anti-gravity could be caused by the missing antimatter purportedly absent due to baryogenesis, we might expect to find annihilation emissions in the spectra (Hmmm... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_roar ? Doubtful, but who knows?). However, such an observation could be absent for at least two possible reasons: It doesn't exist...or the bulk of the antimatter is something weakly interacting and low-mass, sharing the same problem as the standard dark matter model.

I don't mean that antimatter would fall up in such a changed model. Its inertial mass could behave as expected, and follow spacetime the same way as normal matter. It would just exert repulsive influence. Galaxies would be compressed by rings (or spheres, how dark matter is modeled?) of antimatter surrounding them and spread out somewhat in intergalactic space (dark matter), while being repelled from each other by the spherical gravitational dipole effect (dark energy).

If you model a binary system with one matter and one antimatter particle, they orbit a barycenter on the opposite side of the matter particle from the antimatter particle...in lock-step with each other. Put a black hole at that barycenter, add more particles of each type, and you get an orbiting system that goes much faster than it should from just the matter...just like dark matter's effects on galaxies.

There's some amazing symmetry if you think about this, and some weird implications. Inertial and gravitational mass would no longer be identical. Relativistic mass might be gravitationally neutral. An antimatter particle would chase a matter particle and require new interpretations of conservation of energy (Probably one of the biggest potential arguments against the whole concept, except it violates assumptions, not any evidence I'm aware of).

My most recent consideration from all this was the idea of applying CPT symmetry to the big bang (since it could be expected to involve both matter and antimatter), with some truly crazy implications. Unfortunately my understanding of it seems to be even more lacking than I thought, and I'm not sure how to mathematically formulate/test the possibility of the Universe sharing a common beginning and ending if you look at matter and antimatter versions in opposite time-space terms.

I don't know what I'm doing, and really wish someone could put this musing to rest one way or another. Unfortunately, I doubt we really have the experimental evidence either way. All of my musings amount to relaxation of assumptions--I haven't found a concrete contradiction, and all the predicted effects seem too subtle for current experiments to show.

If anyone could give good evidence for falsification of this common cause hypothesis, or point me in a direction for finding it, I'd be very appreciative. I've spent far too much time thinking about this with nothing to show for it, despite trying to break it.

Thanks for reading. Please get this out of my head. :P

Wake up sheeple!

Theoretically we could represent every number like this: 1111111 instead of 7. So why do we have any numbers other than 1? Because it's much less work to write 1234 and manipulate those four digits than to write or type one thousand two hundred thirty-four 1's and count and/or manipulate them.

Or, referring back to Randall Munroe's Up Goer Five the term "helium" is shorter and more precise than "that kind of air that makes your voice funny." When I explained this to my nephew who's in kindergarten the latter was good enough; when he gets older and more interested in rocketry, I'll clarify using the former. But if I were a rocket scientist, or speaking to someone who was, I'd use the former term even though it's "harder."

http://xkcd.com/810/

Obligatory

I've always had the notion that if you just wait a year, you can get yesterday's models for a great price and instead play the games that now have been out long enough to be properly patched. This has the bonus effect of weeding out a lot of crap games.

Which of course comes with some downsides.

Obligitory XKCD 538 link.

App did not warn me about tornado.
Seriously, people have to take responsibility for their own choices.
We're too litigious nowadays; we ought to set the standard that grownups are required to think.

http://xkcd.com/644/

What's driving your zealous PHP advocacy?

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

Note that you're being perceived as wrong, not that you actually are. I certainly don't have the experience to say which of you is right (or more right, as the case may be)

I suppose that may be true, but I have to refer to this canonical xkcd. Every change will break some niche workflow. The real question is: To what degree will it impact the company in particular and the ecosystem in general?

Many elevators and ATMs still run Windows XP—a truly frightening thought. If Windows Vista, 7 or 8 breaks some obscure elevator software, it doesn't really impact Microsoft, even if it costs them thousands of licenses per year. Commercial apps are forced to keep up so they can keep making sales, but for a niche or in-house app, it will probably end up running on old hardware, old software, or a VM. The fact that you may still be able to run an applet from the 1990s is a testament to the resiliency of Java, but in my opinion, it doesn't have any bearing on the state of browsers today.

In about 10, maybe 25 years

Which is why for any kind of fictional thing i often head to TVTropes before checking out Wikipedia.

Oh, I do that as well, nice to know I'm not the only one. But....TVTropes will ruin your life.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife

Or at least increase the number of open tabs you have.

Obligatory XKCD

http://xkcd.com/609/

The battles on Wikipedia are well documented. Articles deleted, added back, deleted again. Back and forth in a never ending battle of arrogant assholes with giant egos.

Oblig XKCD

Even reverse-shattering an egg is theoretically possible, if the egg's bits were perfectly arranged in the final "shattered" configuration and gravity were reversed (as in, the video were shot upside-down, basically). It's extremely unlikely that you'd get the arrangement perfect, but it's possible.

[...] The entropy argument has real merits, but it almost never applies literally and perfectly in the macroscopic world where it's so easy for humans to manipulate entropy in either direction.

The entropy argument applies more literally and more perfectly than almost any other argument about anything. Your argument based on something that is "extremely unlikely, ... but possible" is at best utter nonsense. I could say it is extremely unlikely but possible that I will guess the keys to all the encryption used throughout the world and also have Scarlett Johansson fall in love with me and marry me on the same day. But all of that is much more likely to happen than for you to ever make a self assembling egg. Your notion of what is "theoretically possible" is not at all the same as what a physicist (even a theoretical physicist) means by that term.

As for human manipulation of entropy, we can't, not globally. We certainly can't make self-assembling eggs. Your equating the likelihood of a self assembling egg and a reversed video that shows a ball rolling up-hill shows a breathtaking lack of knowledge about physics and probability.

Duty Calls!