XKCD: It's more than a comic

Yeah, I mean that specific trick "jump down from some height, catch, swing up as high as possible to catch on something else"

Australia looks like a WBC about to eat a bacteria. Never thought that until I saw this map.

Regarding that upside-down map, I wonder if the various mineral deposits are moved along with the land masses.

If they're not, oil gets a lot more scarce, given that much of what's now oil sources becomes under water, and probably not coastal levels of depth, making extraction much more difficult.

On the other hand, if they do move along with the land masses oil gets easier to pump for the US and Eurasia, as they don't have to deal as much with the arctic conditions of Siberia and the current northern NA, which is pretty hard on men and gear much of the time. The RL middle east is fucked, though.

All your safe space are belong to Trump

The Australia joke Entropy is referring to is the idea that Australia is already upside-down. For reference

I'm baaaaaaack

"Wasted Time"

Moon◊

I feel like White Hat and the other guy should be switched.

Nah. The Cueball is more resembling of White Beret than White Hat but is not weird enough. So Cueball it is.

Which one are we supposed to agree with, here?

Because I feel like Cueball has a point, and Boater, while also having a point, is being needlessly antagonistic.

I have a message from another time...

I mostly agree with the Boater. Cueball is rather overexcited for this keyboard. Especially as it seems to be for a mobile - if you actually have a ton of text to type, get a proper one, which already can process any your input at top speed. And yes being faster at wasting time is pointless - the 30% time freed from current amount of pointlessness (presuming that it's ALL tied into the keyboard instead of it being just a portion) will only be filled with more pointlessness rather than actual productivity.

edited 23rd Mar '15 6:41:41 AM by Adannor

Wasn't the whole QWERTY setup designed to slow down people on typewriters who had been going so fast that they were ruining the machinery of said typewriter?

Moon◊

Yes. It's not a problem with modern keyboards, but the standard is stuck.

World-wide change of standard would be immensely hard, and if you are using different computers in your daily life, a portion of them are likely to be stuck on the old layout so learning a different one would only cause confusion.

Really, unless you're a prolific writer, I do not think switching is necessary.

edited 23rd Mar '15 10:14:30 AM by Adannor

The real reasoning for QWERTY is highly debated, but the origin of it as a slowing mechanism is pretty suspect.

That pretentious ending forgetting about good old T9 is rather amusing.

It was basically more efficient for mechanical typewriters because keeping commonly-used characters far apart allowed typists to go fast without worrying of getting two characters locked up together. Not really about slowing down the typist, but about keeping the machinery from jamming.

It's totally useless for computers though. Except for inertia.

edited 23rd Mar '15 5:33:17 PM by TParadox

Fresh-eyed movie blog

AZERTY is even worse, because some of its special characters are a complete joke (how do you type a full stop? with shift-semicolon of course!). Not to mention the Windows implementation which treats Caps Lock as Shift Lock despite:

1. Having accented letters as special characters
2. The Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator issuing warnings when you check the layout, precisely because of #1.

I ended up making my own version of the layout, with real Caps Lock and a few more special chars thrown in.

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

And there is the Hungarian keyboard layout, where you have to use an Alt Gr combination for keys like []{}<>;*

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

In Russian you have to Shift+period to get a comma. Most of the special symbols are gone. (Every button the main rows (except period/comma) and tilde are taken over by letters. Some found refugee in the shift+numbers row^note The lucky survivors are !"&#8470;;%:?*() , but most were left without a place to be.)

edited 24th Mar '15 5:00:40 AM by Adannor

A Finnish keyboard has keys for ä, ö, and (pointlessly) å; but to get ü you have to first press the umlaut key and then u. (Finnish doesn't use ü but it'd sort of make a bit of sense to have that as a key if we're also going to have the Swedish å. They'd probably get used about equally often.)

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

My Spanish keyboard has a dedicated ñ key and is therefore automatically superior.

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

Oddly, I find myself preferring touchscreen keyboards in this regard because you can tap and hold to access all the letter variations.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

ō_ô

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

ô_õ

ಠ_ಠ

´д`

Moon◊

わからない

I'm reading this because it's interesting. I think. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over.

I kind of wish I could have some sort of absurd mega-keyboard with more characters on separate keys but that would be impractical and mess with my touch-typing. I see the advantage with the ability to access variations by holding but I find that I type so much slower without an actual physical key to press.

edited 24th Mar '15 10:01:40 AM by TenebrousGaze