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http://xkcd.com/505/

Obligatory http://xkcd.com/1000/

Yet another relevant xkcd: Reverse Identity Theft

Once, I've had to deal with a guy who had setup a personal website for his small non-profit, and he developed the site so that all links were actually small Java applets which opened an URL. So, no HTML for him: just Java calling HTML.

Obligatory xfcd

Real programmers don't need to type fast.

You do have a point, though: I guess there's some argument to be made in favor of touch typing so that you can continue thinking about the problem while you type (instead of having to think about typing)...

Relevant XKCD for the more visually-oriented

The Netherlands is small.

For now!

As an exercise in security that Schneier himself may find interesting, what methods are available for proving (or at least affirming) that we can trust Bruce Schneier?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Did anyone else misread the title as "USB Implanters ..." and think of http://xkcd.com/644/ ???

Let Go!

http://xkcd.com/538/

Only works if you actually know the password.

Don't remember the password, use a token like a USB flash key. If they take the laptop without the key then it's useless, if you smash the key then it's also useless.

No, this won't stop them from torturing you anyway, but on the other hand, they might pick up the wrong person who didn't actually own the laptop and torture them instead. This is the great thing about torture: it's only useful to confirm what you already know, not to extract anything new; there's no way to tell if someone is lying because you haven't broken them yet or lying because they don't know anything but really want the pain to stop.

"This is why ISPs..."

Oh, what bullshit. ISPs have bent over backwards so they don't lose out on delicious government contracts, which in the UK require satisfactory filtering methods in place.

There are maybe one or two ISPs which have had a backbone in all this - such as Andrews&Arnold. You can tell the difference because their Internet service is 100% unfiltered. They even ask you if you want filtering and refuse to provide you with service if you say "yes".

Not all ISPs

Not only is Andrews & Arnold XKCD 806 compliant, but they meet all of mumsnet^W David Cameron's censorship requirements.

The government wants us to offer filtering as an option, so we offer an active choice when you sign up, you choose one of two options:-

Unfiltered Internet access - no filtering of any content within the A&A network - you are responsible for any filtering in your own network, or
Censored Internet access - restricted access to unpublished government mandated filter list (plus Daily Mail web site) - but still cannot guarantee kids don't access porn.
If you choose censored you are advised: Sorry, for a censored internet you will have to pick a different ISP or move to North Korea. Our services are all unfiltered.

Is that a good enough active choice for you Mr Cameron?

You check your watch for incoming messages. You look at your phone to check the time.

So, it has come to this.

http://xkcd.com/1022/

Because it has C-x M-c M-butterfly.

Obligatory xkcd:

At first I was quite excited with the idea that someone was able to use quantum mechanical elements in a game. But of course, they were not able to do this. They just created a mod vaguely inspired by quantum mechanics, that helps to perpetuate the myths so beloved by the lay media.

The video linked just shows a dude running around, nothing very interesting. If you search youtube a bit, you can find videos talking about the mechanics they implemented. I found this one, about the basic elements -- observation, superposition, and entanglement --, and this one, with the extremely exciting title "quantum computers and teleportation".

Of course, what they call observation and superposition have nothing to do with the quantum concepts, they are just blocks that are different depending on which direction you look at them, and the "entanglement" block is just a glorifed telephone. Their quantum computer doesn't seem to do anything besides teleportation, which is Star Trek teleportation instead of quantum teleportation.

Admitedly, these guys set out do to a terribly difficult task: quantum mechanics is a bit subtle, and quite far from games. The only ones I can remember off the top of my mind are the CHSH game, which is about as exciting as tic-tac-toe, and a quantum strategy to cheat at bridge, which requires you to do a nontrivial amount of maths (and is actually unpublished research =).

They have, nevertheless, failed. The mod looks cool as a game, though.

Apple or Windows?

