* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

KRAKKOOM! SpaceX Falcon supply mission to ISS EXPLODES minutes after launch

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Holmes

Re: lightning? bah.

pretty danged rare

Not at all. Rather regulary:

Lightning regularly strikes airplanes. In fact, as far as anyone knows, the odds are that each airliner in the USA will be hit by lightning once a year. (Obviously some would be hit more than once, some not at all.)

Saw one get hit on the approach once. For some reason this created a weirdly greenish light IIRC.

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Holmes

Try balancing a pencil upright on your fingertip, now imagine trying to do that using thrusters and a pencil the size of a rocket.

1) Create a mathematical model of your system

2) Design, test and tune the cybernetic control mechanism (Thank you, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann etc. etc.)

3) ???

4) Look ma, no hands!

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Re: It was the cabbages, I say!

Try SCE to Aux

Sure thing! You made me google it.

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It was the cabbages, I say!

...and what are those immense tubes on girders around the rocket: Visible here

And NERVA-launch-from-ground when?

Network Solutions' 30-day refund has a catch: It'll keep up to 30%

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Holmes

"share pricing information on their (commodity) product"

So there is a problem with that? In particular, if it is a commodity product, barriers to entry should be low so any "upwardly shared" pricing should be undercut soon-ish.

Robo-car wars: Delphi's near crash, prang, wallop with Google DENIED!

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Re: Fact...

Nothing that front-mounted 0.5 Brownings couldn't actually solve.

Microsoft's curious Sway comes to iPad and iPhone

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Paris Hilton

Re: Clearly you are not optimally leveraging your cloudsourced assets.

you are still thinking outside the box while your competitors are clearly focusing on the corners of the cube

Shouldn't this be the converse? You seem to not have been uptodated with the most recent evolutions in the memetic ecosphere. You better watch out because office remodeling using ageist argumentation happens to people who have been out of the loop for even small amounts of Internet years faster than you will be able to tweet "I'm being rightsized".

Britain beats back Argies over Falklands online land grab

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Damn… That Carvell fella sure sounded like a Russian talking about Crimea…

Sir. I shall ask you to leave. You are upsetting the locals.

OPM data breach: Looking at you, China! National Intelligence head stares out Beijing

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Big Brother

Re: Oh bugger

Well, NATO is trolling hard 100km from Russia's border dropping stuff from B-52, there is heated talk about nuking cities because these cities are all communist dirtbags wanting to "turn back time" and the Pentagon is angling for money to protect All-American Cities against russian cruise missiles (actually not an article from The Onion!). So there is a fat chance that the next amusement ride courtesy of the MIC ("Tankland Europe"?) will be way closer to home this time (but not result in Agent Orange babies this time, so there is that!).

That man told me to stuff a ROLE up my USER ENTRY!

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Gimp

There's a need for inquisition all right!

I tell him I’m none of those things: I am a freelance contractor, which makes me nobody’s boss and nobody’s servant.

Please sit down.

Are you, or have you ever been, an anarchist?

Do you believe in State, your savior?

Microsoft's new mission statement: It's all about doing MAGICAL THINGS

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Mushroom

If the idiots....

...started to use copy-pastable pure text in their "web management interfaces" instead of homegrown bullshit HTML with underlaid images and font-enhanced bling probably meant to appeal to the pointy haired cretins holding the purse strings, it would be a beginning.

Google creates cloud code cache

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Holmes

Re: yeah....

Andrew Orlowski articles can be found on the right -->

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Stop

FUSK NO!

Its Cloud Code Repository – beta now

Gone tomorrow.

Yahoo! displaces Ask in Oracle's Java update crapware parade

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Flame

Re: What!!

"You are now being processed for onboarding to make it easier for you to discover rich and relevant content about products and places" to mix the enticing Yahoo and Twitter experience promises.

This FEMA trailer is departing on ramp 12.

I noticed Yahoo now stoops to mixing actual news from AP wire with "sponsored content" showing money and tits under ludicrous headlines held in the same style, cleverly massaged with geolocation information to appear as "local news". Fraud in the purple palace? Well I never! It's just some slight onboarding!

Apple pulls Civil War games in Confederate flag takedown

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Holmes

Meanwhile, far from the moral panic, in the history books...

The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, by Thomas DiLorenzo

Among the guilty is the foremost of all historians who have written on the topic, James G. Randall. "In chapter after chapter of his 595-page book Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, he [Randall] dutifully describes not mere problems but the destruction of constitutional liberty. He concludes almost every chapter with a string of excuses. . . . The establishment of a dictatorship was not the overthrowing of the Constitution but merely ‘out of keeping with the normal tenor of American law.’ Nor were thousands of arbitrary arrests an example of tyranny but only ‘unfortunate,’ and made, after all, with ‘the best of motives’ " (p. 160).

