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I know that many people don't like xkcd, but he had a nice cartoon where you can see the difference between a natural changing climate and what we have right now: Timeline

How about Kerbal Space Program? The physics simulation is spot on. Folks from NASA (including Randall Munroe) to Elon Musk recommend it, yet it's also great for kids.

http://xkcd.org/

Obligatory xkcd.

That's an excellent article, thanks.

The fix would require specific changes to the implementation and "...there's a high risk that this would also cause compatibility problems." IMHO, it would be highly misleading to call it an implementation problem that an unforseen encryption weakness could be mitigated with changes to the implementation.

I offer the above to be XKCD1318 compliant.

Yes, it's a cultural thing that has become reflected (partially, at least) as a legal thing, whether at EU level or at each country.

I noticed the article's quoting or paraphrasing of J. Wales uses terms like "freedom of speech" and "land of the free", clearly from a US perspective. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But, apparently, we need to remember that "freedom of speech" doesn't come with a freedom of consequences from that speech (Oblig XKCD); and that many citizens of that land of the free have sacrificed many freedoms in the past decade or so, especially after 9/11.

Spain, where I live, has very quite privacy laws and laws governing the handling of electronic data. In just about any public, or even private, building and if you see a surveillance camera, you're likely to also see a posted sign telling you who to contact about having your privacy rights protected (which may even include having the video captures erased or your face blurred).

Every company (and their websites, if any) that collects any sort of information from users must comply with the LOPD (data protection law) and ensure that data is properly handled and users' information is protected. This includes cases like surveillance video mentioned above, but also all the forms (paper or online) that you fill out, contracts that you sign and whatnot.

And we're talking about a country with a history of domestic terrorism...

You were just asking for an oblig, weren't you?

http://xkcd.com/347/ ...now that was truly obligatory.

You were just asking for an oblig, weren't you?

Strange as it may seem, there's an xkcd quote for that.

Probably somewhat around two football fields.

oblig xkcd: http://xkcd.org/1172/ ;)

You're just begging for an oblig, aren't you? ;)

Obligatory WRONG!

Good old xkcd has this covered already. No detector required (just walk around saying "I am not being followed by a drone" and prepare to be corrected.)

the painfully shy, their angst suddenly quelled, could now speak their minds.

As as "painfully shy" individual, I can tell you that by the time I have drunk enough to "quell my angst", I don't have much of a mind left to speak.

Also: Ballmer limit.

"Nobody could understand the source code anymore without massive doses of caffeine... ao we decided to rewrite the whole thing in Perl."

Oblig xkcd

Obligatory Rebuttal xkcd

This is interesting for two reasons:
0. It was Perl's built in features, such as regex, system calls, and ability to be terse enough to enter a solution on a single swinging pass that make it an obvious choice -- It was made for this type of job.
1. I'm confident that if we have not already, we will soon reach a point where entire discussions can be composed of no text other than xkcd links.

"Nobody could understand the source code anymore without massive doses of caffeine... ao we decided to rewrite the whole thing in Perl."

Oblig xkcd

http://m.xkcd.org/ is a better version for mobile. The title below the comic has a clickable superscript (alt text) link that will display the alt text underneath.

Awesome. Tanks for the tip. I've now changed my bookmark :)

http://m.xkcd.org/ is a better version for mobile. The title below the comic has a clickable superscript (alt text) link that will display the alt text underneath.

xkcd.

[Gotta be redundant by now.]

In no particular order I'm currently reading:
1) XKCD http://xkcd.org/ (and yes, 1110 was amazing art even though it's mostly about arcane, subtle or smart references)
2) Dilbert http://dilbert.com/fast (makes actual work seem a little less sad)
3) Lackadaisycats http://lackadaisycats.com/comic.php (guns, alcohol and cats)
4) Unsounded http://unsoundedcomic.com/ (thieves and their pesky offspring)
5) Gunnerkrigg Court http://gunnerkrigg.com/ (a school with mediums, shadows and robots)

Can you put two and two together looking at this graph?

(Numbers and graph Courtesy of the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities).

The bad thing about the right's ideological radicalization over the past decade is that there is no such as thing as "non-partisan" anymore. Anyone who puts forth numbers, facts, arguments, etc, against them is automatically part of the liberal media conspiracy.

