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XKCD Standards

Of course, that intentionally ignores the part that all standards start out that way. Look at MPEG for example, they basically just make up a video codec on the spot and declare it a standard. This approach works fine in the real world.

[The problem alluded to in the XKCD is when you create a standard without buy-in from most of the actual manufacturers of stuff (See OGG Vorbis which is superior to MP3 but never managed to displace it)]

XKCD Standards

That's an answer to why.

As near as I can tell, how is they took a look at the tech support flowchart and decided to make it impossible to follow. I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to help someone set up a printer. There's a Settings button on the main menu that has nothing to do with printers. There's a devices button on the main menu that goes to a completely useless bar telling me I have nothing I can send (?). If I click search, I can type in printer and get nothing, but there's a different settings button on the search screen. If I click the other settings button and then type printer in the box and hit enter, i get a useless screen which supposedly lists my devices (I suppose if the printer was already added it would be listed here, maybe?) but no button to add a printer. If I type printer in the box and don't hit enter, I finally see the Devices and Printers screen, where I can add a printer.

I think I'll stick to 7, thanks.

Oblig. XKCD

+1 grammarian silhouette

Maybe they shouldn't have built it in Utah?


More likely they didn't account in the power budget for the seven secret sub-basements and the underground vacutrain for the reptoids to commute from the Denver International Airport.
honestly, it's like the right hand doesn't know what the left talon is doing these days.

They should call you Mario, cause you just got 1 up'd.

IMHO BASIC was a great first language because of the goto statement. Let me explain why. Lots of people are familiar with or can easily understand a flowchart. By numbering the lines in a purely imperative language, people could easily get a machine to do something by laying the instructions out in order. Goto allows that linear list of instructions to be branched in exactly the same way a flowchart does (check condition, go here). Only after learning very simplistic imperative programming should one say "goto is evil, use structured programming". It's helpful - if unfortunate - to see the downside of goto in order to appreciate better code structure. But I remember there is more forethought required to use structured constructs to write some kinds of code. In the beginning I think it's important NOT to introduce abstract concepts (structured programming, OOP, complex data structures, etc) until the student has groked the fundamentals of getting the machine to do what you want. If all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but then you will also have an appreciation and immediate understanding of the usefulness of power tools.

So I'm only slightly joking when I say "goto", but the point is that every abstraction looks like wierd arbitrary stuff you have to learn until you know enough to appreciate it's usefulness, at which point it's easy to learn because it does something you perceive as useful. Abstractions raise the height of the learning curve, but should not increase its slope or it shall look like a wall.

I'm still trying to understand why the latest craze is functional programming. From where I sit it's a bunch of intellectual self gratification. Programs manipulate data - why shun mutable state? Jumping through hoops (apparently something called monads) to have mutable data is absurd - that's what computers DO. Or as XKCD put it...

Ah yes, good thing physics is a more pure disciple than math. There's a PE license for software development, in case you really weren't trolling.

Obligatory.

For one thing, it reminds people of https://xkcd.com/208/

Just when you thought you couldn't find an appropriate XKCD...

[Useful comment needed]

This isn't wikipedia, where people can trot out two simple words and feel justifiably smug, you know.

Exactly! This is where your trot out xkcd and feel smug!

This is also where you pray that maybe the New Slashdot will feature an edit button.

[Useful comment needed]

This isn't wikipedia, where people can trot out two simple words and feel justifiably smug, you know.

Exactly! This is where your trot out xkcd and feel smug!

http://xkcd.com/1235/

Here you go: http://xkcd.com/287/

to be beaten with a metal pipe

A $5 wrench, you wannabe.

or waterboarded until he gives up the password.

At Gitmo, natch.

I see you've been in my house...

Oblig: Sorry about the mess: http://xkcd.com/1267/

Obligatory XKCD

I'm disappointed.

Look at the instuctions:

“The username is case sensitive. Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-.”

If I can use those, can I do this:

http://xkcd.com/327/

http://xkcd.com/865/

I've been studying this (publishing) for some time, in the context of learning, verifying assumptions, and the scientific method.

It turns out that there is really no bar in scientific publishing. It doesn't have to be understandable, nor innovative, nor even correct. You only need to be ethical (ie - don't lie about the data), cite anything that you got from other sources, and show that there is less than a 1-in-20 chance that you are wrong (p > 0.5).

What exactly do we want in a published paper, anyway?

Many cancer studies can't be reproduced. Many studies are statistically significant but valueless (the IQ of people in NYC is higher than Chicago by 1 point: this can be statistically certain but have no practical significance). There are lots and lots of ways to frame the conclusion the wrong way such as confusing correlation with causation, reversed conditionals (if the defendant is innocent, there is a 1 in 1 billion chance that this evidence is wrong), and other logical errors.

Then there's the enormous economic incentive of needing to publish to keep your job, that reviewers will oppose maverick thought and agree with community beliefs, and that no one examines their assumptions.

Would you like to publish a paper? MathGen will write one for you. Pass it around and chances are it will be accepted.

So when I talk to people about my research, the inevitable comment is "you should publish". And my inevitable answer is: why?

What do we want in scientific papers? What are they even for?

The pain of the Asian Giant Hornet is described as a hot nail piercing the skin and lasts about 4 hours with instant swelling.

Okay, I feel really, really sorry for whomever has experienced both and is able to make this comparison...not cool.

