Potential
by Jeff
Image text: The bunch of disadvantaged kids I was tutoring became too good at writing, and their essays were forcing me to confront painful existential questions, so I started trying to turn them on to drugs and crime instead.
This comic jokes about what a student could potentially create if they were working at their full potential. Instead of something like a better essay or a better science fair project, this student creates a 6 legged car destroying, helicopter shooting monster robot.
The moral of the comic is for students to not live up to their potential, because the teachers instead of complaining that the student is not living up to their potential, will complain a lot more and louder if your potential is creating a giant robot that causes havoc.
The Cloud
by Jeff
Image text: There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord.
This comic is a reference to all of the companies that are rolling out "cloud" services like Google's and Amazon's music service and Apple's aptly named iCloud music service that will be announced this week.
Also, in this comic is a reference to caching and a Roomba. Caching is the way that remote sites would locally store data from the "The Cloud" to prevent from putting too much pressure on Black Hat's non-Enterprise class cable modem. The Roomba is a round vacuum that runs automatically around the house. The Roomba begins to learn the dimensions of rooms, however, apparently it has never learned not to run over the cord.
This comic makes me think of the British sitcom "The IT Crowd" in which they showcase a box that they make the rest of their non-Tech coworkers believe is "The Internet".
Nanobots
by Jeff
Image text: I think the IETF hit the right balance with the 128 bits thing. We can fit MAC addresses in a /64 subnet, and the nanobots will only be able to devour half the planet.
So, in this comic, the two characters are in orbit in space while evil nanobots are devouring the earth in a swarm. The nanobots stop after devouring 40% of the planet. This is a take on the "gray goo" scenario in which self-replicating nanobots destroy the earth while creating more and more of themselves non-stop.
However, the nanobots are only able to destroy 40% of the planet because (psedo math ahead!) 40% of the earth mass = (# of IPv6 addresses) x (A few cubic microns). Without more IP addresses, the nanobots cannot continue to replicate.
This is a joke on the current state of events in which the internet is currently running out of IPv4 addresses. The only difference is that we are on IPv4 and the nanobots are on IPv6.
1998 is when the first IP address registry was opened and IETF is the Internet Engineering Task Force.
iPad
by Mike
Image Text: Maybe we're all gonna die, but we're gonna die in *really cool ways*.
Kind of puts iPads in persepective. Monkeys ARE controlling robot arms. But I'm sure soon there will be an app for that.
FIRST Design
by Jeff
Image text: Pool on the roof must've sprung a leak.
This comic is about a robot competition between two sides. The protagonist's side comes up with a robot that has a match on an extending arm to set off the sprinkler system to disable the opposing robot. Then the protagonists added an umbrella to their robot so that their robot could complete the competition without getting wet.
The image text is the protagonist's flimsy excuse for the reason there is water everywhere.
UPDATE: As Zero Cool and Alexandra said in the comments, the Image text is a reference to the movie, Hackers.
Prudence
by Jeff
Image text: Moments later, the White Witch rolls up and, confused, tries to tempt the probe with a firmware upgrade.
This comic is a reference to the book The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis and later made into a movie. The children in the book are playing "hide and seek" in an unfamiliar house when one child hides in a wardrobe. They then find a entire world known as Narnia behind (or inside) the wardrobe.
The comic is making a play on the Narnia tale, by instead of the child exploring the new world herself, she sends a probe. This is similar and possibly a reference to the probes that NASA deploys to gather information about new worlds. It also may be a reference to Stargate, in which the Stargate Command sends a probe to new worlds to gather information about the world.
EDITED TO ADD: The title appears to be a reference to the fact that the child in the comic does not run blindly into the new world, like in the book, but instead she deploys the probe to gather information first, which would be seen as "prudent".
More Accurate
by Jeff
Image text: We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.
This is a comic referencing the Terminator series , in which a super-intelligent machine from the future time travels back in time to kill Sarah Connor.
However, we currently have robots that are able to attack specific locations and targets. Originally, unmanned aerial vehicles were only used for surveillance and reconnaissance. But, now more than ever, they are used for attacks. One thing that keeps us short of a Terminator scenario is that most of the unmanned aerial vehicles are either pre-programmed or flown remotely by members of the military. Still, the image text is correct, the future is here.