Incredibly, the same pattern recurs among Lincoln’s partisans when they describe the gross violations of international law committed, with Lincoln’s entire approval, by Generals Sherman, Sheridan, Butler, and many others. After his bombardment of Atlanta, "Sherman’s army went on its usual binge of looting and burning. . . . It has been estimated that more than 90 percent of the city was demolished" (p. 186). As if this were not enough, Sherman expelled the remaining civilian residents from the city. Nevertheless, Mark Grimsley, a leading military historian, "downplays the suffering of the citizens of Atlanta by saying that ‘only’ a few thousand of them were evicted from their homes" (p. 187). In the face of Sherman’s march to the sea and Sheridan’s burning of the Shenandoah Valley, Mark Neely writes that "Sherman and his ‘fellow generals waged war the same way most Victorian gentlemen did, and other Victorian gentlemen in the world knew it.’ Total war, according to Neely, was just not Sherman’s cup of tea" (p. 198).

To attack Sherman and his cohorts is fortunately not very controversial, even in these times of abject Lincoln worship; but to state the obvious clearly is no small virtue. Professor DiLorenzo undertakes a much more difficult task, though, in his treatment of Reconstruction. Here he undermines completely the arguments of the dominant approach to this period among contemporary American historians.

As the US realises it's been PWNED, when will OPM heads roll?

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Trollface

I just realized....

Hollywood will never again be able to sell a "hard hack on the Feds done by überskilled nerd" story with a straight face.

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Trollface

Re: Katherine Archuleta is lying to Congress!

Isn't there a Union Problem with this plan?

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Windows

The claim that the Snowden files had been cracked by Russia is a ridiculous lie.

Also seems to have sunk without a trace again after this blatant trial balloon failed to take over the Sphere of Discourse with a 24/7 Emmanuel Goldstein hatefest.

Makes you wonder what is actually true in the Ukraine story and the concomitant East-West escalation, doesn't it?

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Windows

Re: finger pointing @ Where not exists

I know the majority of readers on this site are blindly Pro-Obama but it is time to start holding him accountable.

Oh come on. We might see one or two Obamites from time to time but, hey ...

Whoops, there goes my data! Hold onto your privates in the Dropbox era

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Holmes

Re: Answers on a post card please

Francis, is that you?

Get your WELLIES to MARS: Red Planet reveals its FROZEN BOTTOM

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Windows

Re: Need boots on Mars...

Unfortunately, Mars doesn't need to be made safe for Israel, so it will be some time until these particular frozen dunes are closely investigated.

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Windows

Mr. NEET, please!

Also, sandtrout when?

Login creds for US agencies found scrawled on the web's toilet walls

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Paris Hilton

It's ok Gaius, just set the password to "permanenthardon", nobody will care...

So why is El Reg punting RoTM-themed stories underneath the article?

Something we should know?

(And why do ancient icons reappear from time to time?)

Killer ChAraCter HOSES almost all versions of Reader, Windows

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Thumb Up

His Kung-Fu is the best

It's like getting owned by Hacky Chan!

GCHQ: Security software? We'll soon see about THAT

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Trollface

Notably, US-based vendors McAfee and Symantec and Britain's own Sophos are nowhere to be seen.

Any idea why....

Spiceworks in WTF-class social log-in SECURITY BLUNDER

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Facepalm

Next: Sign in with Baidu.

This whopping 16-bit computer processor is being built by hand, transistor by transistor

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Re: Really?

One of the nastier side-effects of having enough capital infrastructure to escape subsistence farming.

In the old times, one would take to the Mayflower in protest and sail west.

Polish airline LOT was grounded after 'IT attack' took hold

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Trollface

Exponentially?

So scarestories are NP-complete?

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Coat

Re: I feel a pun coming on...

Security is not exactly in pole position

Anakin Skywalker chased by cops, crashes podracer into tree

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Windows

16 years ago?

Wait, what?

Facebook SSD failure study pinpoints mid-life burnout rate trough

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Paris Hilton

The first diagram seems to indicate that about 20% of the drives of any manufacturer have high error rates (the rightmost part of the cumulative function).

The second diagram I don't understand. Shouldn't there be "time" on the x axis?

US is the world's botnet mothership, says Level 3

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Windows

I want to go back to the "phear the two Kevins!" era. It was sweet.

Unusual communications to these countries should be automatic red flags for IT and security organisations.

.... there is no need to involve China into this!

MOUNTAIN of unsold retail PCs piling up in Blighty: Situation 'serious'

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Re: sales slowing as customers hold out for Windows 10 systems?

austerity bites

The what now?

