* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

VW’s case of NOxious emissions: a tale of SMOKE and MIRRORS?

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Headmaster

Re: Only VW?

hedge funds buy up oil futures thus creating a future shortage which drives up the price

I declare this utter tosh and a confusion of cause and effect. Plus, someone must SELL the oil futures.

textbook on hedging was bloody expensive and you can pay to read all the details for yourself

I'm not going to read any crap by mathematicians with a PhD out for a quick buck. Ever.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Only VW?

How can hedge funds drive oil price? They are hedge funds - they hedge risks. One fart by a Saudi Prince into a sillken handkerchief has more effect on oil price.

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Re: Sir Humphrey

Non-denial denials.

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And then your government, which already gave you around USD 40'000 to pay off while you were awaynot even born yet (it's a "social contract" you see; it says that your future must suck), decides to ream you out with "Quantitative Easing" while you look at the worstalling prices.

Whom can we trust anymore?

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Coat

Re: Bit ranty, any actual facts yet?

I've seen that allegation in El Reg comments, but nowhere else. By whom "are we told" ?

By common sense?

You don't behave like a sweaty guy with a Mackintosh if you can actually perform.

Blighty's GCHQ stashes away 50+ billion records a day on people. Just let that sink in

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Trollface

The right not to be forgotten?

Maybe we should enshrine it as additional "Human RIght".

That would just make it legit, liberals could take to the benches and defend the utter goodness of governmental oversight, "accidents by MP5" could lead to heartfelt expression of "he wanted too much of his right not to be forgotten" etc.

Problem solved!

Once we go full Oswald Mosley/hard left this can be morphed into the "right to be remembered".

'Steve Jobs filmmakers opportunistic? Apple, you've got a factory of children making phones'

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Big Brother

Re: "it's not a great part of our world"

At least 3 fanbois have the anti-capitalistic mentality where jesus phones are extruded whole out of governmental offices and fabianistic planning by sharing, caring bureaucrats ensures success.

Or maybe they just think that Apple and Rapacious Jobs just CANNOT be opportunistic because that would DEMEAN THE CHURCH?

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Holmes

Re: Zero Tolerance?

"As usual?"

These are the same governments that visit death, destruction and ISIS on whole areas of the world for political support by lobbies of foreign undemocratic governments and the self-indulgent illusion of reaching "defenestrator of the freedoms / responsibilizer to protectoratify" hit levels in history books.

Money is not everything!

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Cannae make her do it capt'n! I need more stockmarket energy!

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Headmaster

Re: Looking at the money I am inclined to agree

"than"

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Facepalm

"it's not a great part of our world"

Why is that guy a CEO of anything except his garden shed?

I'm sure non-opportunity-seeking regimes like North Korea will receive him with open arms.

Break from the future: Hold the new stuff and fix the web first

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Gimp

Bring out The Goog. The Goog is in beta!

Indeed it is not so much that the web is moving too fast, but that there has been seemingly no effort whatsoever to fix things that have long been broken

Because it's easy to throw out some stuff "finished" to 55% written by developer monkeys fresh out of school who actually believe writing JavaScript code is different from self-abuse. Slap some "tracking" on it (sourced from Google) to see how people are using it -- easier than thinking hard about how it should work -- then forget about it because the hype cycle demands some new unfinished product be wheeled out by the end of the quarter. This will go on until the next "crash that no-one could have foreseen" flenses the marketplace and things calm down again.

Reg readers: We want to integrate you into our Continuous Lifecycle

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Mushroom

Re: Well...

Are you gonna hold a speech or not?

NASA rover coders at Intel's Wind River biz axed – sources

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Holmes

Hmmm.....

Guess the next version will be written in PHP. Cheaper that way anyway.

Is that Catbert I hear?

Penny wise and pound foolish: Server hoarders are energy wasters

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Holmes

Re: Sooooo... someone, somewhere

Maybe something in the DIY route has fallen under the table? What could it be....

UK in Frenchy cyber love-in to ward off 'information bomb'

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Big Brother

Well, Well it's getting hotter in the "democracies" because the Message Needs Some Control, right?

