* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Splash! Three times as much water as ALL of Earth's oceans found TRAPPED underground

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Paris Hilton

But I read pretty much exactly that about 10 years ago?

Has the paper resurfaced, attached to a liferaft?

Also:

...there may be as much as three times as much water as in all of our oceans combined

Not sure whether that means 9 times as much?

And that representative is gold:

For those of you who can’t watch, Rep. Barton asks Energy Secretary Steven Chu “How did all the oil and gas get to Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean?” As Dr. Chu begins to describe plate tectonics and continental drift, Barton interrupts by asking “Isn’t it obvious that Alaska and the Arctic Ocean were a lot warmer?” As Dr. Chu explains that what is now Alaska actually drifted north over millions of years, Rep. Barton just laughs. And brags about “stumping” Dr. Chu on his YouTube channel.

Amurrica fuck yeah!

Spaceplane design nipper Ariadne gets a promotion

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Re: SPB Boffinry

"An organisational chart looking like a picture of several multicoloured anacondas, mating"

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Re: Sooooo........

malaria charity

Wasn't she voted into the Afghan Parliament?

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Headmaster

Holdy Ony! "Dr."?

Where did that PhD come from? University of Life?

Latest casualties of Iraq fighting: Facebook and Twitter

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Holmes

"See there's always a catch When you're livin' thru a blow back"

Islamist insurgent group ISIS, now in control of much of the country, thanked Allah for social networking.

Allah is Great and so his Zuckerberg. However, ISIS controls " a good part" of an area covering Syria and Iraq. A color-coded map of the utter mess can be found at here.

Le résumé:

But Isis too has its weaknesses: in the past it has isolated itself by its fierce determination to monopolise power, impose fundamentalist Islamic norms and persecute or kill all who differ from it. This enabled the Americans to turn many Sunni against it in 2006 and 2007. So far reports from Mosul suggest it is being much more circumspect, telling government employees to turn up for work and not harassing the population, though this may not last. People in Mosul are wondering who they fear most: Isis or the government. Anger against the latter will grow if it resorts to indiscriminate bombing and shelling of Mosul as it has done in Fallujah.

Suddenly funnelling arms to ISIS tentacles in Syria to liberatify it from Assad doesn't sound like such a good idea anymore. Those "pinprick" aistrikes lately threatened in response (to quite likely engineered) chemical weapon use are probably "off the table", too.

We will now bring you the latest evolutions of Rihanna...

Entirely new trojan quietly wheeled into black hat forums

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Paris Hilton

Re: >"the Windows security registry function CreateProcess API"

Very nice.

I wonder how a downvote occurred? Did someone write a bot to randomly issue downvotes?

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Paris Hilton

The software is modular and pervasive, and unique thanks to its ability to inject itself into all new processes via the Windows security registry function CreateProcess API

I do not understand? Is fork() now considered a black art skill? Has it come to that?

Boffins lay out 'practical requirements' of 'realistic' quantum computer

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Pint

Re: "complex-valued probability distribution"

Of course you can never measure ""the value of the probability distribution".

The only way to plot is to prepare a large number of identical states, take a measurement, and mark the bin into which the measurement falls.

At the end of the day, you count the crosses in the bin, divide by the number of trials and then finagle a continuous function.

Just as in classical physics.

What is a "state space"?

Ok, let's use "sample space" for the individual classical outcomes. Sample space is just the possible values of the measurement with a funny notation:

For one qbit: |0> , |1>

For two qbit: |00>, |10> , |01> , |11> (the space gets larger quick - as 2^N)

For three qbit: |000>, |001>, |010>, |011>, |100> etc...

Now assign a complex-valued probability to each element of the sample space, under the constraint that the complex-valued vector of dimension 2^N has unit length (in the two-norm: sum of squared length of the individual components)

This is a straiightforward extension of classical probability, were you only assign real values to each element of the sample space , under the constraint that the real-valued vector of dimension 2^N has unit length (in the one-norm: sum of reals). It seems that this extension is the only one which makes mathematical AND physical sense.