The example of the hour, of course, is the right's attack on Nate Silver. To be fair, Nate did support Obama in this election, but his analysis was based on raw number crunching, not wishful thinking (like these eight conservative pundits who predicted a Romney win), which is why he was able to correctly predict the outcome of all 50 states (assuming no FL surprises). Meanwhile, the Red States guys were predicting a 3.5% win for Mitt the day before election. (Not to mention their hilarious exit poll that favored Mitt 5.4% with a 1.44% margin of error!)

They just stripped away all statistical corrections that professional polling organizations normally use in order to get the result they want even when the underlying reality was completely different . Now that the cold light of day has shown them wrong, we'll see if an apology, methodology change, or indeed any indication of humility or self-growth is forthcoming, but I'm not holding my breath.

Unfortunately, most complex things (global warming, taxation policy, etc.) aren't resolved simply and quickly like this polling "controversy". Right-wing ideologues will continue to manufacture misinformation and attack anyone who disagrees with them, and because of that: truth is dead, in a sense. (This can apply to left-wing ideologues too, but it's right-wing ideologicalization that has been more prevalent over the past decade.)

I'm not entirely sure I want a big ass-bonus.

So, it's not teleportation. Thanks.

Again? Bahamas!

*We* slashdotters

http://xkcd.org/1055

Don't worry, Etymology-Man will rescue us. Probably by pointing out that we are not really getting "fried", more like getting "microwaved".

so, it has come to this.

http://xkcd.org/908/

http://m.xkcd.org/908/

I think you're simplifying too much. Its better to quantify things. UV radiation is 1,000,000 times more energetic than radio. So the magic threshold you are talking about spans a factor of a million. Another way to put it is that the cutoff is not arbitrary at all. If you shine light that does not contain photons energetic enough to knock electrons away from their nuclei, it does not matter how long you do it for, or how bright the light is. You will never get ionization. This has been known for 100 years.

Can the exact energy required to ionize a molecule be affected by factors such as the solvent and interaction with other molecules around it?
Yes. This difference will not be by a factor of 1,000,000 though.

Could there be damage due to non-ionizing effects of the radiation?
Yes.

But is the damage due to non-ionizing radiation significantly more than the damage a cell causes to itself during day to day living?
Probably not. A normal cell repairs around 250,000 dna lesions per day (or 10,000 per hour, or 200 per minute). It is capable of repairing closer to 1,500 dna lesions per minute.

For reference, one hour of bright sun exposure causes about 80,000 dna lesions (1,300 per minute) and skin cells can take about 15 minutes of this before they start killing themselves off rather than trying to repair.
So if you look up how many dna lesions occur in RF treated cells now you will have something to compare to.

As to whether we should keep paying for these huge epidemiological studies without any proposed mechanism:

http://xkcd.org/882/
http://xkcd.com/925/

http://xkcd.org/882/ is also relevant.

An asshat haberdasher like this one

Oblig: http://xkcd.org/865/

obligatory xkcd that points out the basic problem: It works for 1 guy, it doesn't work for everybody.

Obligatory XKCD: Recipes and Genetic Algorithms

There's a XKCD joke for mostly everything

Obligatory XKCD: Recipes and Genetic Algorithms

That's why the diode worked!

If the owners of a website are willing to get paid for using a CAPTCHA system, then I guess they're also willing to lose most of their users because of it.

There are other methods to keep your website clean.

Word... HFT is not much different than the plot for Office Space. "Making" money from money by taking other people's money from their transactions just by essentially skimming what would otherwise be roundoff errors off the top.

On the plus side, at least it's a plug for Linux performance?
Obligatory: http://xkcd.org/808/

At some point this becomes truth...

http://www.xkcd.org/538/

Obligatory xkcd link: http://www.xkcd.org/123/

http://www.xkcd.org/481/

A reduction in fertility isn't enough to stop exponential growth. 500 million, 2 billion, 5 billion, 10 billion... Global population since the industrial revolution. citation

But as a counter to my own point. xkcd

I think today's xkcd is fairly relevant...

http://www.xkcd.org/756/

Man and I was expecting number 640
It inspires me.
http://xkcd.org/640/

Storm

Bullshit, those storm chasers are not motivated by movies and shows like Twister and Storm Chasers. Everybody knows they are motivated by xkcd. See: http://xkcd.org/752/

link

Obligatory XKCD

Wow, Randall must have some timing

http://xkcd.org/