* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Amazon snubs FTC: We'll see you in court over kids' in-app cash blowouts

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Re: Great!!!

Socialistic much?

We need to talk about SPEAKERS: Sorry, 'audiophiles', only IT will break the sound barrier

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Re: Hmmm

> a sound with frequencies up to F,

Yeah yeah but that is evidently the sound with a discrete Fourier decomposition, i.e. the one which repeats forever, infinitely often.

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Re: Hmmm

If a sinewave carries no information how is it I can hear it perfectly well?

You brain will filter it out in 5 minutes. That should tell you something.

(Ok, so it carries amplitude, frequency, and arguably phase. But what of it?)

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Did that really happen?

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Holmes

Re: Waaaaaah!!!!!

This article is the aural equivalent of arguing we should all want perfectly nutritionally balance food pellets rather than the vast array of culinary delights we choose to partake of.

I would rather think it argues you can have perfectly good stuff in the digital processing arena for cheap while people with extremely expensive rigs are barely approaching the bronze age, with all the superstition you would expect.

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Trollface

Re: Audiophile?

Audiophile Boffins - We do what must because we can

For the good of all of us

Except the ones who are deaf

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Paris Hilton

Re: ancient technology

Why not replace the tube by a proper digital circuit simulating the tube?

You could even save energy!

Redmond's EMET defense tool disabled by exploit torpedo

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Re: EMET needs to be downloaded and activated for each application?

Thanks, that makes some sense at least.

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Paris Hilton

EMET needs to be downloaded and activated for each application?

Wait, I thought that was part of the OS??

Mystery bidder plunders the whole haul in Silk Road Bitcoin auction

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Trollface

Luxembourg!

(But seriously, why is no-one asking why Luxembourg and Belgium are being positively stuffed with US govnm't obligations at the present time? A far more interesting question.)

Like frozen burgers, 'Bigfoot' DNA samples have a touch of horse

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Joke

The Adventures of Reynard Muldrake and Diana Lesky

Jose Chung: "As for her partner Reinhardt Muldradt - a ticking time-bomb of insanity - his quest into the unknown has so warped his psyche - one shudders to wonder how he can receive any pleasures from life."

Fox Mulder: [Mulder is jerking off to fake bigfoot video]

NIST shows off one-way photon-passing metamaterial

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Holmes

Useful!

For covering sniper scopes and the windscreens of ultra-expensive all-in-black cars.

PayPal says sorry: Fat fingers froze fundraiser for anti-spy ProtonMail

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Headmaster

I'm glad this has been clarified then

What would have to Abdul's the veggie merchant's kickstarter project under the same circumstances?

Iraq civil war: You can fight with an AK-47 ... or a HOME-COOKED Trojan

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Headmaster

Re: DAM AK-47 are from 1947.

Ah, but these are not EU Glocks. (Why should the EU give out Austrian produce in a US-occupied territory). To cite:

The author of the report from the Government Accountability Office says U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops. The highest previous estimate of unaccounted-for weapons was 14,000, in a report issued last year by the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

But yes, quite certainly these were sold on. This is why Obama's proposal to ship weapons to Syria overtly (and prior to that, one suspects, covertly ship the contents of the armories of late strongman Ghaddafi via CIA express) is not necessarily the best idea. ISIS now has 2 billion cash to spend.

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Headmaster

AK-47 are from 1947.

Today, one uses at least an AK-74, if not an AK-103. Although the AKs that Petraeus lost in the Iraq omnishambles before the surge are labeled as "AK-47", so who knows.

Anyway, these ISIS guys have the chutzpah (ha HA!) of using the technology the use of which would probably merit a righteous cutting off of the hands (possibly at the neck level) when used. Will their heads explode?

REVEALED: The sites blocked by Great Firewall of Iraq

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Headmaster

Re: God is great and Frank Herbert is his prophet.

Come off it, they didn't have a competent government to start with. The deservedly dead Gadaffi

Uh... Ghadaffi (our acceptably-good-guy/bad-guy permamorphist) is starring in another show with Hillary Clinton.

killed about a million in his hobby war with Iran

Well, we delivered the goods and the gas to do it because we didn't like people not liking our bastard the Shah or Iran. Basically, we were for Hitler before we were against him. If there were any justice, big radioactive meteors incubating flesh-eating diseases would strike the "West" any minute now. Luckily, there isn't.

