* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Ford to dump Microsoft's 'aggravating' in-car tech for ... BlackBerry?

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How about in your MCU?

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unless there was a "deal"

Mesmerized by Clippy!

SpaceX set to try HOVER LANDING for re-usable rockets on March ISS mission

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Headmaster

Austrian business cycle theory, my dear!

which explains why the stock/property markets keep booming even when the rest of us are skint

That is not that.

These markets are booming because the money is easy (fuelled by newly printed money for bailouts, quantiative easing or to keep interest rates low, pyramiding through the fractional reserve banking system). The rest of us are "skint" because easy money fuels investments in things people do not really want nor need - generally high capital goods like skyscrapers and overpriced housing and cars, buildings full of cloud computing etc, which will lay fallow when the bubble bursts.

The fact that government keeps printing money, keeps people out of work with regulation and generally blows half of tax revenue on warfare (with a very large industrial tree feeding into it) and employs a fat percentage of the (overpaid) workforce at taxpayer's expense does not help at all.

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You need to build additional pylons!

Still waiting for the basic capital infrastructure and materials knowledge.

Hasten slowly.

Make cyberwar a no-no equal to nukes, bio, and chemical attacks, says RSA headman

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Big Brother

A mixed blessing

You know that the first thing that will happen is that someone will heed the cry "cyberwar" and ram his thing into the breach to bring "FREEHDUMS" to other people by basically blowing large swathes of a foreign country to smithereens from on high.

Then the guy will go home and collect the votes.

Meanwhile, the croaking begins.

MtGox has VANISHED. So where have all the Bitcoins gone?

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Re: Were people really stupid enough to use MtGox as a bitcoin wallet

Yes but at least with a bank account if the bank goes bust the first 50K or whatever is covered by the state.

It's not covered by the state, it's covered by everyone through inflation (i.e. a tax). While the people who got rich through fractional reserve banking ... stay rich.

Or it could be that like in Cyprus, your money suddenly is just gone by decree. Works too.

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Re: Only confirms what I have said all along

No, but any metal that doesn't rust away immediately, is not radioactive and overly toxic and is solid at room temperature will do. The rarer, the "more expensive".

This is a pretty old trick and not hard to grasp.

In a Robinson Crusoe + Friday scenario, fish for milliday transaction or coconuts are fine too.

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Re: Disregard that, I Mt. Gox

Who is Gox and why do you mount him?

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Headmaster

The web age has arrived! Fasten your seatbelts!

“transaction malleability”

Fuzzy transactions, then?

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Re: Were people really stupid enough to use MtGox as a bitcoin wallet

You can say the same thing about a bank.

A banking account with a positive amount is just a very risky loan given to the bank...

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Re: Only confirms what I have said all along

Unfortunately, joules are hard to transport, hoard or even exchange.

So it's not money nor currency.

You need a solid commodity for that.

Now, if the LHC produced stable microscopic black holes with charge....

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Trollface

Not worth a Doge Continental!

It's a like honest-to-god fractional banking system!

Even without the "unlimited fiat money via the printing pressdatabase updates and 'free market operations'" territory.

Just add staid marble columns at the entrance.

Samsung and Apple BEWARE: Huawei is coming to eat your lunch

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Re: Pronouciation

Like the german Kaiser did: HU! A! WEI!

LG offers BRAIN-SAVING CANCER-BL... er 'good luck charms'

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Alien

Re: Thoroughly discredited.

MTHR = Mean Time to Heat Ray

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Finally save

and prevents your harmful electromagnetic waves that cause health problems, such as endocrine malfunctioning, reproductive malfunctioning, cataract and brain tumour

As is the local custom, someone mistook microwaves for hard gamma rays.

then the phone you’ve so carefully "cleaned" and to which you'd attached the well "rubbed" sticker would stop working

UNLESS you applied it homeopathically.

'G-WIZ like' object doing 40,000 MPH CRASHES on the MOON

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Re: Wow

Dunno it doesn't work me LOL.

Java or .NET bod in the Midlands? Congrats - you've got a DOUBLE DIGIT payrise

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Trollface

What, me worried??

If I were a central banker...

... I'd be worried now.

You clearly have no idea what central banking is about.

UK citizens to Microsoft: Oi. We WANT ODF as our doc standard

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Facepalm

You want interchangeable documents ... are you a bearded fatwa thrower??

the open source zealots

Am I really reading an article by Orlo?

