Posts by Destroy All Monsters
5341 posts • joined Tuesday 3rd June 2008 16:11 GMT
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Re: 'Phone battery spark is an urban myth?
It is as impossible to ignite fuel with a mobile as it is to cook an egg. Yet another case of the "fear new technology" mindset. Static electricity from your pullover is a larger danger.
Around here, mobiles were forbidden on public transports (i.e. bus lines) in the early noughties because of "interference". Some drivers had experienced sudden unexplained revving ... turns out the real reason was yoofs opening the maintenance hatch in the back of the bus and playing around with the engine. Yup, must be those devilish mobiles.
Re: An interesting example that doesn't involve aviation
It is not verboten to use mobiles in the server room (or is it?)
Why should medical devices be more vulnerable to radio signals in the usual mobile bands?
Re: Interference vs. Distraction
Tests have been run.
I remember some test with a laptop which radiated quite heavily at the processor's frequency. IIRC there were interesting hot spots in the plane's tube (like in a microwave oven) and some interference with on-board electronics, but I can't remember whether that was considered a minor problem or not.
Re: What a dumb fuck
> it's to do with having passengers not being distracted (or distracting others) during the critical phases of flight.
We are talking about civilians here.
You know, the guys who are not exactly trained to get out of a tinfoil cylinder of death which is either doomed or doing a bellyglide over concrete at not unconsiderable speed.
Some of which may be under sedation, sleepy, sick, on ethanol...
Concentrate away! May the Force be with you.
Re: @Henry Wertz 1
> Boredom. The worst of all human diseases.
It is bring the boxcutter out in you!
> fairy dust
Don't most people think that way today? Interest in understanding how things are designed, produced or maintained is low. It's down there with proudly advertised ignorance about politics and economics ("too complicated for me, LOL"). Replaced by greenery, "social-mindedness" and proud marveling at the new gadget one bought on credit.
A sign posted on the bridge reads, "Stop! Pay troll!"
> Looks up, sees a ceiling instead of a bridge, nope - I'm not trolling! :)
I think the troll should be ON the bridge, blocking it. Not underneath.
Thanks, that makes sense.
Right.
> 157 Billion dollars is one quarter of their company value
That value is not the "company value". It is a hypothetical number with no basis in reality generated by overheated speculative fever - aka "a bubble" - due to people having too much cash. In other words, people just buy at that price because they hope to sell the day after for some profit. This is only gonna get worse, as Quantitative Easing 4 has now been given the go-ahead.
Re: Don't expect real news when reading The Register
If there needs to be "reasonable explanations" for a quiet, uneventful launch day at the Apple Stores, something sure is not quite right.
Re: 5 days?
But then why was the US "nuke-a-moon" program cancelled? And was Smoking Man involved in any way, kind or shape?
> Apple is taking an increasingly hard line against bulk purchasers in an effort to keep a lid on the grey market for hardware.
I thought they actually wanted to sell their stuff?
DAT URL!
...."nasa_explains_curioisty_self_portraits"
Yes
> Users who linked his app to their Twitter accounts were asked to grant the application permission to post updates.
So, they grant the application permission and the application posts?
Why is this considered a "hijacking"?
Re: They can explain why a slinky does its thing...
Re: trolling
Looking forward to a shot of a few plastic figurines of Dzeta Reticulians that Curiosity set up from the contents of a secret backpack.
Re: a waste of NASAs time
If the earth wasn't flat, how could curiosity VISIT THE OTHER SIDE? EXPLAIN THAT!!
9/11 Slinky Truthers will be all over this story!
It is highly suspicious that this slinky does not fall at the speed of gravity! Looking at the movie, it is clear that the slinky could only be collapsed this way by preinstalled tension packages distributed all over the coil. Moreover, professor Crank for the University of Lower Uppsala has found nanothermite particles in the slinky debris, a clear indication that there was fowl play.
One could at least ask the extradition-ready special partners to do redirects.
That would actually be cool.
"iran.gov" could lead directly to the AEI for example.
Posted in Apple loses iPhone patent lawsuit
Re: That call rejection patent...