Wasps, and indeed flying stinging things in general, also not cool. Whole article is severely paranoia inducing, watch as I run for the hills every time something buzzes past my ear. On the bright side, the sound of one of these suckers flying by could definitely win the annoying ringtone competition...

Because they don't use some backwater measuring system like 'feet'.

That's true. They should have reported it in terms of "football fields" (either kind). [see http://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ note 7]

Actually a sports field analogy would have been apt here. A sports field is something humans are familiar with running fast on, and this guy was clearly motivated to run fast.

You should actually look up the definition of things you say '.. is by definition'

Thanks for looking that up for me. While you were at it, please look up the word "context". Anyone whose life consists of more than living out xkcd 386 understood easily enough that a company of soldiers is unlikely to have an IT security department, and that while the company of a beautiful member of the opposite (or same, whatever your preference is) sex may be a fantastic way to spend the evening, it is unlikely to entail general issues of information security. As such, even Cyc would have correctly calculated the correct definition to apply towards a semantically correct interpretation.

Of course, being human beings, we are capable of intentionally focussing and the incorrect contextual hints in order to make a point, crack a joke or just be a troll of extraordinary density.

XKCD 'What if' to the rescue!
Short answer, yes we could but it will take a long time to catch up. Voyager has a 35 year head start.

http://xkcd.com/1189/

*Sigh* Now he's got to update it again...

Relevant XKCD

Gotta post it!

http://xkcd.com/1189/

I'm so original!

http://xkcd.com/1189/

http://xkcd.com/1189/

Teachers also use word problems, discrete objects, and liquids, ideally delivered in quick enough succession that the student's brain catches the only constant: the concept of a fraction.

I think the problem isn't education research getting into the classroom - it's exactly the opposite. Teaching is an application-focused industry. When a teacher solves a particular educational problem, the technique stays within the school district, or perhaps makes a few rounds at educational conferences. The technique rarely gets any widespread attention, hardly any formal study, and is entirely forgotten within the decade... until an "educational researcher" stumbles across it and publishes a paper describing its effectiveness, which doesn't help because the school boards aren't interested in using new experimental techniques when their budgets are already in such jeopardy.

There is no Nobel Prize for education.

Some of us actually have monitors with 1680 width (or more) that we use... to read.

My PC at work has a 1920x1080 pixel monitor. I use half of it for the code editor and half of it for documentation. Or when my code's compiling, I use half of it for Slashdot and half of it to watch for the compilation to finish. Snap is like a poor man's dual monitor.

It looks like a cheap ass blog...

It looks like a cheap what now?

I guess that their intent is to surf on the NSA conspiracy bandwagon, to create the buzz and to attract more customers. Bad taste buzz, but only money is driving the business, isn't it?

The following reference is obligatory tmo:

http://xkcd.com/538/

As security experts, suggesting that using another cipher suite would protect the customers from the NSA is either ridicule or ignorant of NSA's actual powers at best. Again, I've no clue of what these powers could be, but suggesting that they could break into secure systems by brute-forcing or cryptanalysing AES / SHA-2 does not make sense. Doing so would cost an overwhelming amount of energy, even for the NSA, when actually much much cheaper and conventional methods exist, like tapping into back-end systems (often with agreement from operators themselves), installing key logger into end user devices, etc. They certainly control some botnets, and maybe even some underground websites. Knowing that most users uses the same password over several websites, it's really a child game to penetrate systems for an organisation like the NSA. The NSA do not need to guess your secrets, they simply read it over your back.

If Silent Circles feel like doing something, what about playing the card of full transparency and proving to the community that they are indeed beyond any doubts? That would at least have the merit to elevate the current level of discussions and not to throw away the work of dozens if not hundreds of people around the world trying to bring real open peer-reviewed security.

Being human only has a 93% mortality rate.

7% of all humans who have ever lived are still alive today.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/27/

http://xkcd.com/1014/

The reason, you see, that it's really "rare" for a woman to get pregnant when she is raped is because rape, by itself, is already relatively rare compared to the frequency with which people voluntarily engage in copulative sex...

Oblig

Actually, not even Internet can compromise your OTP lines of communication.

Yes it can. A OTP can protect the content of your communication, but it does not protect the meta-data. "They" can still see who you are talking to. Once they know who is involved, they can use the proverbial $5 wrench to retrieve the content.

Didn't work well for the IBM TrackPoint...

http://xkcd.com/243/

For those who don't know.

This is a reference to: http://xkcd.com/225/

But then, if RMS did sleep with a samurai sword, I'm sure he would have gone after them for their taunt mentioning "open source" instead of "free software."

Instead of playing Mozart to them, play recordings of coding techniques to them while they are in the womb.

Why not just play recordings of paradigm wars or language wars? Hell, let's push Functional Programming on them from day one.

http://xkcd.com/895/

Curious to know people's thoughts on this: how necessary are projects like MATE now that GNOME 3 has a supported-in-the-long-term "Classic" mode

Why, there should always be a project that people will loudly "threaten" to switch to every time somebody makes a development commit affecting their favorite workflow habit.

As usual, an XKCD comic applies...

You always have to be careful about extrapolation. What looks like exponential growth is unlikely to stay that way as further order effects come into play.

Oblig XKCD

FTFY.

obligatory XKCD. Recent one too.

http://www.xkcd.com/1257/

Obligatory XKCD