Prez Obama cyber-guru: Think your data is safe in an EU cloud? The NSA will raid your servers

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Re: Message from US to EU:

1) "You can't do anything against us, lube up"

2) "If you want to do anything against us, deep down it's just about filty lucre anyway, so don't"

That guy sure is a piece of work. A mix of narcisissm, american exceptionalism, belief in the omnipotent state and hypocrisy. And a desire to keep going on the useless talking heads roundabout.

But he's right. There *will* be lubing up. EU behaviour on subjects as diverse as FATCA and Ukraine says so.

Moon flashes Earth after getting pounding from MASSIVE meteorite

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Gimp

Yeah

Big boom on Moon on 9/11...

Surprise meteor over Russia just when everybody is looking at another space rock...

I think someone up there is trolling and I'm not sure what to think about it.

Next a Jupiter's moon will be gone missing.

MIT wants quasars to help put free will to rest

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Trollface

Re: Intriguing.

Yeah it's easier to do the experiments based on what the government's left and right hand are doing.

Fully uncorrelated.

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Because inflation blasted things apart faster than "c" from each other, so currently every observer is getting more and more light from the universe that was thrown out beyond his "event horizon" way back when.

So we are in the middle and already see both ... but they don't see each other yet. Unless the universe is smaller than expected.

Collective SSL FAIL a symptom of software's cultural malaise

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Re: Who is Wun and how do I reach him?

Yep, downvotes.

Shitty developers abound, too. No surprise there.

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Headmaster

Re: No, it's a sign that security & encryption is hard

1) This is not a tiny mistake. It is tiny only in the sense of how delivering the wrong container is an off-by-one error because the serial numbers were nearly the same.

2) This has NOTHING to do with security & encryption. If you have this kind of problem in your radiation therapy machine, you have Therac-25 and dead people.

3) "It's also the hardest to test, because the testers in your company won't be motivated". You are doing your "testing by the gorilla regiment" wrong

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Re: Cultural malaise?

Add to this "he's cheap, so he's good enough on this team" and "we don't have time to do it right".

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Headmaster

Who is Wun and how do I reach him?

Which means it's a case of shitty tools - in this case, the language.

There is a reason for why high-assurance code only may use a subset of C.

Netflix coughs up to cruise on Comcast

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Paris Hilton

What's wrong now?

> Why is it legal?

Why should it be illegal? Are you being forced to do Netflix??

> If anything, its the ISPs who owe to the Netflixes.

That would mean subscriptions go up. Cue ISP customer butthurt and moaning.

> This does not look like capitalism at all.

Why not?

G20 gives Google, Microsoft, Apple et al tax deadline

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Trollface

Those pigs are flying under the radar at breakneck speed.

“engage with, and support low-income and developing countries so that they benefit from our work on tax.”

Yeah, right. We will be totally forgetting about mercantilism, trade blocks, punitive import taxes and generally about f*cking brown people up their wazoo because we need to pull in the goods all of a sudden ....

A likely story.

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Thumb Down

But... MUH INFRASTRUCTURE!

The last time I checked, I haven't undersigned anything about participating in the "Global War on Stuff", which includes the 5-trillion boondoggle about wrecking Iraq. Did I mention yearly 3 billion pumpout to "the sole democracy in the Middle East"?

"Infrastructure" my ass. If taxes went to "infrastructure" we would have skyhooks by now.

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Facepalm

Yep, these tricks are well known and are totally internally consistent. The people who implement these generally feature arm brassards with wild symbols. General socialistic well-being ensues.

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Big Brother

Who's gonna pay for the ministers' private jets and cars?

The world's top 20 finance ministers have signalled once again that they're sick of their taxes disappearing offshore and have signalled a strong intention to get their cash back.

There is just one little problem: It is not "their" cash (which, however, they take upon themselves to boldy destroy by inflationary actions). Robbers and highwaymen of the lower classes (those with guns in hand) and of the higher classes (those with boys in blue with guns in hand) may lay claim to the contents of your purse, not to mention your actual physical existence, but there are some slight moral problems with that kind of attitude. Which, in our sufficiently "social" welfare-warfare permafail "nation states" are wont to be hushed up or delicately covered by random political noise.

Something rotten stalks the Cloud Kingdom

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Re: Good, gawd/ess Trevor.

"Life isn't a game."

U wot mate?

Intel, Sun vet births fast, inexpensive 3D chip-stacking breakthrough

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It's not this chip.

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Re: EMP

If that is a problem it means you dump most of the energy going into the chip out into the aether.