I won't even go into the utterly despicable French/British behaviour post-WWI and Skyes/Pikot, which deserves a separate introduction of the people involved to the Black Box of Pain.

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Headmaster

God is great and Frank Herbert is his prophet.

crisis-hit nation

> 2014

> Calling Iraq a "nation"

It's a bloody stump of a colonial area (sort-of a "country"). It may have a sort-kinda authoritarian state apparatus under under Maliki, but there is no nation anywhere to be seen. The Kurds (under a quasi-mafiosi but lesser-of-two-evil kind of leadership) are giving the finger to the freakshow (AFAIK Turkey has already okayed the move, amazingly). Sunni obscurantists are creating a new region around the Syrian-Iraqi border area - good times for rope dealers. Soon you will see ethnic cleansing fanning out from the Shia sectors and the pre-2007-surge cleaning of Sunni enclaves will be scaled out... Meanwhile car bombs and hellfire missiles are going off everywhere.

No nation here. Nope, sir.

Cambridge Assessment exams CHAOS: Computing students' work may be BINNED

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Trollface

We're obviously happy to have fixed that

YOU HAVE BEEN CAUGHT REG.

DON'T DO IT AGAIN.

AT LEAST NOT BEFORE 14:00.

Overclocking to 5GHz? We put Intel Devil’s Canyon CPU to the test

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Re: a 1/4 of a Kw on a *chip* 66w on *idle*

The days, they are back again!!

Cambridge's tiny superconducting magnet breaks strength record

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Re: Brittle

protecting power semiconductors from short circuits

That would certainly beat the exploding tantal capacitor.

Speed of light slower than we thought? Probably not

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Headmaster

What am I reading?

"His conclusion, in this paper at IOP, is that both Einstein's prediction of the speed of light – 299,792,458 metres per second in a vacuum – is wrong"

1) Einstein didn't "predict" the speed of light. That speed has to be measured. It is always 1.

2) He correctly posited that the most elegant way out of the pretzel-shaped contortions that physicists were making to adapt their theories to the logical implications of electromagnetism and the absence of any experimental sign of an absolute rest system in which light was moving was to go whole hog and posit that the speed of light must be the same in all reference systems. Which means that durations and lengths differ between reference systems

3) Quantum mechanics comes in later, whereby you can have "faster than light" events in the small (resolved by changing to antiparticles in other reference frames) and the world-famous "entanglements" (which have nothing to do with any speed at all, except the speed of thought).

SUPER EARTH possibly home to life FOUND in our 'solar backyard'

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Headmaster

Re: It might have a habitable moon?

Wood Terrorists!

MIT and CERN's secure webmail plan stumped by PayPal freeze

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Big Brother

Re: ...and now...

No one can, in reality, pay for anything without Uncle Sam says OK.

And with FATCA now in effect, no-one can get his savings from underneath his nose (and savings have been, to all intent and purposes, outlawed via negative interest rates).

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Headmaster

No they don't

1) PayPal is not a bank; it is an outfit that lives from people transferring money through them

2) They are not the International Organization Against Crypto And Other Terrorist Tools either

3) PayPal board members should be handed over to ISIS for a quick interrogation about their deep knowledge of the koranic verses for this.

Microsoft's anti-malware crusade knackers '4 MILLION' No-IP users

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99% of all malware-spewing computers use IPv4 adresses!

ICANN ordered to hand them all over!

BT at last coughs to 'major outage' after broadband went titsup across UK on Sat

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Re: A human right - or no hope for mankind?

If you are paying for it, it is a service.

"Positive rights" are an idea that sprung from festering progressive minds.

There aren't any in a world not based on pony lore.

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Re: Wasn't a DNS issue...

It went all white?

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Re: "I KNOW HOW THE INTERNET WORKS"

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry!"

London teen charged over Spamhaus mega-DDoS attacks

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Re: He's a teenager.

He will be activating botnets before lunchtime.

(Or launch nuclear missiles by whistling DTMF codes over the phone-cal--to-his-lawyer like Kevin Mitnick did.)

Hey, Marissa Mayer: Flexi working time is now LAW in UK. Yahoo!

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Re: So you can now legally ask for flexitime?

It's called angling for the votes.