Welcome to innovation in the 21st century.
It's like a no-go theorem
Public administration, the handling of the government apparatus of coercion and compulsion, must necessarily be formalistic and bureaucratic. No reform can remove the bureaucratic features of the government’s bureaus. It is useless to blame them for their slowness and slackness. It is vain to lament over the fact that the assiduity, carefulness, and painstaking work of the average bureau clerk are, as a rule, below those of the average worker in private business. (There are, after all, many civil servants whose enthusiastic fervor amounts to unselfish sacrifice.) In the absence of an unquestionable yardstick of success and failure it is almost impossible for the vast majority of men to find that incentive to utmost exertion [that] the money calculus of profit-seeking business easily provides. It is of no use to criticize the bureaucrat’s pedantic observance of rigid rules and regulations. Such rules are indispensable if public administration is not to slip out of the hands of the top executives and degenerate into the supremacy of subordinate clerks. These rules are, moreover, the only means of making the law supreme in the conduct of public affairs and of protecting the citizen against despotic arbitrariness.
It is easy for an observer to indict the bureaucratic apparatus for extravagance. But the executive with whom the responsibility for perfect service rests sees the matter from another angle. He does not want to run too high a risk. He prefers to be on the safe side and to be doubly sure.
All such deficiencies are inherent in the performance of services which cannot be checked by money statements of profit and loss. Indeed we would never have recognized that they really are deficiencies if we were not in a position to compare the bureaucratic system with the operation of profit-seeking enterprise. This much-abused system of the “mean” striving for profit made people efficiency conscious and eager for the utmost rationalization. But we cannot help it. We must put up with the fact that one cannot apply to a police department or to the office of a tax collector the well-tried methods of profit-seeking business.
Ludwig von Mises: Bureaucracy (1944)
Re: Business as usual for HMG IT, then
Nobody knows but by golly, Amazon will be forced to pay for it! Twice!!
Re: Graph fail
Relative differences are expressed in percent.
Posted in Apple loses iPhone patent lawsuit
Re: Let me get this right
> empowers
This being the War Of Patent Terror, you have to use the iconic verb "embolden".
Posted in Apple loses iPhone patent lawsuit
Re: Obvious?
Unfortunately, it's currently tending to the deep wounds and irreparable injury (probably a kidney lost in a backalley organ heist) of MobileMedia Ideas.
I sure hope people are paying their taxes.
Because otherwise the trough would be half-empty.
Posted in Australian State launches IBM probe
I sure hope IBM paid all their taxes and didn't play with any tax optimization schemes...
Oh yeah, he also emptied the White House of the taxpayer-provided decorations when he left including some stuff that was hanging around there for quite a few decades time. And IIRC, the window curtains. Just sayin'
Quand c'est foutu, c'est foutu!
And then....
"Some would say Clinton got his second term and budget surplus because of the dot-com boom, so maybe he should be Bubba Dot-Com. It has been almost 20 years since Clinton was first inaugurated, and Clinton said it was hard to believe it has been that long."
Yeah. Here's something that was written in January 2001. It still applies to January 2013. It's hard to believe it has been that long.
Clinton's legacy, January 2001
White House insiders have said for years that Bill Clinton has been desperately seeking a legacy for his administration – other than having been impeached and having disgraced himself and his office. At long last, he has at least two of them.
The first of these is the coming recession, his first gift to the incoming administration of George W. Bush. Like the invasion of Somalia that Dubya’s father had handed Clinton upon taking office, this is surely going to cause some heartburn for the new president, even if it provides a strong rationale to pass the tax cuts on which he campaigned.
Clinton’s second legacy will be soaring prices for oil and electricity. All during his presidency, he and his underlings conducted what amounted to a jihad against energy producers, along with owners of other natural resources. A soft economy in Asia mitigated some of the inevitable price increases, but reality finally came to bite Clinton and company this year with a vengeance. It will be up to Bush to follow more sound policies, although the same groups that supported Clinton’s anti-energy policies will hog the media spotlight if the new president follows economically-sound policies....