That's not a single choice, that's two choices :-)

ObXKCD:

http://xkcd.com/927/

I think we'd (the Linux community) be a lot farther ahead if they got together and implemented a single solution that solved all the known requirements.

Except that people don't agree on what the requirements are. Your requirements are not the same as mine. Even people that share requirements may not agree on what is the best solution. Your proposal will likely lead to this.

http://xkcd.com/1235/

The Republican party is actually very slit up.
You have the evangelicals, these are the Anti-Science People, their religion tells them that science is wrong, and they should follow only what the bible says. these guys swinged republican, to stand against the abortion issue, then they got more power, now they are the Anti-Science wing to the Republican Party.
You have the big Business men, These guys may know a good deal about Science and Technology, However they have earned a lot of money and they just don't want to waste it away on frivolous spending, and constantly changing regulations.
Now the Tea Party, is the middle ground of the two, they don't have any issues with Science, and want what the Big Business Men want (even though it may not be in their best interests) But they see how effective the evangelicals were with their no hold back attitude so they adopted it. It isn't the lack of Science Skills is their issue but stubbornness to realize that there are a lot of details to maintain. In many ways the Tea Party is like Physics Majors XKCD.
You can be good at science and still be very stupid.

Now the Democrats can jump on a lot of anti-science band wagon stuff too.
Such as Hyper Environmentalism. Where people condemn new technology and not consider that its tradeoffs overall is better.
Then you got the Foodies, Where they want all natural everything even if there is no evidences to their views.
Heck I remember when they found some findings that GMO Foods doesn't have any heal effects, all these guys jumped up an arms and just won't believe the data, making excuses, attacking the scientists motives etc...
However being the Colleges and Universities will tend to be supported by Government aid, Scientist will be more naturally gravitated towards the Democrat party.
For most of them, it isn't as much about the party being better then the republicans but the fact they pay the bills.

Or not.

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

The head and tail of the list

9. Designing a solution

1. Naming things

are pretty much two sides of the same coin.

And these *are* the hardest things on the list.

While I agree that these items are closely related, in my opinion, these were the *easiest* thing on the list. After all, this is what programmers are trained and paid to do, and for me this is the most enjoyable part of programming.

Of all the items on the list, the one I'd put closest to the top is 'time estimates', since in anything other than the most trivial cases it is an exercise in predicting problems yet unknown.

But the one that would be on the very top of my list isn't there: Interfacing with god-awful third-party software, and tracking down the inevitable breakages when said software gets updated. This facet of my job has become more and more prevalent over the years, where I have to chase down a problem for which I have no good diagnostic tools, no access to the source code, and as a result spend hours of fruitless and frustrating poke-and-hope troubleshooting, or searching Google eight way to Sunday hoping to word your problem in some way that corresponds to some other poor soul who might have the same problem. (This xkcd is a good illustration of that dynamic.)

I guess to some extent it depends if by 'hard' you mean "challenging" or "so frustratingly, brain-numbingly tedious that you want to gouge your eyeballs out". Yes, good design is 'hard' in the first sense, but I feel good after a day of that kind of work, but that second kind of 'hard' work makes me wonder why I became a programmer in the first place. Unfortunately, it seems that over time there's less of the former and more of the latter.

Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

When someone writes the software that will operate an automobile, it's best to separate the steering and braking functions from the audio equalizer. The benefits of modularity are not specific to data, control flow, testability, costing or any other single domain. If you bring me code that won't be self-explanatory on a single page, I'm wondering why I shouldn't be looking for your replacement.

4.. noob.

Posting a picture to a xkcd joke without the alt text (nor proper link) is inexcusable.

Pull out your cellphone. Click. Now your IP on the cell and phone are tied to your browser session and it's IP address. If geolocating wasn't easy enough, they have you at a doubley coordinated vector.

Not to mention your location. Getting location services is a standard part of HTML5 and is how mobile Google Maps works. So they can get your location, force you to watch some ads before letting you in, etc.