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Facepalm

"Modern businesses know that flexible working boosts productivity and staff morale, and helps them keep their top talent so that they can grow"

...so we need to force them to do it.

I think a found a piece of good old Aristolean logic behind the sofa. Maybe it can be useful in parliament?

Microsoft to shutter security email feed on July 1

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Re: Interesting, but...

Got this from QNX

Facebook 'manipulated' 700k users' feelings in secret experiment

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Headmaster

Loopholes, leechers, terrorists and hoarders! And speculators. Gouging our freedoms.

"creepy experiment"

0% creepy, rilly. You get more emotional response manglement whenever a politician or a spokesperson appears on the tube and uses newspeak to whip up a frenzy. Extra buffer stuffing when it's an economist working for our top clown court.

NASA's Curiosity rover brought Earth BUG to Mars

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Holmes

Re: All software has flaws

You seem to have a pretty firm grasp of the obvious.

Have you managed to light your cave-illuminating fire yet?

New MH370 search zone picked using just seven satellite 'handshakes'

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Re: @Crazy Ops

> knew full well what they were shooting down

No they didn't. It reasonably looked like a US interloper to them.

The point is that the shootdown couldn't be hushed up for long.

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Headmaster

Re: Ughh... bad news

The Malay and/or Vietnamese en route traffic controllers were not up to European standards. The major flight path deviation/alteration on the radar scopes

There weren't any because the plane went off primary radar, then the transponder went suspiciously at the time handover to VIetnam would be happening.

went unnoticed for an unknown period of time

17 minutes before Vietnam asked Malaysia whether there shouldn't be a plane or something, an interval described as "peculiarly long" by I-don't know who.

during which the aircraft's IFF or whatever it's called now had been turned off.

See above. It's called a transponder.

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Thumb Up

Re: worth a watch

Still a bit dramatic with emotionally correct voiceover, but a good résumé. Also, fuck hell, the tools around us are Jetson-style amazing but one never even notices them anymore.

The idea of the electronics rebooting after the plane begins to roll post flame-out, giving the engine a last squall of fuel is probably not needed: the plane has an emergency ram air turbine for electricity generation.

Compare with ABC's "Researchers now have new theory about where the plane went: It might have descended in a spiral before hitting the water, OMG!"

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Actually, an oxygen-starved pilot or passenger with Flight Simulator experience giving instruction to the robot in ways that make no objective sense would fit the bill. Like Tintin in the moon rocket.

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Re: Wingnut central.

No-one has yet suggested that it was the ghost of Amelia Earhardt riding on the wing, leading the plane to its death! I am the first!!

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Re: What about those black-box locator pings?

News just in: things don't always perform to specification.

Protip: This is not the realm of Microsoft-level consumer-grade shit.

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Re: @Crazy Ops

China shot the plane down

Fighter pilots are not the brightest sparks. Everybody would know about that kind of event (even in the 80s, it was quickly evident what happened to KAL007). Kerry would be shuttling all over the planing, handing out warnings and admonitions like they were going out of fashion.

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On page 38:

Radar data showed that after take-off MH370 tracked in accordance with its flight-planned route to waypoint IGARI and then turned right towards waypoint BITOD. Secondary radar data was lost shortly afterwards. Primary radar data then showed that MH370 deviated from its flight-planned route. Primary radar data showed that the aircraft tracked along the Malacca Strait. During this time the aircraft passed close to waypoints VAMPI, MEKAR, NILAM and possibly IGOGU along a section of airway N571.

So possibly following a set of waypoints picked from the standard waypoint database (but why)?

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Holmes

And what would it do in Turkmenistan?

Note that these are not the wilde countries of yore, with unfriendly, bearded and fierce people on horseback shouting at whiteners in guttural voices. You can now place mobile calls to airports and ask for whether there is a plane too many on the tarmac, thank you very much.

Power BI: Office 365 just got more intelligent

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Sounds interesting, but as usual you must marry the rest of Microsoft ecosystem. Which is an unhealthy thing to do.

Physicist proposes 1,000-foot state-sized walls to stop tornadoes

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> Oklahoma has been plagued with earthquakes since fracking began there.

What?

Amazon offers Blighty's publishing industry 'assisted suicide'

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Paris Hilton

With NYT-editorial levels of truthiness, we boldly go....