Ironically, shortly after the New York Times expressed its concern for journalists in early August, the Guardian reported in an article written by William C. Bradford, a recently hired assistant professor in the law department at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The article, entitled “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column,” was published in the National Security Law Journal of George Mason University Law School.

Bradford argued that the U.S. should be more aggressive in attacking Muslims to include attacks which are war crimes under the law of war. But it was his advocacy that the U.S. military attack other “lawful targets” in its war on terrorism, which include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews” that caught the most attention. These civilian areas were all places where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited” exist, according to Bradford.

Furthermore, Bradford wrote, “Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting] scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are – at least in theory – targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism.” In other words, dissenting scholars are unprivileged belligerents and subject to attack, just as journalists are according to the Law of War manual.

Not to defend him but Bradford was articulating the underlying logic of the new Law of War manual’s position that dissenting journalists can be targeted as unprivileged belligerents. This, as stated above, is consistent with oppressive extra-constitutional martial law practices which Chief Prosecutor Mark Martins boasts of as “U.S. domestic common law of war.”

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In modern days "revolutions" are just about tweeting a bit more than usual, then going back to watch TV.

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Facepalm

I can has Continental Balance Of Forces by depoping the countryside?

*We* were on the frontline covering the little surrender monkey's ar$es.

For this style of historical retconning you now get the AMURRICAN BAGDE OF EXCEPTIONALIST KEYBOARDER HONOR!

Long may it stain your shirt.

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Facepalm

This Paul Virilio seems to have been the typical lefty pretend-intellectual.

What an impenetrable utter crap. He's actually pining for more state intervention and control? I hope he's happy and will get a fat drone on his worthless arse.

A fundamental disorientation which completes and perfects the social and financial deregulation whose baleful consequences we already know.

I'm still waiting for "social and financial deregulation" that exists anywhere except in the minds of the Marxist/Leninist and "Progressive" lumières. The drowing man cries for more water!

The BBC's Space: A short history of 21st Century indoor relief

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Windows

I want politicians to have control, because, errr... because!

Here's Bill at The Register in 2002, busting net libertarian mythology with some gusto.

If they want a First Amendment online, or to let some gun-toting nut argue that writing viruses is the online equivalent of carrying a concealed weapon and so counts as a constitutionally protected right then they can go ahead - the rest of us can do things differently. ('Viruses don't trash hard drives - people trash hard drives.')

A cyberspace in which each machine is 'within' a jurisdiction and where actions can be mapped onto physical space will be very different from today's Internet.

In the mapped network we will not have the absolute freedom of speech which cyberlibertarians claim they want, but neither will we get absolute oppression, absolute free market capitalism or even absolute communism. We will instead get compromise, and regional or national variation, just as in the real world.

I can scarcely comprehend how utterly stupid and out-of-touch this now sounds after the Summer of Surveillance and the tendency to fascist-out on just about everything. It's the vision of the "Peace Grid". Well, we are getting it anyway, willy or nilly.

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Thumb Up

Re: The issue with the Beeb..

Epic. But wait, no George Clooney?

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Windows

Re: "digital"

When I was a nipper, "digital" was an adjective for the punishment the village priest meted out on pupils declared unruly according to secret papal standards, using a wooden ruler.

At some point, we got black & white TV....

Ofcom triples licence fees for mobile operators to £200m

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Re: So, like the actual "spectrum" itself...

But the price will "trickle down".

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> did I miss something in Quantum 101

The answer to this question is complex with unit 1.

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Re: "The mobile industry has not previously had to pay market value for access to this spectrum"

You put them on the market, of course and let haggling commence.

This not being the case here....

Gartner backpedals on device market growth prediction

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Devil

Evil Flippy laugh

Did I hear the "dollar appreciating"? I can't hear you behind all the economic problems for kidsdollar and EURO containers.

Mysterious cosmic dustball fires up Milky Way's black hole

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Re: Space-time pedantry

The light-cone of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy has become a lot more active in the last year

Revealed: Why Amazon, Netflix, Tinder, Airbnb and co plunged offline

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Paris Hilton

Re: Different kinds of politics

That's another thread though.

benevolent dictatorship is my form of government of choice

For all 15 minutes of it. Then the Heydriches move in.

