Talk:2481: 1991 and 2021

It's 7:12p and I'm on android at m.xkcd.com . There is no alt text, and the "see also" link directs back to the same page. The comic is fun though, people will be thinking about time travel as technology takes off. 162.158.62.179 23:14, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

There is no title-text on firefox on PC either. 162.158.79.59 23:16, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

The title text is botched. Instead the comic is wrapped in an a (hyperlink) element: <a href=""Oh, and our computers all have cameras now, which is nice during the pandemic lockdowns." "The WHAT."">. 141.101.98.152 23:24, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

I reckon the backend interface for posting a comic must have a field for the title text and a field for the "see also" link, and someone put the text in the wrong field. Easy mistake to make, hopefully fixed soon. -- Peregrine (talk) 02:33, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Wasn't the federal no lasers pointed at airplanes law was in acted to prevent laser guided missile attacks against airlines? Not laser attacks in general? 172.68.129.136 01:24, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Sure, someone may have suggested that, but the truth is that anyone who has access to guided missiles (IE state-level actors and military forces) isn't going to be bound by federal law anyway Defaultdotxbe (talk) 02:37, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

My thoughts too. At first I took it as White Hat thinking that there were military attacks with lasers capable of shooting down planes… but a federal law against that would, as you say, not be heeded by those doing such things. On reflection I decided that White Hat is envisioning that ordinary citizens have laser guns and have taken to shooting them at planes, the way road signs get shot at by ordinary guns in reality. -- Peregrine (talk) 02:46, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

In short, no. 18 USC §39A, the federal law criminalizing the pointing of laser pointers at airplanes, was not enacted to prevent missile attacks against airlines. It was enacted to help combat kids (and others) causing real injury to airline personnel in what they thought were harmless pranks (they're not harmless). JohnHawkinson (talk) 03:46, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

It's interesting that Mr. 2021 summarizes the entire Internet/World Wide Web with "it's really easy to send news stories to your friends". The Internet certainly existed in 1991, but the advancement in that area over 30 years is pretty significant. I'm not sure how I would sum that up to someone from 30 years ago in a single comic panel, but I think it would come out differently than what we see here. Orion205 (talk) 03:57, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

I saw the ratio of advertisements with www.foo.com in it rise only at the end of the 90s which was when the Internet started to get mainstream adoption. Before Google, it was not so easy to find relevant content with Altavista and friends. Bmwiedemann (talk) 20:31, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Don't confuse the Internet with the Web, though. With searchable access to alt.your.fetish.or.hobby on a usenet feed, a curated FAQ (or general conversation) could make you aware of ftp.hobbyfetish.org.au, or whatever wherewithall you needed to telnet directly to the FetishHobbyBBS. Or vice-versa if you'd started on a FIDONet connection. (Then there was the AOL Keyword approach, where you had such an ISP with such a USP and an acceptably obvious hobby/fetish.) Before Tim Berners-Lee (and whoever did Gopher, etc), plus the time needed to get into your prefered era of AskVistaGoogleDuck, the connectivity was there - just a little less automated and only hugely beyond a single person actually knowing everything they could connect to, rather than totally mind-blowingly so... 162.158.158.105 00:05, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

It's not so much the range of cordless phones that is of significant change, but the computing power inside the phone that made the most advancement since 1991. Phones at that time could only make phone calls! Texting didn't become available until 1992 and games and everything else we do on them was later. To me "range" means the connection range which improved a lot, but is still not as signficant as "range of use" Rtanenbaum (talk) 12:17, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Does "cordless phones" refer to cellphones? That's the "wireless" industry. Cordless phones are landline phone handsets that don't have a cord connecting them to the wall, and he's talking about the distance they can be from the base station. Mentioning these is a joke because so many people have cut the cord entirely, abandoning their landlines in favor of just using cellphones. Barmar (talk) 12:59, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