No such luck with Dubya of course, but let's stay on track....
Dependence upon the Keynesian paradigm keeps Business Week and its allies from understanding the nature of the current business slump. The current high-tech morass is not due to any lack of aggregate demand or quirks in the tax code. Instead, we are seeing once again the classic business cycle as first outlined by Ludwig von Mises in 1912 and again by Mises, F.A. Hayek, and Murray Rothbard in later works. This seeming cluster of entrepreneurial errors has come about because Greenspan and the Fed shoved billions of dollars of new money into the economy, triggering malinvestments that now must be liquidated. Any scheme – monetary or fiscal – by the government to reverse this current trend will only make matters worse.
Furthermore, new money does not arrive by helicopter or a Brinks truck at your door. New money comes into the economy through the banking system, as banks lend their excess reserves within the fractional-reserve pyramid. Such actions are accomplished through the Fed’s massive purchases of government bonds in its open market operations, as well as the lowering of the Fed’s key lending rate by fiat.
For much of the second term of Bill Clinton’s administration – and especially during the Monica Lewinsky scandal – the Fed, under Greenspans’s aggressive leadership, pumped new reserves into the system, with much of the lending going into capital markets. Furthermore, the Fed’s lowering of interest rates encouraged venture capitalists to pour their investments into the Internet startups.
At first, the scheme seemed to work. The infusion of new money into the high technology sector soon translated into a stock market boom, which increased both the Dow Jones and NASDAQ indices by huge amounts. Soon after came the parade of "Dot Com" multi-millionaires who saw the value of the stocks they owned zoom to unbelievable levels.
However, as Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek would have noted, the pattern of new investment did not fit the pattern of consumer spending. While the advertisements for some of these new startups made a big splash during the Super Bowl last January, they didn’t translate into consumer demand for their products and services. By the late summer and early fall, many of the once-hot Internet stocks had plunged to near-penny stock levels. The Austrian Business Cycle theory, ignored by academe and the political classes, had once again proven true.
Self-serving politicians and their self-serving retconning
Woah, let's just immediately hit the buffers here. Ex-President Clinton should slink back to where he came from. While arguably fighting rearguard actions against retarded conservatives out for blood, he gave us Clipper Chip Proposals and an endless stream of Big Brother Productions, laying the groundwork for the 21st century perversions of Bush/Obama, he bombed Yougoslavia for no good reason, wrecked Iraq for no good reason, gave us no progress in the Middle East, exploded with philandering extravaganzas onto TV, revved the "dot com" bubble (the latter by ordering up some easy money from the serial mumble Greenspan so as to look good politically) and I don't know what else.
Ok, back to basics. What do I hear?
"If you are interested in particle physics, earlier this year, finally at the CERN superconducting supercollider – which I tried to build in Texas, by the way and you may remember your former senior Senator, Lloyd Bentsen, who became my first Treasury Secretary, came to me and said we were trying to make a budget deal back in 1993. And he said, 'We can't get the votes unless we give up the supercollider.'"
Ok, here's the actual story...
From "The Decline and Fall of the SSC" by John G. Cramer -- Alternate View Column AV-84
"It is common wisdom in Washington, D.C., that it is dangerous for a large project to span more than one Administration. Bush was defeated by Clinton in 1992, and the SSC project came to violate this rule and suffer the consequences. In 1993 the incoming Clinton Administration made a budget-tightening decision to stretch out the SSC project, moving its date of completion from 1999 to 2003, increasing the overall cost of the project while reducing its yearly cost. The SSC cost rose to over $10 billion, a 16% cost increase. The budget-conscious freshman Congressmen swept in with with Clinton in November of 1992 felt no responsibility for the decisions of their predecessors, and the SSC project became a tempting target of opportunity. Clinton's new Science Advisor John Gibbons did not give active support to the SSC project, as had his predecessor, Alan Bromley, and Clinton's new Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, now famous for her million dollar travel excursions, proclaimed during her confirmation hearings that she was "not passionate" about the SSC. In September, 1993 when her passions were finally aroused, she took the counter-productive steps of re-shuffling major SSC contractors and increasing the already bloated oversight team to 140 bureaucrats in the Dallas DOE Office. Before the two critical votes in June and October, neither Clinton nor Gore was willing to make personal appeals to House Members on behalf of the SSC, as Bush had in 1992. The final blow to the SSC came late in 1993 when the DOE's Baseline Validation Report was released. The validation group surveyed the sorry history of SSC cost escalations and concluded that extreme conservatism was needed. Their report advocated much larger safety and contingency margins and moved the completion date back to 2004, increasing the project cost to $11.5 billion or another 15% increase. With this, rank-and-file members of Congress had had enough. They were fed up with the ever-rising SSC price tag, the evidence of poor management and DOE indecisiveness, and the heavy-handed attempts by Congressional Leadership to save the project. On October 27, 1993, by a vote of 283 to 143 the House rejected the Conference Committee report that would have continued SSC funding. The project was officially dead."