Actually, two smartphones required to browse. One to navigate to the website, the other to take the picture of the QR code on the first one's screen. Oh, and you'll probably need a third hand to type in the password that is computed on the second phone into the password box displayed on the first phone.

Geez, makes you wonder if someone simply applied an XKCD comic as a standard...

http://xkcd.com/1235/

Because Americans carrying cameras has significance to bears in the Himalayas.

http://xkcd.com/327/

http://xkcd.com/1235/

In logic 101, you learn to look for assumptions first, because if an assumption is wrong, then the entire rest of the logic chain doesn't need to be examined anymore, as it is meaningless.

This is apropriate in just two sentences...

Your wrong assumption is that the problem is with the spending.

Wait for it...

But a deficit is not a problem of high spending, it is a problem of spending more than you have.

BAM! One of the stupidest statements I've ever read. See obligatory xkcd tautology club joke.

You can fix it by reducing your spending, or by increasing your income.

Which would make it

a fight for the economy

since An economy or economic system consists of the production, distribution or trade, and consumption of limited goods and services by different agents in a given geographical location.
Note the use of the word "limited".

Making an infinite series of trivial distinctions results in this type of "101 logic" applications, and great waste of limited resources.

You might be interested in Steve Martin's How to become a Millionaire advice.

What ever happened to 'sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me'?

Oblig xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1216/

This obligatory XKCD now seems surprisingly relevant.

And as always, there is a relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/750/

The plain fact is that what has happened has damaged national security and in many ways the Guardian themselves admitted that when they agreed, when asked politely by my national security adviser and cabinet secretary to destroy the files they had

Were the people politely asking also holding a wrench by any chance?

this is Ayn Rand revisionism...Paul Ryan type stuff...>

I read your post before seeing this.

https://xkcd.com/678/

I didn't even click on the link and knew it was some fag linking xkcd. It's not clever. It's not funny. Just the subject containing something about RNG, with a link under it and not even a short, useless, one sentence post shows the kind of unoriginal, uninspired, idiot is making the post. It was funny to read when it came out. It's even funny when clicking on the Random button on the site and seeing it. It's NOT funny when someone links to it from a one-sentence post and thinks they're so fucking clever to have discovered xkcd. You probably still use lmgtfy and think you're so damn clever. It means in real life, you're an unoriginal hipster doofus. Got anything to do with sanitizing inputs to a SQL database, etc.? Link to Bobby Tables. Got a nerd-project slow-ass turing machine? Like a minecraft logic circuit from redstone? Link to the one where it's some guy alone in the world making a computer out of rocks. Got a story about password security or encryption? Link to the one where they beat the password out of the guy with a wrench. Fuck off. You're not clever.

http://xkcd.com/1053/

Guess you're not one of today's 10000. Thanks for playing.

Keep up the good work

http://xkcd.com/221/

Mandatory XKCD moment:
https://xkcd.com/1170/

Check out who has been in our heads lately.

http://xkcd.com/1277

xkcd 902

If Nokia wants to fix this, they should get together an industry group to design and agree to use such a connector

XKCD tells you about what happens when you promote a new standard to supersede previous ones.

If someone wants to make a car physically crash, there are much easier ways than trying to hack the software.

http://xkcd.com/538/

randall munroe actually put up a fairly insightful chart of radiation levels: http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Um... I see a problem with your racist logic... obligatory xkcd.

Well, I'll be reading xkcd on Tuesdays for the next few weeks to find out...

I'll just leave this here

Yes, I think that's true, but competitions will help focus minds. Most competitions will last a few years, including a period of laying out the requirements.

I envision a new protocol to replace 3 remote security functions: SSL/TLS, IPSec, and SSH. I think SSH is the most secure of the three of those today but they could all three use a rethink.

The ultimate goal, though, is not to do this as a separate project but as a unified community effort like the NIST competitions (see Standards).

http://xkcd.com/1273/

And here's the oblig. XKCD.com