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Holmes

Re: Is Control Theory still on the syllabus for ICT qualifications?

it is obvious, that there is no convergence, no global minimum and it is subject to at least one positive feedback loop with a potential tailspin death of the service

I like overheated rhetoric as much as anyone, but most data-processing systems are not amenable to cybernetic analysis. Even in simple analog systems, control engineers have to go through major contortions to get something that behaves predictably.

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Re: Is Control Theory still on the syllabus for ICT qualifications?

Anyone can get the basics really quickly, but I daresay that in these systems here, it is very unclear how to analyze things in terms of feedback loops. This is worse than an electric power circuit. Even finding the relevant loops seems dicey as they may change from day to day. Overprovision or build in features to kill services off in order to regain control and sod the quality of service are two possible options.

Privacy, net neutrality, security, encryption ... Europe tells Obama, US Congress to back off

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Holmes

Re: While we are at it!

Oh, four thumbs down? Are there Amurricans in the forum today? Please excuse my hotheadedness.

Meanwhile....

Tensions between the US and Russia are already at a near-term high in recent weeks, and look to be getting even worse amid new reports from Germany’s ZDF that the US intends to deploy new nuclear weapons to Germany and upgrade its nuclear infrastructure across Europe.

Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the move a “very serious step toward exacerbating tensions on the European continent,” and warned that if the US follows through on these plans Russia would carry out retaliatory countermeasures, adding more ballistic missiles to its exclave of Kaliningrad.

...

The ZDF report came simply out of publicly available US budgetary information, and publicized some deployments the administration clearly did not intend to make a matter of serious discourse. The deployments are likely to also rankle Germany itself, because the deployment of Cold War-era nuclear arms was already highly controversial, and many Germans simply want the weapons of mass destruction removed, not upgraded.

Excellent timing. Carry on.

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While we are at it!

Very well.

Now, I want to bring to the attention of the estimated delegates the suave poodle play exhibited by the EU during the Ukraine ominshambles ...

Holy litigation, Batman! Custom Batmobile cars nixed by copyright

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Holmes

Re: What is it with the reg...

Welcome to the Reg.

If you want aligned talking points, go listen to neocons

Meanwhile:

"In our well-ordered society, protection of private property is essential"

I'll pass on the "well-ordered", but I note that he didn't talk about "Intellectual Property", which, of course, is no property at all even though starving artists and supermoguls alike all pretend it to be so.

NIST's quantum boffins have TELEPORTED stuff over a HUNDRED KILOMETRES

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Re: AFAIK

QM is straight-arse extension of classical probability. No infinites involved as no Quantum Field Theory yet. Bohm didn't get anywhere near QFT as far as I know.

It's been some time, but I remember bohmian interpretation being very much worse, because in disagreement with experiment and/or inconsistent. More here.

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Headmaster

Re: And after

Quantum Physics is so hard, even Quantum Physicists don't understand it!

How very yesterday.

Quantum Picturalism

The quantum mechanical formalism doesn't support our intuition, nor does it elucidate the key concepts that govern the behaviour of the entities that are subject to the laws of quantum physics. The arrays of complex numbers are kin to the arrays of 0s and 1s of the early days of computer programming practice. In this review we present steps towards a diagrammatic `high-level' alternative for the Hilbert space formalism, one which appeals to our intuition. It allows for intuitive reasoning about interacting quantum systems, and trivialises many otherwise involved and tedious computations. It clearly exposes limitations such as the no-cloning theorem, and phenomena such as quantum teleportation. As a logic, it supports `automation'. It allows for a wider variety of underlying theories, and can be easily modified, having the potential to provide the required step-stone towards a deeper conceptual understanding of quantum theory, as well as its unification with other physical theories. Specific applications discussed here are purely diagrammatic proofs of several quantum computational schemes, as well as an analysis of the structural origin of quantum non-locality. The underlying mathematical foundation of this high-level diagrammatic formalism relies on so-called monoidal categories, a product of a fairly recent development in mathematics. These monoidal categories do not only provide a natural foundation for physical theories, but also for proof theory, logic, programming languages, biology, cooking, ... The challenge is to discover the necessary additional pieces of structure that allow us to predict genuine quantum phenomena.

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Re: AFAIK

Please, no pilot wave. Magic unobservable stuff to "explain" straightforward maths/force? Bohm and Lucas: same problem. Failure results.

