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always been one of my favorites... http://xkcd.org/221/

I'm in tautology club and I know this to be a fact. (obig: xkcd)

http://xkcd.org/701/

http://xkcd.com/539/

http://xkcd.org/378/ There you go.

http://xkcd.org/610/

....but I am more interested in turning a cell phone into explosives.

Also, obligatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.org/

The point is, if said "maid" is

• A local government agent and you're a criminal
• A criminal and you're a local government agent
• A foreign government agent and you're a fed
• A private investigator and you're the target
• A corporate spy / saboteur working for your employer's competitor,

then you should be worried about your maid supplanting your bootloader. Remember, this isn't the maid in your house, this is the maid in a hotel.

Another one: if you check your laptop at an airport, there's plenty of time for these sorts of shenanigans. If you fly frequently, the fed could quite easily snoop your password after two flights. So, if TSA reads xkcd, it's game over for anybody who wants to fly with physical security for their laptop.

Obligatory XKCD..

How does your RSA key fare against wrenches?

Sorry to say but if the founding fathers were to attempt a revolution with our current tranqed populace today, they'd have failed and been executed as terrorists instead of hailed as hero's.

That's ok with me, I don't want a violent revolution right now. They are messy and painful. Fortunately in a democracy, we have other ways of changing things besides violence. Think about it: how many followers do you need in order to win a violent revolution? Fifty percent of the population? I'm going to say you'll need more than that, unless all of your followers happen to be in the military. If you can get fifty percent of the population to follow you, then you can win an election. You don't need to have violence.

Also, given your insistence on thinking everyone around is a sheep who doesn't care about anything but their next fix, this may apply.

Because what could possibly go wrong with Android?

Because what could possibly go wrong with Android?

Yeah I know, my goof. However, you could have also linked to the one in question.

I always find myself ending up with loads and loads of tabs after a few hours of fascinated clicking or slacking off (which is good... right?). Tabs are not really helping when you start off reading manuals for some API you're trying to tame, get distracted by a really interesting concept mentioned in there, and finally end up with nine tabs of Wikipedia, a few eBay tabs, thirty webcomics and two blog posts about cabbage. I really can't "find" the three tabs with documentation if I want to go back to work.

So the idea of grouping tabs sounds appealing to me. Maybe the groups of tabs could even get a different kind of behaviour, e.g. the anonymous browsing feature. Or a merge with the 'profiles' feature.

Obligatory xkcd for you, and it's even a recent one: correlation.

Unfortunately, most idiots who spout drivel like this don't even have a strong correlation in the first place. Sales of violent video games may be up, and knife crimes might be up, but is it even the kids playing the games committing the crimes?

Giving adolescents more productive things to do is the best way to fight teen crime. If they're busy earning money, cleaning the parks as volunteers, acting in community theatre, playing music, dancing, painting, or playing organized sports they're less likely (and have less free time) to go out and commit crimes.

In addition to providing an example of how alien life might be cobbled together, synthetic biology has a broad array of uses on the home front

Oh yes! Like holding the world hostage!! Now where can I get some mind-controlling synthetic life forms? (don't forget the insulin dependence).

He must be learning.

Since then, he's decided it's better just to make the words up as he goes along.

Obligatory xkcd reference.

Indeed! I heard it's 10x faster than this guy's computer.

The coriolis effect is not a real force. It's an illusionary effect that happens when you have a moving point of reference.

Obligatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.org/123/

Obligatory XKCD link.

And, yes doing business with legal entities is such a hassle, and leads to so much legal problems that it easy to make a case for going illegal from the start. My decision is to go without, but I can't really blame someone that chooses a different path.

If Bill is unavailable, I'll throw my hat in the ring, although I'm holding out for Secretary of Tubes.

It's coming true! Black-hat really does want to be Secretary of the Internet!

Secretary of the Internet.

Xkcd explains it all.

Naturally, this is the ideal schedule for maximum creativity.

...well, I'd say real meat women are gonna be in trouble.

Yeah. for exactly one generation. Then nobody will be left to be in trouble.