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Devil

Re: The channel is talking itself into a panic - Stop it!

Greece is about to fall over heralding a new global recession.

I hear China has money. Pretty sure they will like all the little islands.

Supermarket tweet: Twitter ankles balloon in product, places shopping frenzy

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Pint

Re: They REALLY said that? With a straight face?

I, for one, welcome discovering rich and relevant content about products and places on a more daily basis!

Assange™ celebrates third year in Ecuadorian embassy broom closet

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Thumb Up

Meanwhile, on a website on the Internet: Royal Wahabbi Gonads Exposed (maybe)

The Saudi Cables: Over half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry

Maybe it will at least cause Mr. Hope & Change to stop playing Al Qaeda's Air Force in Yemen (I suppose to buy Saudi assent to pump the oil like crazy to keep prices down to punish Putin for "eastern aggression" which contrary to US "southern aggression" is totally not okay; loss of face over Syria may be involved too. The dark-skinned listening one is very thin-skinned.)

E3 2015 in a nutshell: Hurry up Hoth, and plenty to Unravel

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Gimp

Re: Bethesda uses paid actors

I am shocked, SHOCKED to see that there is astroturfing going on on these premises!

Also

> Mirror's Edge

> On a console

Sorry, I am not differently abled. When will the PC version come out?

MS privacy policy website subverted to pimp gambling sites

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Could have been worse. Could have been SharePoint.

Twitter joins Skynet arms race with terrifying acquisition of Whetlab

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Trollface

Not ANOTHER machine learning startup.

Since "Machine Learning in Action" has come out, all the algorithms from the 80s clearly are getting the startup treatment.

It's just statistics, really. Ok, we now have the data generated by armies of tweeting high-schoolers.

Banking trojan besieges Bundestag … for the second time

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Holmes

Re: Actually

Surely, any decent web filtering product worth its salt would probably identify the destination as a malicious site?

Certainly, our new medium has been trained in badness detection by Tibetan Monks while living 10 grueling years in a Himalayan Hermitage being trained in chinese sword arts. We have isolated a few milligrams of Medium-Chloridians extracted from his blood and put them onto this add-on card. Just schlomp it into an open slot...

Downing Street secretly deletes emails to avoid exposure to FOIeurs

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Pint

Now the Final Solution can be applied.

"[This system] means that people don’t remember things"

A bad case that can only be solved by a forced visit to the Fletcher Memorial Home. It's sad, but a government can't be run with these levels of Alzheimer. It's all for the best, really.

For fax's sake: Medic chaos as e-Referrals system goes offline

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Holmes

Hmm... socialized and centralized healthcare

Permanent trainwrecks we can believe in!

Amazingly I have never had my plumber refer me to my glazer (though even so both are under the privacy-and-trust-eroding regime of "VAT" taxation). How is that?

Trans-Pacific Partnership stalled says Australian trade minister

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Big Brother

TTIP apparently would also force the EU to crack down on European groups participating in the growing movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel ". I am not sure how support for Israel comes in (oh wait, I DO know) and how that would square with human rights laws but state-mandated forced consumption contrary to your wishes would be the least of the spectacular inventions of the modern age.

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Big Brother

Re: Unwarranteed Optimism

Correct. But even a politicking and warmongering psychotic tart may be right for all the wrong reasons.

Stratosphere protects WASP's hot body, say boffins

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Paris Hilton

White anglo-saxon protestants are not noted for being particulary hot.

Cortana threatens to blow away ESC key

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Even Matrix Neo knows how to use the ESC key in case strange crap appears on a suspiciously black screen.

'Snowden risked lives' fearfest story prompts sceptical sneers

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Re: Snowden is an arse clown

Matt please, stop arsing around as AC.

crimes against society

"My society right or wrong?" Doesn't matter anyway, how's your Chinese course coming?

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A Brown Trousers Event?

Deutsche Telekom, Huawei: Let's rain on Amazon’s euro cloud together

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Re: What choice in network kit?

Remember that the Bundesnachrichtendienst plays errand boy to the NSA, and the NSA still taps the Merkelphone because they can.

Data secure in Deutschland? Ja aber vielleicht.

Duqu 2.0‬ malware buried into Windows PCs using 'stolen Foxconn certs'

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Paris Hilton

Too fast and too trusty 2.0

have been able to snatch copies of various code-signing certificates

Really, the private key associated to the (the public key embedded in) the certificate, right?

How do you snatch the private key, or alternatively, have your private key certified by e.g. Verisign? A stern discussion at an old factory away from civilization? A powerful operator from Uncle Sam placing a phone call?