XKCD is a comic that involves a lot of math and science, and complains about dishonesty in academia on a frequent basis. Yet here the author is being excessively generous to one concept that he favours, and excessively pessimistic regarding another that he's trying to dispel. That's what irks me.

But if you don't understand the concept, and would rather write a post full of meaningless insults and devoid of reason and sensibility, then there's nothing anyone can do to stop you. Knock yourself out.

I read the transcript. "A few more bits" would actually be a good few more bits. There are many, many more feasible and realistically common permutations. Enough, in my opinion, to bring the total entropy to a level way beyond what's necessary to use on any system that allows a thousand queries per second.

That's a rather offensive opening for a post that doesn't really do anything to corroborate the methods used to calculate the entropy. I'm well aware of the exponential benefits of longer passwords.

That's the real reason to pick a long password, yes, but I have issues with the way the entropy is calculated in that strip. It's based on assumptions, and the entropy seems to be calculated with no regard to any of the many other common permutations.

I seem to be the only one who thinks that this strip is complete bullshit. There are so many assumptions, and no accounting for variations.

Don't forget uc "free";

I'm having trouble understanding your reply. The people who play games don't buy $300 video cards to run Photoshop. They buy them to run very demanding 3D applications. You can't run those applications on other platforms, so it isn't a matter of going out of one's way to avoid alternatives.

"High performance desktop" gamers are a pretty self-selected group now days. If you're sitting in front of a ATX case with a discreet video card, you've gone out your way to avoid every computing trend over the last 10 years. Which is fine, but its not exactly a growth market.

That's a pretty loaded statement. If you use a tool for a specific tasks, and forgo newer tools that come out in favour of revisions of the tool that you have been using because it remains the best tool for the job, then you haven't "gone out of your way to avoid every computing trend," rather, you've continued to use the best tool for the job. There are no devices more suitable for the kind of stuff these people do than desktop computers with discrete video cards.

Somehow this still costs more than what we pay T-Mobile for two phones with unlimited minutes and text, and 2GiB for each phone.

The U.S. is a third world country with respect to cellular providers.

I already covered this in my post. Why are you replying with this?

Use your own critical thinking skills and reading comprehension, and read the full sentence.

"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

The list of opposed curricula is disjointed, "critical thinking skills" is not capitalised, unlike the two other specified subjects, suggesting that the paragraph is talking about critical thinking skills in general, and not a specific methodology of the same name. Taking into consideration the rest of the document, which rails against anything other than loyalty to the Christian faith and and Christian morality, it doesn't take a whole lot of critical thinking to understand that what constitutes "purpose" in an environment expecting total loyalty and faith can be anything that might conceivably challenge religious notions, and nor does it take a scholar in logic to understand that verbiage more broad and vague than what is needed to address a stated desire is of no use to anyone aside from a party with hidden motivations.

Critical thinking requires an understanding of context.

Not at all. The paragraph says that they oppose "the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs," because they "are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning)." They oppose this because they feel that the programs "focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

You're cutting out crucial parts of the sentence and ignoring the flow of proposition and justification to make it seem like they object to a subset of programs that specifically aim to achieve a certain objective, when in fact they object to the entire set of programs because they feel that they all aim to achieve a certain objective.

That's a crock of shit, to be honest, even if the question was hypothetical. No part of these export laws have anything to do with subjective judgement of character.

Wait, so soldiers are expected to uphold the law, but people outside of the armed forces aren't? Or are soldiers more credible and trustworthy than people who aren't in the military?