That's what I wondered too. I would assume the comic is referring to cordless phones in the sense of landline phone handsets, not cellphones, if just because the coverage range of these phones has increased, whereas the opposite is true for cellphones. With 2G, you can get coverage up to 35km from the base station, whereas with 4G this is reduced to about 16km. There is effectively more cellphone coverage nowadays because there are more base stations, not because the coverage works at longer range. Zoid42 (talk) 02:28, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

I agree, & the assertion that cellphones have increased in range since '91 would be amusing, if it weren't so incorrect as to represent harmful disinformation. (Ironic, given the topic...) I have edited the explanation to make the situation clearer, but that paragraph is now overly long & contains several run-on sentences: The explanation would read better if split into coherent sections for each of the four changes Cueball described.

ProphetZarquon (talk) 17:56, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

The computing power inside the phone would definitely sound significant in 1992 ; I suspect it would be comparable to top supercomputers of that time. -- Hkmaly (talk) 00:10, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

It indeed seems that we're seeing 100s of GigaFLOPS in both those supercomputers and these smartphones. Possibly more, as I couldn't easily find mobiles from the last half decade referenced in those terms of measure. And, when it does, it refers to the GPU, which makes for a very highly specialised architecture to render (e.g.) game environments via 3D elements, unlike supercomputers that... hmmm, often had a very highly specialised architecture to process (e.g.) weather predictions via 3D elements. ;)

Still hard to compare (is it easier to efficiently re-task arbitrary GPUs for things like, say, cryptofarming than it would for a weather-service machine to be re-applied to non-weather computing?) and of course other metrics such as data storage have been Moore's Lawed as well, by a combination of higher quantity, lower cost and increased availability (never mind pocket-portability) even before we start to get to near infinite swappable tape-storage now being approximated by virtually unlimited remote cloud storage (which could ultimately and opaquely still be as crude as tape-storage, but probably is disc-farms).

It would be interesting to go beyond the few brief glances I made at the details and actually with the various conversion factors that relate what we had in the early '90s (when something like a 486 DX2 66Mhz was the height of personal computing power, for me, at least until DX4 100s became available - and a HD 3.5" FDD wasn't always a given...) 141.101.99.103

This is the second time Cueball travels from within the Covid-19 pandemic to visit White Hat 2280. Is there any comic where White Hat interacts with pangolins, bats, or China? Even though Cueball is vaccinated by now, he might be a carrier Ruffy314 (talk) 22:46, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

That field around Cueball might mean he's not physically here ; maybe it's not possible to transfer matter into past, just information. -- Hkmaly (talk) 00:10, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

Black Hat: "Here wear this shirt when you project back."

Cueball: 'Why? What does it say above that big block of code?' Black Hat: "'Reproduce this RNA sequence for a cool surprise!'"

ProphetZarquon (talk) 17:56, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

I disagree with the assertion added by 172.69.35.193 (talk):

'A moment of thought would make it clear that the "laser attack" is unlikely to damage the plane directly, because if it did, no new law would be needed.'

Something being criminal under an existing law does not mean no new law is needed or will be passed. Maybe the existing penalty wasn't deemed sufficient. Maybe the law had loopholes not foreseen until the new technology appeared. Or maybe Congress just wanted to be seen to be doing something. There are many reasons why new laws can and have been passed to combat (the comic's word) something that's already not legal. Does anyone have thoughts to add? -- Peregrine (talk) 10:45, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

I agree, that addition should be removed. Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 11:03, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

I'd like to add that the law Cueball references is only supposed to "combat" laser attacks, not necessarily outlaw them. I interpret this in the same way that one might outlaw firearms in order to "combat" mass shootings, or legislating TSA checks to "combat" bombings - both of which are already very illegal. So in Whitehats imagination, a law passed to "combat laser attacks on airliners" might be something like background checks on lasgun owners (deemed necessary because of frequent attacks). This law would be (arguagbly) "needed", even though the attacks themselves are already illegal. 162.158.203.15 12:25, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

<message deleted; sorry about that>172.70.126.2 15:27, 28 June 2021 (UTC)