Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
Exactly. I would personally consider damage caused by an unreliable suspend mode (whether an issue of software or hardware) to be an example of manufacturer defect.
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Placenta is a flat cake, from Ancient Greek πλακοῦντος. Presumably, human placentae are named for their shape.
Comment · 5 years ago
.ecneirepxe tfel-ot-thgir ,reporp a etamixorppa ot siht ekil yalpsid ot txet deen dluow uoy ,noinipo ym n'I
Comment · 5 years ago
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/index.asp if you want to read the actual draft proposals
Comment · 5 years ago
Well, in FORTRAN, GOD is REAL (and JESUS is INTEGER, but that's not as funny). Even modern fortran has to maintain this feature for legacy reasons, leading one to add 'implicit none' to the beginning of each module etc.
Comment · 5 years ago
Some miscellaneous comments:

Woman in a bar: This particular mathematician appears to be from the 5th century BC.

Prime numbers: This reminds me of the Grothendieck prime, 57.

Hunting: I would modify the statisticians statement to "on average, we got him", but that doesn't sound as funny.

Theorem: I would have thought that the mathematician would just define, without loss of generality, the interior of his prison cell to be 'outside', much like in the subsequent joke about fences.

Comment · 5 years ago
A good name is also memorable, consistent, easily decipherable, and works around namespace conflicts. Might be a best 2.7 out of 4 situation, I guess. Why 2.7/4 and not 3/4? Because the remainder was lost in translation to the ASCII gods.
Comment · 5 years ago
Hmm, In my experience, trying to stop a sufficiently motivated 'kid' is an exercise in futility. Here are some possible scenarios, in decreasing order of plausiblity:

1. At the surface level, you have to assume that the password mechanism is secure. I'm sure many of us remember the Windows 95 login, for instance.

2. But even making the assumption that the password is secure, social engineering will typically work against the parent.

3. Even if the parent is cautious, one can bypass Edge Kids Mode by simply not using Edge.

4. Even if no other browser is installed, this can be bypassed by copying a portable version from a friends.

5. Say the parent blacklists certain executables via GPedit. Typically, renaming the executable to a whitelisted one (e.g. calc.exe) will suffice.

6. Suppose the parent chooses to enable S mode, so that only Edge and UWP packages from the Microsoft Store can be enabled. The child creates a Linux live USB (at a friends house) and modifies the Windows filesystem directly (or ignores it entirely).

7. What if USB is disabled in BIOS, and the parent enables a BIOS password, and Windows has full disk encryption enabled? Disconnect the CMOS battery for a bit, I guess?

8. Say the parent gives up, welds the device shut, and cancels the internet service. Can't browse the Inter-webs without internet service, right? Wrong. Go to the friend's/neighbor's/public library and do it anyway.

In summary, Kids Mode is about as effective as transparent schoolbags or the Great Firewall. You are probably better of finding something interesting and productive for the kid to do (not to say learning to abuse poor infosec is a waste of time), so that they have better things to do than explore double-plus-ungood web sites.

Comment · 5 years ago
The author recommends -std=c99 (-pedantic) default flags, yet suggests K&R (2nd edition, presumably) as a reference...
Comment · 5 years ago
As if that sounds any better in English. It's probably better just to ignore us English speakers anyway. Anyway, apparently Oberfucking and Unterfucking still exist?
Comment · 5 years ago
Now 16x those bandwidth numbers with 1TB µSD cards, granted the read/write times will still be equally awful.
Comment · 5 years ago
As an aside, there are also ISO B and C series paper, although I believe that the C standard was withdrawn somewhat recently. The area of B_n is the geometric mean of that of A_n and A_{n-1}, while the area of C_n is the geometric mean of that of A_n and B_n. Without context, C4 paper sounds quite scary, until you realize it's probably related to A4 paper in some way. As to why it isn't just called A3.75, I have no idea.
Comment · 5 years ago
I'm curious what 'useful' feature set of a laundry machine is enabled by Internet access. The only thing that comes to mind is remote access e.g. to change washer/dryer settings or to check cycle progress, but surely implementation of the aforementioned features requires only LAN (or LAN + SSH etc.), and not public internet access. Or just buy a regular machine which doesn't suffer from these anti-features.

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