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Voyager Wires

3 Comments and 4 Shares
Also, they're getting increasingly worried that someone will accidentally hit the 'retract' button, and that the end of the cable thrashing around as it winds up could devastate the Earth's surface.
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Fidtz
923 days ago
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I think that is about 4 trillon dollars and about 100 billion metric tonnes of #24 wire.
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ManBehindThePlan
923 days ago
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Should have used fiber!
deezil
923 days ago
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17776 - The Sequel.
Shelbyville, Kentucky

Versus Bracket

3 Comments and 8 Shares
Some works didn't make the cut; in "Ecks vs. Sever" vs. the passage of time, the latter seems to have won pretty decisively.
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Fidtz
1842 days ago
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"The Volcano" vs "The World" or "The Justice League" or "Marvel", depending on your view of various super powers.
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reconbot
1842 days ago
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In Predator vs Godzilla I'd put my money on Predator
New York City
alt_text_bot
1843 days ago
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Some works didn't make the cut; in "Ecks vs. Sever" vs. the passage of time, the latter seems to have won pretty decisively.
silberbaer
1842 days ago
Final four: Larry Flynt, Predator, Marvel, and Batman?
reconbot
1842 days ago
Superman would realistically beat batman. I ended up with Predator vs Volcano vs Marvel vs Superman
lahosken
1842 days ago
You might also like: https://twitter.com/xkcdbracket

wine fraud

2 Comments
this_part_of_the_date_is_so_stressful_that_you_should_prolly_drink_beforehand
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Fidtz
2368 days ago
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All better than Merlot for a Wedding! Valpolicella or Beaujolais could be inexpensive red options too.
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Covarr
2368 days ago
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I don't care what the experts say. The experts would have me serve Merlot at my wedding reception, and that is simply not happening.
East Helena, MT
Fidtz
2368 days ago
Good lord, what experts say that? That is the worst choice for a random group of people.
Covarr
2368 days ago
Well, that's what the people at the winery I visited suggested. I'm probably gonna go with a Riesling for white (my personal favorite), and maybe a Malbec or Pinot Noir for red. Even if I did think Merlot was a good choice in general, it doesn't fit our menu.

Temperature Preferences

5 Comments and 11 Shares
There's a supposed Mark Twain quote, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." It isn't really by Mark Twain, but I don't know who said it—I just know they've never been to McMurdo Station.
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Fidtz
2576 days ago
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First xkcd for a while I don't think works. I have been to Riyadh and Hong Kong in the summer. I find it hard to believe anyone who loves one of their climates would even like the other. Dubai+Delhi seems dubious too though I have no first hand experience there.
mooglemoogle
2576 days ago
Yeah that’s the thing, heat and humidity don’t necessarily go together. I could definitely see liking hot, dry summers but hating hot, humid ones. I would understand the other way less but that’s just me :)
kazriko
2575 days ago
I'm tolerant of hot, dry, but I don't like it. Hot and humid, or even warm and humid just makes me miserable.
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zippy72
2563 days ago
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Lisbon doesn't get a look in? I'm hurt...
FourSquare, qv
claudinec
2575 days ago
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So true. Wellington, Edinburgh and San Francisco are at the top of my revisit/migrate list for the weather as well as the culture.
Melbourne, Australia
ameel
2576 days ago
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Awesome. And I love that both Lahore and Karachi are in there!
Melbourne, Australia
angelchrys
2576 days ago
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I was wondering if KC would make it and sure enough, it is where it belongs: if you love cold and love heat. I live here and love neither.
Overland Park, KS
infogulch
2576 days ago
Yup. I also hate both, but I hate heat more. Looks like I need to move in the direction of New York (on the chart, obviously).

This Is Real

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I felt like I needed to stipulate right in the headline that this is not "fake news," because, well, it may be difficult to believe that this is where we are.

Following Betsy DeVos' confirmation as Secretary of Education, Republican Representative from Kentucky Thomas Massie introduced legislation to abolish the federal Department of Education.

Really.

The legislation, H.R. 899, is one sentence long: "The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2018."

Really.

It already has at least seven co-sponsors: Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA), Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), and Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID).

Really.

In a press release, which you can read in its entirety at Massie's House website, Massie says: "Neither Congress nor the President, through his appointees, has the constitutional authority to dictate how and what our children must learn."

Really.

And: "Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children's intellectual and moral development."

Really.

And: "It is time that we get the feds out of the classroom, and terminate the Department of Education."

Really.

You might imagine that Massie's legislation is some sort of critical commentary on the selection of DeVos, but that would be wrong. Because DeVos almost certainly shares his opinion about the department she was just confirmed to run.

After all, as I have been observing since the day Trump selected her, DeVos' only qualification is her willingness to destroy the Department of Education.

She was chosen specifically to be the perfect partner for Trump, who has said he wants to break up the "government-run education monopoly," and for Pence, who has been destroying public education in Indiana for quite some time, and for Bannon, whose exploitation of ignorance is significantly aided by subverting public education.

The GOP has spent decades shouting at poor and/or marginalized people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and now they want to take away their best opportunity to access a pair of boots.
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Fidtz
2855 days ago
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superiphi
2852 days ago
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There's a serious difficulty trying to make a country work without national standards. Especially education, which relies on the assumption that people can move from one state to another....
Idle, Bradford, United Kingdom
kazriko
2852 days ago
National standards can be agreed upon between the states without having a free-standing bureaucracy to trump the local initiatives. The Common Core initiative actually began as a state-run cooperative (And was actually popular... Until the DoE tried to force it.) We had minimal federal oversight of education as part of one of the other bureaucracies for decades before the Department of Education was formed in the late 70's.

Team Chat

7 Comments and 27 Shares
2078: He announces that he's finally making the jump from screen+irssi to tmux+weechat.
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Fidtz
2889 days ago
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2051, solid 1960's style future prediction there!
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stsquad
2884 days ago
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Truth
Cambridge, UK
hooges
2888 days ago
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IRC, never die!
Topeka, KS
emdeesee
2889 days ago
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OK, fine. When the galactic singularity becomes an option, I'll consider switching from IRC.
Sherman, TX
beowuff
2889 days ago
Don't worry. It'll still run irc as it's back end, so you can still connect.
Covarr
2889 days ago
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What if I'm only still on IRC because the rest of my groups are?
East Helena, MT
alt_text_bot
2889 days ago
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2078: He announces that he's finally making the jump from screen+irssi to tmux+weechat.
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