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Holmes

Re: i though thats what Einstein postulated

No, both are in a linked state ("entangled", geddit?), so if you examine the state on side A, you INSTANTLY KNOW (evidently) what the state side B must be in. The fun is only that the state on either side is undefined (only the common state is defined) until observation on side A or side B actually takes place. The extremely fun thing is that the order of observation can be arbitrarily shuffled by choosing the appropriate relativistic reference frame (A before B, B before A, A simultaneous to B - results must be the same).

It's really very simple. COUGH

Chinese ad firm pwns Android users, creates hijackable global botnet

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Paris Hilton

Artificial Insanity detected in botnet?

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Re: Further threats

Because politicians/reliogiotards/people_minding_your_own_business and "no fun allowed"

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Coat

Re: Conspiracy

... because he has let a disturbance in the Force appear between the US and Israel. These disturbances let in all sorts of transdimensional nastyness: Warp Ghosts, Undead Tentatcular Beings, Antivaxers, Neocons, Presidential Candidates, Keynesians ....

11 MILLION VW cars used Dieselgate cheatware – what the clutch, Volkswagen?

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Re: DMCA

DMCA does not say anything about "trade secrets" though. AFAIK, reverse.engineering is still ok (not sure whether you need to be outside the US today). Of course, you may then fall into a patent trap, rent-seeker minefields are everywhere..

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Re: European testing

Yeah, if Euros say it's "fundamentally different" it's quite likely far far worse. "Policy regarding increase of monetary mass in the EU is FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT from the one applied in the US" etc.

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Re: Sorry but how is this at all funny or appropriate?

DEAR PC PLOD,

THANK YOU FOR BEING OFFENDED ON MY BEHALF!

Reminds me of the protest letters to The Economist about the use of "niggardly".

Meanwhile:

but at a cost of barfing out 40 times the permitted levels of nitrogen oxide

should hopefully be "up to" etc.

These US Presidential contestants can't even secure their websites – what hope for America?

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Childcatcher

Pretty sure aliens beam dumbfuckeration waves onto the Glorious Homeland!

It's only explanation that makes sense, and I don't even need NAVY CSI style image enhancement techniques to come to that conclusion.

Foreign Policy by Intimidation: GOP Candidates Show How It's Done

GOP-think ... has an underlying racist tone to it, with the presumption that those not quite Caucasian foreign people are not really like us, don’t think like us and can be shot or droned on sight when they fail to heed our advice. It’s not about Israel per se or about anything that would make sense to any disinterested observer. It is all about having a “security zone” that is global in reach and preempts the rights of anyone else. It is coupled with superpower hubris driven by an “exceptionalism”-derived unwillingness to treat people who are not Americans with any respect or consideration. Washington reflexively turns potential friends into enemies at every opportunity and perseveres in a foreign policy based on a whole basket of false premises that has been disastrous vis-à-vis any actual United States interests. Unfortunately for the American people the likely alternative to all this blatant and dangerous nonsense is Hillary.

It's 2015 and a text file can hack your Apple Watch. IS THIS THE FUTURE YOU WANTED?

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ron_paul_doom_levels.jpg

Symantec fires staff caught up in rogue Google SSL cert snafu

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Symantec Warhammer 40K?

"Because you rely on us to protect the digital world"

Err... no, actually?

India to cripple its tech sector with proposed encryption crackdown

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Trollface

After nearshoring, farshoring, outshoring, cross-shoring, backshoring....

...cryptoshoring!

CHEAT! Volkswagen chief 'deeply sorry' over diesel emission test dodge

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Re: How many early deaths?

Only in liberal discussion groups.

Just before the "Responsibility to Protect" discussion leads to a vote to bomb some sanddudes.

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> dinosaurs

More like, bacterial mats and algae.

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Trollface

Re: lawsuits on the way, no doubt

I'm guessing that there'll be a bunch of civil lawsuits against VW for this.

Yeah "The performance of my car is too high, I'll sue"

Obama's DoJ seems to think that crimes committed as an executive of a large corporation don't merit prosecution.

In this case it will completely depend on what the UAW thinks about this. Pension payouts endangered? Maybe not. Is VW unionized or not?