* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Anatomy of a 22-year-old X Window bug: Get root with newly uncovered flaw

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: When any C/C++ code includes "goto" you know it sucks...

> Structured programming if used sensibly and non-dogmatically

Jesus Christ, the 70s called. They want their debates back.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: What?

A troll.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Surprise?

"the worst Internet Worm ever was on UNIX based systems..."

At a time when "Internet" consisted of a few thousand Unix and VAXen strung together by leased lines.

10/10 would troll with.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Wrong

Man: (paraphrased) Something about C/C++

Arthur: (uninterested) Yes...

Man: Something about programmers using C/C++

Arthur: (perturbed) Yes I see!

Man: Finally something about the mothers of C/C++ programmers

Arthur: (mad) Be quiet!

I may remind the dear correspondent that back in the times when X11 was written, C++ was unstandardized, Ada compilers were expensive, D or golang were not to be found. Yes, you could have written it in Pascal.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Re: X Window, not Windows

I wonder what kind of cretinperson downvotes a perfectly good comment about naming conventions?

Are we to be spared nothing?

Or is it because the link to Wikipedia doesn't reach Orlowski levels of hip?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: smiles for the 'goto'

ALl of that could be avoided with proper sub-functions

Human overlord Watson lives in the 'clouds' now, in a $1bn cognition unit. Don't be afraid

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Speed: How fast you get there

Performance: How much not tired you are when you get there

Paris, because, you know.

Space Station bags extra 10yrs of life as SOLAR STORM scrubs resupply

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Who's next to visit the ISS?

But what happens if they just ring the bell at the docking point?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

groundbreaking research being conducted

Should be replaced by "groundbreaking duck-tape and WD5 engineering being conducted".

Pesky protesters FORCE GOOGLE STAFF INTO THE SEA

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Shalmaneser when?

This sounds more and more like something out of a John Brunner novel.

I like where this is going.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

You are forgetting a few very interesting schemes about the creation of free money which are very more interesting indeed.

Linksys's über-hackable WRT wireless router REBORN with 802.11ac

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Up

Is this good or what?

Most excellent indeed.

Scientists discover supervolcano trigger that could herald humanity's doom

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Hold This

That will be a bit difficult to do, unless you have a plan of building a Death Star to put major holes into the continental plate?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Anyone got a map?

It's actually like living on the upper layer of a lava lamp.

Ohh... the nice colors.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Probability and Mathematics

Not a problem. The president and selected members of the military-congressional-industrial complex will suffer with you - from orbit.

As long as you regularly paid your social security "contributions", that is. Give generously!

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
FAIL

"Most likely, it is a clusters of fissionable material reaching critical mass and a rapid decay process causing eruptions."

When do we finally get that "lauhging elf" icon?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Bulging in advance

> I think there might be a bit of social breakdown.

I don't think so. We have been living with nukes on hairtrigger alert since the 50's. Even in 2014 "liburl" presidents are throwing 100 billion dollars that they don't have into a "refresher project". No-one gives a f*ck.

ATM hacker Barnaby Jack's death blamed on accidental drug overdose

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Bah!

Reiser is still alive but his girlfriend not so much, thanks to Reiser.

You statement is of bad taste.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

"Victor the Cleaner has left the building"

So what does the girlfriend say?

I am pretty sure she has a word to put in about the likelihood of that guy doing a Krokodil Homemix while in Vegas.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Cool

> I see you don't own a pig farm.

jake, is that you?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Commence conspiracy theories.

> the SS is alive and well in America...

Tell us something new. There are also a few people who are potentially donor/carries of HITLER'S BRAIN.

Did anyone see Cheney lates, btw? I'm not sure what he's up to.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Commence conspiracy theories.

I'm sure they need Peacemakers today.

Dusty old supernova could reveal answer to life, the universe and EVERYTHING

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: A question for the astronomers

So even if you gathered up all the relatively heavy elements that the nova produced, there wouldn't be enough hydrogen left to trigger star formation again.

Actually, the outer layers of the old ball should yield a a solar mass of perfectly good hydrogen.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: A question for the astronomers

And heat. You have to get rid of the heat.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Ah, the vagaries of time...

"I'm pretty sure that"

Your surety will have to take the proper dent once you realize that depending on your local movement (e.g. shuttling towards and from the khazi), the actual date of the supernovation does suffer serious adjustments due to the effects of Special Relativity and large leverage (i.e. distance to the boomcentre), although I cannot be bothered to compute the actual amounts of delta-t involved.