"State space" of your current quantum state is the (Hilbert) space in which that complex-valued vector of 2^N dimensions "lives". This vector describes the full state of your N-qubit machine (it describes a "pure state"). There is the added finesses that shifting the "complex phase" of each component of the 2^N state space vector has no physical significance, so properly the actual state is actually a subspace of the state space, also called a "ray".

And that's about it. If you take a discrete space (of qubit arrays or anything else) and take it "to the limit" you get the continuous space where you need infinite-dimensional state space vectors - these may describe for example the position of a particle; every component of the vector giving the complex probability density function of "finding" a particle at the given position.

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Our computers use the binary system of 1 and 0s. Quantum computers use qubits (quantum bits), which can exist in "superposition", meaning that they can be a 0 or a 1 and everything in between... simultaneously.

NO!

"The state of the qubit is a complex-valued probability distribution over the state space { 0, 1 }"

Isn't that clearer?

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Re: Genuine question

You will be able to

1) Factorize numbers for fun and profit

1.1) Probably do quantum crypto stuff on the side to alleviate 1)

2) Do quick searches in a database (faster than using a search tree)

3) And simulate quantum processes without exponential slowdown. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART as it means advances in material science and deeper understanding of how molecular interactions actually work.

IBM releases Software-Defined Storage For Dummies - no joke

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Native encryption and secure cryptography erase (data wiping) that is NIST-Compliant and FIPS certified

OH SHIT!

Purposefully flaky and price-upgradingly compliant to a bunch of hocus-pocus.

Waiting gamer slams no-show show: E3 – was that it?

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Re: Thank god

it looks like ass

Better eat some crow, then.

Microsoft in hunt for the practical qubit

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Holmes

Needs better explanation

With enough qubits, a quantum computer could therefore represent an awful lot of states simultaneously. If you can then ask the quantum computer the right question, its waveform should collapse into the answer.

With the answer given having a certain classical probability of being correct.

The quantum computer therefore – in theory – lets you get a complex answer in a single operation, rather than having to step through lots of iterations, as in a classical computer.

Only for the following algorithms:

1) Factorization

and

2) Searching in databases

All the other classical turing-machine algorithms have to STAY classical.

MORE HERE

When will Microsoft next run out of US IPv4 addresses for Azure?

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Re: IPV6 Foot Dragging Goes On Forever

Frankly, if it wasn't terrible, it would have been adopted ten years ago.

Come off it, Moon, Earth. We know you're 60 million years older than we thought

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Well, sure it is the current Earth Year. Which is just a fixed number of seconds. Which are defined using distance and the universal dimensionless constant 1 ... or lightspeed for the hoi polloi.

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Paris Hilton

Re: "Blind, drunken Gods, swaying to the sound of mad piping...."

Am I wrong?

Yes. You seem to be mix this up with more oriental approaches like Zen Buddhism and things like that.

(I still hope to see Frank Herbert's Zensunni religion before I log off; it would be weird, but the human mind is malleable and can pull practically anything out of the hat as long as verification of it can be left as an exercise...)

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It gets really, really old

It might be you...

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"Blind, drunken Gods, swaying to the sound of mad piping...."

Further perusal of Jimbo's Excellent HTML Store™ revelas that...

Gnosticism presents a distinction between the highest, unknowable God and the demiurgic “creator” of the material. Several systems of Gnostic thought present the Demiurge as antagonistic to the will of the Supreme Being: his act of creation occurs in unconscious semblance of the divine model, and thus is fundamentally flawed, or else is formed with the malevolent intention of entrapping aspects of the divine in materiality. Thus, in such systems, the Demiurge acts as a solution to (or, at least possibly, the problem or cause that gives rise to) the problem of evil. In the most radical form of Christian Gnosticism, the Demiurge is the "jealous God" of the Old Testament.

So I think there is some leeway in those texts from the sandy lands.

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Angel

Re: But the earth is only 6 thousand years old

gb2 Jesus Camp!

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Re: Years or revoltions around the Sun?

Earth never wanted to be a Stormtrooper!