Amazon's reported demand to control the right to copy, when it wants, is regarded as the equivalent of coming for your first-born.

Getting the license to print (even with arm-twisting involved) is not "control the right to copy".

Publishers not happy? Then they should get their shit together. Lazy buggers couldn't set up an independent venture if their profit depended on it. And it does.

'Sterile neutrinos' re-ignite 'we found dark-stuff' debate

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Trollface

More from this paper (file under "WTF am I reading?")...

We can divide physicists into two types: Those who believe the world is special and inevitable, and those who believe it is random and accidental.

Steven Weinberg’s correct prediction of the cosmological constant certainly gives the latter camp a strong upper hand. If that latter camp is right it would seem that winning the next Nobel Prize in high energy theoretical physics is equivalent to winning the Lottery. It might well be this is just the way things are. On the other hand, it must be said that much of Physical Mathematics has a predilection for special, sporadic, and exceptional structures. Superconformal field theories and supergravity theories are closely related to magical properties of low-dimensional Clifford algebras, leading to startling connections with platonic solids, triality symmetries, division algebras (including the octonions), exceptional groups, Freudenthal-Tits magic squares, and so on. Moreover, certain conformal field theories have famously been closely related to the sporadic finite simple groups, especially the monster group.

Even if we live in a random world, it cannot be denied that it contains within it some exceptional gems of rare beauty which can only inspire a sense of awe. One could write an extensive essay on the numerous “coincidences” and “accidents” associated with exceptional structures appearing in Physical Mathematics which call for deeper understanding. I cannot forecast what stormy weather our field is destined to endure, but I can confidently forecast abundant moonshine in the years ahead.

Among the most notable recent examples of such structures is the Mathieu Moonshine phenomenon associated with K3 sigma models and mock modular forms. Four years after its discovery it remains largely mysterious, despite very intense efforts of first-rate scientists to find a natural explanation. Indeed, the mystery has only deepened with the extension to umbral moonshine. The state of the art is summarized in [SCGP workshop on Mock Modular Forms, Moonshine, and String Theory]. Here is a fairly concrete question in this general area:

"Is there an algebraic structure on the BPS states (spacetime or worldsheet) of string theory compactifications involving K3 surfaces whose automorphism group is naturally related to (the Mathieu Group) M_24?"

In the heady days after the invention of the heterotic string many of the exceptional “accidents” were adduced as evidence of deeper structure. Some of these “accidents”, such that the relation of surface singularities to Lie groups and the Kodaira classification of elliptic fibrations have been incorporated beautifully into enhanced gauge symmetries in string theory and F-theory compactification. But other “accidents” remain unexplained and unutilized. My favorite question in this class would be:

"Is there a physical interpretation of the fact that the group of 11-dimensional exotic spheres, {Z}_992, is cyclic with order four times the dimension of E8?"

Finally, we might ask whether there are applications of various Moonshine phenomena to laboratory experiments. There are claims that neutron scattering from cobalt niobate detects the first two Perron-Frobenius eigenvalues of the Cartan matrix of E8. If E8 appears, can the Monster be far behind?

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They decay. I don't know what decays are permitted that keep all the quantum numbers invariant though. In the end, you get photons, which is what counts.

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Holmes

Messy? Just simple consequences of inherent simplicity

Via Peter Woit, this gem,

“Physical Mathematics and the Future”

accompanying a lecture at String 2014, cites Dirac:

The steady progress of physics requires for its theoretical formulation a mathematics that gets continually more advanced ... What however was not expected by the scientific workers of the last century (i.e. the 19th) was the particular form that the line of advancement of the mathematics would take, namely, it was expected that the mathematics would get more and more complicated, but would rest on a permanent basis of axioms and definitions, while actually the modern physical developments have required a mathematics that continually shifts its foundations and gets more abstract ... It seems likely that this process of increasing abstraction will continue in the future ...

and Einstein:

Our experience up to date justifies us in feeling sure that in Nature is actualized the ideal of mathematical simplicity. It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them which give us the key to the understanding of the phenomena of Nature. Experience can of course guide us in our choice of serviceable mathematical concepts; it cannot possibly be the source from which they are derived; experience of course remains the sole criterion of the serviceability of a mathematical construction for physics, but the truly creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it to be true that pure thought is competent to comprehend the real, as the ancients dreamed.