Yeah, basically it’s just a “clever” way of wasting people’s time by getting them to read a long paragraph of something that seems to be either relevant or interesting, only to have it cut into the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” theme at the very end.
Because of this, whenever I come across a long post on some message boards that seems like just a bit of a non-sequitur, I immediately scan to the bottom to see if it ends with “Bel-Air” before I actually take the time to read it. :dubious:
I’m glad I pretty much only read this board and snopes.
Personally, I’m hoping Brady Quinn takes a big ole’ crap next year…
I’d always wondered what people were talking about with the mouseover text in xkcd, then I decided to try it in IE instead of Firefox and lo and behold! Text shows up that doesn’t in Firefox. I would use my little plug-in that lets you look at the guts of a page to show image alt attributes (which is usually how you have text show up when you mouseover an image–this comic uses the ‘title’ attribute for that, and ‘alt’ is used for something mundane) and they were never funny, so I didn’t get it. Like the alt tag for this one is “Piano.”
Regarding the strip itself, I think it’s kind of funny and I got it because I’ve heard the “12-inch pianist” joke several times… The part that made me roll my eyes was that the girl would ask him out for having a 12 inch dick rather than run away screaming, like any sane, non-genetically-mutated woman with normally proportioned bits and an average pain threshold would do.
Stick figure girls are just kinky that way.
Are you using the latest version of Firefox? Or the latest version of IE, for that matter: both browsers display the same text for me on mouse-over. Namely, the text from the image’s “title” attribute, which in this case is “Good thing he didn’t make it smaller, or it’d need someone three inches tall to play it.”
The alt text is in fact “Piano,” but neither Firefox 3 nor IE7 display the alt text on mouseover if a “title” attribute is set.
In firefox, it displays some of the text but usually it’s cut off with ellipses. In IE, I can see the whole thing.
I have Firefox 3.0.5 and nothing shows up when I mouseover any xkcd comic. I have to look at the source coding to see that text in Firefox, but it shows up in IE. Not nearly enough to make me use IE or anything, but it’s annoying 
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1715
Long Titles, Firefox truncates the title/tooltip/whatever text naturally for whatever reason, this addon lets your see the whole thing.
If i recall, there’s a certain add on you can get to firefox to allow you to see the full texts to links/pictures. I don’t recall what it’s called, but I know it’s there. It’s nice, except for when I scroll over a link to a post here, and i get a whole long Post filling up my screen basically telling me the first post.
But if you search around you might be able to find it.
Ok I went and followed the workaround to get that addon to work in 3.0.5 and it installed, it shows up in my addons list. But I still get nuffin’ when I go to xkcd. I also get no popup over thread titles on the SDMB with the first bit of the first post in them. I figured that the admins had somehow turned that off or something.
Now I’m sad because my Firefox is poopy. 
Firefox users, this one’s for you.
*** Ponder
i am a bit disappointed in old randall though. An earlier strip featured a stick figure girl saying something to the effect of “the penis is an organ about this big. now can we, as a society, MOVE ON?” I was hoping he was staunchly against dick-jokes. I mean this one was funny, but still… this could quickly decay into “sex and the city” if left to its own devices.
Well…I don’t get today’s xkcd
Skynet that’s from terminator…but other then that
Heh, the most recent one made me almost snort up my tea when I saw it. 
It’s a joke about genetic algorithms, which are basically algorithms that look for an optimal or near-optimal solution in some problem domain. A “fitness function” is used to evaluate and rank candidate solutions, and the best solutions are “genetically” combined in order to produce a new generation of solutions, which are also ranked and selectively bred, and so on and on until some solution is found that is considered sufficient. The idea is that by treating candidate solutions as genetic individuals within a population, a little selection can be applied to cause evolution towards better solutions.
In the xkcd strip, the fitness function appears to be evaluating the “costs” of certain paths or actions, the idea being that the overall cost should be minimized in an optimal solution. Thus, the “cost” of the algorithm evolving into Skynet is set absurdly high, in the hopes that the genetic algorithm will then avoid doing just that. 
Anyone think this thread should be made into a sticky?
I didn’t understand it either.
The explaination made it clear that there is no way it could ever be funny.
I don’t know from genetic algorithms, and I chuckled. 
By ‘explanation’, do you mean Stealth Potato’s post here, or the mouseover? Because I’m not sure if the mouseovers are ever explanations, though sometimes they do provide extra context that might help someone ‘get’ a joke they didn’t before. They’re comments or tag punch lines.
I meant post 55.
With that high of value he’s just asking for an integer overflow and then we’ll be up to our eyeballs in Schwarzeneggers…