Greenpeace rejoices after getting huge renewable powerplant cancelled

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Re: Have you red the project?

Few things are great about hydro.

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Trollface

Re: Renewable is OK but...

1) Pick up fone to Canada

2) Order up a few CANDUs

3) ???

4) ENERGY from cheap uranium.

On the minus side, the lead time is prolly 10 years.

On the plus side, you will enrage Amurricans and Greens because you can produce Plutonium in a continuous cycle.

Added bonus if you order up a Russian fast breeder package.

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Trollface

...and how.

I hope it is Sun powered!

MIGHTY SOLAR FLARES fail to DESTROY CIVILISATION. Yes!

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Re: X scale

Not a logarithmic scale of badassery then?

Windows 8 leaker gets three months, booted back to Russia

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Trollface

Then "The Disgruntling" occurred!

"After receiving a poor performance report, he reportedly became disgruntled and leaked prerelease Windows 8 software to an unnamed French blogger."

Why did the poor performance report make him hate French bloggers that much? It is a mystery. Will we ever know?

Microsoft poised to take Web server crown from Apache

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Holmes

Re: Does anyone care? I'm mean, really care?

Well, it sure brings back memories from before the Global War On Stuff -- struggling with getting servlet engines to work via ajp while random people told me how cool and easy asp and ActiveX were only to be hacked up the wazoo a bit later, so .... yeah.

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Trollface

Re: Nick Kew Deja vu again

Which ignores the fact many IIS server admins also try to hide their servers' identities as well

RESPECT THEIR SECURITY-FU! No wait. Why lose time with inanities like that? Oh well...

Indeed, many IIS servers run on corporate intranets and therefore are not visible on the Web at all, making IIS's real share of the webserver market even larger than the Netcraft survey suggest.

"Please find the various problems with this statement for 15 points."

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Meh

Re: Chris Wareham

You could say exactly the same thing about the large number of (insecure) Linux servers I see with Apache installed and advertising itself by default.

So ...

a) how do you know about their apparent "Insecurity"?

b) what's wrong with proud advertising? It's not like IIS says "I'm a trolling dog" either.

holes like SAMBA configuration files

WTF are you talking about?

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Re: Bring him back

A true firefox!

Cabbies paralyze London in Uber rebellion

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Trollface

Meanwhile the french are enjoying an SNCF strike

It's that time of the year again. Oh well.

"RÄUMPANZER VOR!"

The Force of tax breaks brings Star Wars filming to Blighty

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Re: Filmed in the UK for the tax breaks,

NO! Enough of the dead sets lovingly shooped in in which actors who do not know what they are supposed to be enact movements and monologues of stultefying woodenness.

AWS breaks silence over Truecrypt's role in data import/export

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where the makers are to some level accountable or at least traceable

Why though? Just to tick the box in the compliance statement?

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Holmes

The popular crypto platform recently became a pariah after its shadowy developers posted a note to the official website claiming it was compromised and users should adopt rival Microsoft Bitlocker.

This has as much truth as a Psaki™ State Department Official Statement™ on the situation in Ukraine.

El Reg reported Truecrypt version 7.2 was dropping malware executables

YouTube video or it didn't happen.

207 thousand lights-out boxes are STILL hackable

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Re: logo

Goatse?

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Pint

Re: Heres a suggestion...

People wilfully/negligently exposing said stuff to the internet *after* being informed about it being broken get buste

60'000 sysops get dragged before the beak.

DailyMailyMayhem ensues!

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Thumb Up

Re: "risks had been heeeded"

Heed on, gentlemen!

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Big Brother

One year after the Summer of Surveillance...

Farmer was also highly critical of the protocol stating it was vulnerable by design and contained next to no documentation pointing users to ways to improve their security postures. "This was tantamount to major server manufacturers 'harming their customers', he said.

Do not assign to stupidity what can easily be explained by well-funded malice.

Texan parks quadcopter atop Dallas Cowboys stadium

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AT&T stadium, eh?

Looks like an evil Godzilla-sized Roomba. Sure to hoover up your data.