An analogy for you Slashdotters:
Children are compiled by women. Boys too. We just give them half of the source code.
Good luck executing your program "humanity.pl" with half of the source and no compiler.

Welcome, Internet. You take every baboon, idiot, and moron and give them the opportunity to be heard at the same level of volume as every other individual out there. You then take a news agency, wanting to capitalize on not having to pay stringers constantly, and provide said speech free to the world.

I laugh.

I spent 5 years in college doing photojournalism, 4 years in High school, and 2 years in middle school- all with a camera plastered to my hip and face. My life was defined in photos of other people. Now out, I look forth and see every person with a cell phone camera capturing daily drivel and spouting it off as 'news'. News is immediate and important based on locality- ie, it's important if you shoot it because it's important to you- the rest of the world (more likely than not) just doesn't give a shit. However- and here is where the internet and CNN step in- you now have a distribution model to *make* it important.

So the health of Steve Jobs is suspect- we all know that. Apple hid it from the world so the stock price wouldn't tank. Apple has done it to itself by not being candid in the past- and has reinforced the notion that if the almighty master suffers the company will suffer. Had they suffered this price dump in the past the future wouldn't revolve around every little sniffle.

Investigate all you want- Even if the stock was manipulated many people took profit at the news- because they recognized the inherit fear that Apple has now linked itself to Steve Job's life.

Thus, I give you my opinion on citizen journalism: http://xkcd.org/481/
*please note that this post itself citizen journalism and the author is subject to the same rant he inflicts upon others.

When did 'blogosphere' transfer from being a humourous result of Randall Munroe's warped mind, and turn into a bona fide word?

Unless you're counting squirrel balls in the genitalia department...

But honestly folks, xkcd nailed this one a while back

http://xkcd.org/194/

TLDR (except for the beginning)

Of course there's an xkcd-comic for this one:

http://xkcd.org/435/

Yeah, the reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped.

Stallman!

It's okay, you're free!

Bah. sh with dd...

Butterflies are enough for everyone.

Loud sex.

Sex? Slashdot? You must be new here.

Or tormenting the neighborhood "gangsters"... http://www.xkcd.org/368/

It's parabolic, so if you can drag it inside, make it into an elliptical reflector dish.

Loud sex.

http://xkcd.org/424/ No, but it seems to work with Vista!

"We know what we're doing."

*shrug* Discover didn't build a name for itself with sensational mysticism ("surfer dude Lisi may unlock universe with E8 shapethingy"). This seems to be a modern news trend that's invaded popsci.

The grounded, hypothesize-and-falsify style engages my mind like a good mystery. If you're interested in my views on soft science, I'm certain they're in my post history. The parent's article accurately conveys the spirit -- both adventure and method -- of scientific thinking. I praise it for that, even if the underlying field isn't rigorous. Speculation and science aren't exclusive; look at the Standard Model.

Our OP, on the other hand, is another "study shows" piece of smut masquerading as research. To the press's credit, the source material is conveyed without an awful amount of color.

Felt like venting did you?.

I was wondering if they weren't a bit wrong in their calculations. A Zettabyte is 1 Million Petabytes. Knowing that where I work has about 2 petabytes in a few SAN's and there are 1000's of larger institutions and millions that are smaller (that store in the terabytes range) around the world. The place I worked before had about a half a petabyte just in tape backups for credit card and other transactions, catalog and pricing information, images etc. and that was just an average clothing company, hardly rivaling JCPenney or Macy's. I'm also thinking about Wal-Mart with millions of products and thousands of stores. And we're just talking about SAN's here mainly in the US, not including desktops, laptops, camera's, personal information, Google.

On another note, how much does a zettabyte actually yield these days, drive manufacturers might just give you 700 Petabytes for it. Oblig. XKCD: http://xkcd.org/394/

http://xkcd.org/154/

http://xkcd.org/125/?z

You could've predicted this using C-x M-c M-Butterfly while editing emacs code inside emacs...

Lord help us when that happens.

So if they stop a hurricane in China, does that mean a butterfly here will stop flapping its wings?