Hopefully not.

Harvard student thrown off 14,000-core super ... for mining Dogecoin

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Re: Exploiting National Resources for Fun and Profit

Years ago I was in a senior project role at one of our National Laboratories...

Gordon Freeman, is that you?

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Re: A++?

These are the voyages of the USS Dogeprise...

Uni of Maryland hacked: 300,000 SSNs of staff, students, alumni swiped

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Trollface

Re: Actually, yes it can be "Stolen".

my head hurts

Luckily no body orifices emit painful signals. That's the good news.

maybe I'll get my identity back when I sober up?

Sure. "We can remember it for you wholesale".

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Holmes

Re: Stupid

This discussion has been had in the early 90's.

Nothing happened.

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Holmes

Re: Perhaps it's time to think about security?

Pretty sure I have heard that speech back before the "Global Wars On Stuff" and possibly even the delicious Greenspan-fuelled dotcom bubble. Maybe back in President Clingon's times.

Been rummaging in old ASCII texts, have you?

Update your iThings NOW: Apple splats scary SSL snooping bug in iOS

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"accept all certificates, it's the only way, young jedi"

Please explain!

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Devil

if you can't code

In particular, if you can't test.

Or if you "forget" to test.

Google picks five teams to share $6 MEEELLION funding in Lunar X Prize

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Re: 10th prize...

With reality-enhanced Mun!

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Re: @ CmdrX3

Mr Turtle, your nurse is on the phone. It seems your scheduled medication is running late.

Microsoft asks pals to help KILL UK gov's Open Document Format dream

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From Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning ... was the Command Line"

Old words...

I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was released around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better tool than MacWrite, which was its only competition at the time. I wrote a lot of stuff in early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and transferred the contents of all my floppies to my first hard drive, which I acquired around 1987. As new versions of Word came out I faithfully upgraded, reasoning that as a writer it made sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on tools.

Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0 It didn't work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an earlier version of itself. By opening it as a text file, I was able to recover the sequences of letters that made up the text of the document. My words were still there. But the formatting had been run through a log chipper - -the words I'd written were interrupted by spates of empty rectangular boxes and gibberish.

...

Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7 point something) and so the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were responsible for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen the "save as text" option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple telegrams, and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or less crap). Now I was paying the price for that self-indulgence. Technology had moved on and found ways to make my documents look even prettier, and the consequence of it was that all old ugly documents had ceased to exist.

It was--if you'll pardon me for a moment's strange little fantasy--as if I'd gone to stay at some resort, some exquisitely designed and art-directed hotel, placing myself in the hands of past masters of the Sensorial Interface, and had sat down in my room and written a story in ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad, and when I returned from dinner, discovered that the maid had taken my work away and left behind in its place a quill pen and a stack of fine parchment--explaining that the room looked ever so much finer this way, and it was all part of a routine upgrade. But written on these sheets of paper, in flawless penmanship, were long sequences of words chosen at random from the dictionary. Appalling, sure, but I couldn't really lodge a complaint with the management, because by staying at this resort I had given my consent to it. I had surrendered my Morlock credentials and become an Eloi.

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Mushroom

Elimination . Physical elimination.

It's the only way to be sure.

Self-forming liquid metal just like a TERMINATOR emerges from China lab

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Alien

Because our lizard overlords don't care about toupees.

It's a chimpanzee thing. For that, we are on our own.

Hot racks and cool customers: Colocating in the capital

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Thumb Up

Stuff's amazing

Reminds me of all the hours I spent installing kit in cramped racks with little support from the rest of the company. Real muscle stuff. Good times though.

The MTU diesel engine hails from Friedrichshafen, and was built in the old Zeppelin motor factory.

One of those VIIC diesels, I suppose?

Facebook pays $19bn for WhatsApp. Yep. $45 for YOUR phone book

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Thumb Up

Good stuff by Orlowski is actually good.

I recommend that he just stop writing about "Glubal Warming" and "Muh Copyright Theft" for a couple of years of chillout period.

Microsoft claims x86 hypervisor market lead

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Re: Best Hyper-V feature

"and Windows clustering technology is far more widespread and proven"

Where?

Just like Elvis, dead Steve Jobs to appear all over America in 2015

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Trollface

> Interested

> Go to scribd to see this document

> Nothing works

> Click "Allow all scripts on this page temporarily" in NoScript

> Ghostery pops a vein in its forehead because its list of nosy scripts becomes too long

MFW!