Posted in Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support
Re: Evil Linux dropping support
Clearly we need Netanyahu for a little pep speech about red lines etc.
"McAfee said he was scrupulous about paying his taxes"
I think this tax thing is fast becoming the new-age "are you or have you ever been a communist" thing, and maybe an "is your pedigree provably aryan" thing.
Re: Microsoft is the SAURON or Critical Vulnerabilities
I think it's only half bad, you AC downvoters should be ashamed of yourself.
As if!
We are being set up for an alien takeover.
Second secret trip to orbit, huh? They are probably transporting the abject surrender declarations of a sizeable chunk of the US inner circle to a rendezvous point with the alien mothership, beautifully signed and tastefully enhanced with a folded US flag. Didn't Krugman say that this would be happening soon and that we should be looking forward to it? Meanwhile the ITU is busy taking over the Internet. Coincidence? I think not.
Enjoy dying due to lack of dentistry. Or food.
> Having been out to some of these cultures I would love to live a different life in a mud hut without all the western technologies. Many of the people in these cultures look at the way we live with pity.
Bizarre that I get all these funding calls to pump money in the direction of people obviously dying on their arse, the way mother nature intended.
Re: Nice
You didn't think of it first because you didn't need to think about it.
But yeah, cuckoo clock + LED == excellent idea.
Posted in Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support
Re: The joys of open software
> So there's a little lesson.
RICHTO, stop posting as an anonymous coward.
Posted in Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support
Re: Sad day
The more so as embedded devices should really move to more modern CPUs than 386
Re: Er
> Do you think that the chance of winning a $3 million prize is not going to have an distorting effect on the progress of physics theory?
No.
Re: Games additication
Women... bitches don't know about my perfect game score!
Re: Dig at open source
Wild downvotes appear! Do you choose to fight or run away!
Re: Hmm...
> we effectively pay them to do it by covering part of the cost of their workers labour, rather than have them pay a living wage.
Why not nationalize them? Then you could have a Queen's Book Distribution Service. Pay the poor exploited underclass good, serious wages with money fresh off the press gracefully granted by Her Majesty's Exchequer.
Re: All Microsoft Training revenue goes to Luxembourg too...
Because of the 15% VAT? Which is still 15% too high of course.
Not a surprise at all. I hear taxes are being raised in Luxembourg in 2013.
Re: Corporations avoiding tax
> We have to pay extra tax, in effect, to subsidise the corporations.
You have to pay extra tax to pay the state.
Re: The solution is simple
> corporate tax to below Luxemberg
1) It's "Luxembourg"
2) Can you check for me how much the corporate tax is for Luxembourg? I can't remember exactly. I can, however, with 100% assurance tell you that it is not low.
Re: Pensions,
On would hope.
But then exporting money tends to depress the strong pound, so exports become easier.
The strong pound .... of wait ....
"list of shame"
What kind of shame is that, then?
The same one invented by Good Honorable Citizens and People In Power And Need Of Money on which ..err.. "money lenders" were once put?
Re: Gogol would have been proud.
Who names his cat Gogol? Have your read Bilal, perchance?
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