Cyberintelligence
Cyberintelligence
[Ponytail, pointing at a chart to her left, with text and two curves on a graph, is talking to someone off-screen to the right.] Ponytail: Our overall FY2015 cyberintelligence budget was $8.1 billion- Off-screen voice: -Yet it wasn't enough to pick up on the fact that no one else has used the prefix "cyber-" for like a decade? Ponytail: Shut up.

Ponytail presents a FY2015 ( Fiscal Year for 2015) budget for cyberintelligence , but is then interrupted with a snide remark about the prefix cyber .  Although it is not specified what organization the budget is for, the size of the budget ($8.1 Billion) is large enough to suggest that it must be a large government organization such as the United States Department of Defense.
This comic illustrates that some organization spends obscene amounts of money on their "cyberintelligence" budget, yet all that spending appears not to have informed them that the prefix "cyber-" fell out of fashion years ago. That the prefix could annoy experts were already used in the title text of 1084: Server Problem .
The prefix "cyber" is derived from " Cybernetic ," which comes from the Greek word κυβερνητικός , meaning skilled in steering or governing. Cyberintelligence could also be called cyber spying i.e. spying in the digital world, one of many "new" words with the cyber- prefix . Many were invented in the 1980s and 1990s, following the example of " cyberspace ", popularized by William Gibson in 1982.
If cyberintelligence departments were given names today, they might be called Internet Intelligence, Virtual Intelligence, Data Intelligence or Online Intelligence departments.
This may be due to the fact that government organizations are typically named by middle-aged or senior officials who are generally less likely to be familiar with the current trends in technology language. They are more likely to stick to the words that were used when they first learned about the technology. Such organizations, being bureaucracies, are also unlikely to change their name.
The title text continues the joke by implying the organization learned about the demise of "cyber-" yet failed to process or analyze that data. It is a common problem among intelligence organizations to gather "raw information" (such as photos, or reports from spies) but be unable to make use of it because there wasn't time to process the information into intelligence by determining what it means. This is particularly true for intelligence gathered by or relating to computers, as they can generate data far faster than people can review it. It may also be a reference to the previous comic, which was a link to a survey for xkcd readers.
"Cyberspace" and " cybernetics ", illustrated here , are two of the most common words with that prefix (Cyberspace 6 times as prevalent as cybernetics at their peaks). "Cyberintelligence" is shown here . Cyberspace was used 4000 times more often, although the more common spelling splitting it in two words "Cyber intelligence" was 1.35 times more used than in one word. But even combining these two versions cyberspace is still used more than 1700 times as often.
[Ponytail, pointing at a chart to her left, with text and two curves on a graph, is talking to someone off-screen to the right.] Ponytail: Our overall FY2015 cyberintelligence budget was $8.1 billion- Off-screen voice: -Yet it wasn't enough to pick up on the fact that no one else has used the prefix "cyber-" for like a decade? Ponytail: Shut up.