UK govt preps World War 2 energy rationing to keep the lights on

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Re: What to do with the waste

The Juno space probe to Jupiter is solar powered because of a shortage of nuclear waste.

That ain't waste. You need to bredd your Pu-235 from Neptunium in a special breeder reactor.

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Re: Nuclear is not safe (Fukushima and Chernobyl being fine examples)

NYET: RBMKs were not ever considered particularly safe. They can, however, produce some Pu.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Neither new nor concerning

interruptible supplies are nothing new or scary

Did the good people of the Socialist Republic of California get their rolling brownouts under control? There was a big fuss in the start of the noughties after ENRON, then the economy imploded and GULF WAR FOREVER happened, then the housing bubble RESCUED EVERYTHING, so all of that got pushed off the very staid and rational newspaper front pages...

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Holmes

Re: You cant just "bring online" mothballed coal and gas-fired plants.

Your hysteresis is showing!

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Trollface

Re: Failure? No. Complete success.

managed 'run-down' of the economy, as planned under Agenda 21

As opposed to the unmanaged run-down of the economy, completely ad-libbed by our central banking keynesians?

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Thumb Up

Re: The future's bright then...

everything seems to have turned so very f***ing 1970

U2 will be back?

Pictures of elite 'Chinese military hacker' published

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Terminator

Putter Panda does not pander!

"decade-long economic espionage campaign that is massive and unrelenting"

"Flesh over a metal endoskeleton. It cannot be reasoned with or bargained with. And it drinks vodka."

Massive news in the micro-world: a hexaquark particle

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Holmes

It was Gell-Mann and Zweig who first introduced the concept of quarks in 1964, not Freeman Dyson.

Well, Gell-Mann pissed all over the idea at first and gave believers a hard time and some righteous belittling - he was sure "quarks" were only a mathematical neat way of expressing the nucleon behaviour. Apparently this is also where the name "quark" comes from - he called them "quirks", which sounded like "quarks". None of the Finnegan's Wake tall story stuff.

Once experiments came in, he decided to retcon his attitude on the actual existence of quarks. Such is life in the physics community.

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Holmes

Re: Neutron decay

I am sure I can be wrong. However, these ideas are not from me, they are a rather self-consistent model of how it works created by thousands of people each more brainy than myself. I can't compete with that ...

Heisenberg believed that the exchange particle involved was an electron (he did not have many particles from which to choose). This electron had to have some rather odd characteristics, however, such as no spin and no magnetic moment, and this made Heisenberg's theory ultimately unacceptable.

The binding is done via meson exchange, right? I remember that Yukawa came up with that idea. Note that if the neutron *could* decay in a stable nucleus, you *would* see it as there is always a diagram in which it decays immediately before any exchange happens (and it is bound to be advertised to the rest of the universe as such, i.e. "observed"). So energy constraints, like program contracts and assertions, are strong.

Anyway, today we have Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics, and the first Google result that comes up:

Nuclei from Lattice QCD

1000 PetaFLOPS * Year for an Alpha Particle Approximation? FUND IT!

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Headmaster

Re: @dan1980

it's a tiny ball of wibbly-wobbly quarky-gluony ... stuff

More like a Feynman diagram of improbable depth and complexity (think all possible interactions on overhead slides, layered on top of each other, with lesser probability the more complex the diagram is); like a a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person! The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents...

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Headmaster

Re: Neutron decay

More likely they still decay, but the free electron is quickly bound to a nearby proton, turning it into a neutron. From the outside it would appear that the neutron is stable

Absolutely not!!!1!

Your physics intuition only competes with your lack of google fu.

The reason that neutrons do not decay in stable nuclei is because doing so would result in a nucleus with HIGHER energy. And this is forbidden by a Brussels decree!

Neutron Stability in Atomic Nuclei

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Re: @dan1980

Commenting clearly reached a bottom

DUBIOUS COMMENTARD ACCELERATOR EL REG PRESS CONFERENCE:

COMMENTING PLANCK LENGTH IN SIGHT!