Bay Area plots Googlebus tax after local residents riot

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Commune of California!

a mature answer to the problems the buses represent

And what problems DO the buses represent exactly? As I check the constitution there is nothing about people being entitled to rent they consider "low" in sunny areas they prefer to live in. Deal with it.

Steam and Origin gamers knocked offline by SEPARATE DDoS attacks

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Hives of villany affected

4chan was also down for the count, AFAIK

Two white dwarfs and superdense star. Yup, IDEAL for gravity lab in the sky - boffins

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Alien

Err...no.

"Best hope of seeing quantum theory in action"

That is actually your nearest high-school lab.

What you hope to see here is some deviation from the predictions of GR. This may or may not indicate something about Quantume Gravity if they occur. But probably not.

Planning to rob a Windows ATM? Ditch the sledgehammer and bring a USB STICK

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Disbelief

> But to be fair; an ATM is not simply a PC accessible to anyone and everyone.

"They do not think it be like this, comrade. But is."

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Signature striked!

> Terminator 2 wasn't a documentary.

Well, that "time machine" business was a bit far out but those hunter-killer drones were spot on.

UNREAL, dude: Nvidia uncloaks Tegra K1 graphics monster for your mobile ... and CAR

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Echelon Security in San Jose, California, on Tuesday, December 31, 2013, confirmed for Monterey County Herald reporter Phillip Molnar that Echelon security guards were hired on Saturday, December 28, 2013, to protect the barley pattern in the field after it first appeared that morning. Chualar residents told field researchers Jeff Krause and David Mendez that dogs barked all night before the pattern appeared and later that people with ropes were measuring in the pattern on Sunday, December 29, 2013.

Yes this is a mysterious pattern and anyone who hasn't had his head buried in esoterics during the last ten years will immediately recognize an IC.

If E. T. non-terrestrial, we might be meant to see this formation as a powerful demonstration of the entity’s ability to investigate our human technology and also to harvest it regardless of our wishes. ... The use of Braille is another aspect of this, but I have no explanation for the repeated use of numerals 192. They may mean something to the module designer as a registration number or perhaps to NASA as an identification to a surveillance satellite camera. We will probably never know the full story here - but it bothers someone!

HUH! Yeah. They are warning us about TESLA 666, using dark tech from serbiaǹ engineers with a bent for showmanism.

How does one perform such nice patterning of wheat fields though?

Time travellers outsmart the NSA

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: The wet dream of the liberal: "If I had the money ... I would eradicate badness!"

Oh here we go again.

In truth, liberals and conservatives are the same control freaks.

You may note that you have currently the most liberal multicolored hopistic poster child of the liberal wankshow and he is a serial catastrophe on everything from warmongering to mandatory healthcare fail while bailing out cronies left and right, printing money, keeping the gitmo open and shitting on the constitution.

Yeah, it's all due to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Sure.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Re: A must read to increase your knollij!

I think you need to point us to your paper on the arxiv!

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

The wet dream of the liberal: "If I had the money ... I would eradicate badness!"

Just think how much good we could do in the world with such amounts of money. We could give everyone a decent education and eradicate terrorism.

This is exactly what they are doing.

They are just failing hard on both points.

You think you gonna do any better?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: He came, he saw, he left again.

"He went back to our common future of FAIL, whence he came."

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

A must read to increase your knollij!

PHYS771 Lecture 19: Time Travel

Let's talk about the more interesting kind of time travel: the backwards kind. Can closed timelike curves (CTCs) exist in Nature? This question has a very long history of being studied by physicists on weekends. It was discovered early on, by Gödel and others, that classical general relativity admits CTC solutions. All of the known solutions, however, have some element that can be objected to as being "unphysical." For example, some solutions involve wormholes, but that requires "exotic matter" having negative mass to keep the wormhole open. They all, so far, involve either non-standard cosmologies or else types of matter or energy that have yet to be experimentally observed. But that's just classical general relativity. Once you put quantum mechanics in the picture, it becomes an even harder question. General relativity is not just a theory of some fields in spacetime, but of spacetime itself, and so once you quantize it, you'd expect there to be fluctuations in the causal structure of spacetime. The question is, why shouldn't that produce CTCs?

Incidentally, there's an interesting metaquestion here: why have physicists found it so hard to create a quantum theory of gravity? The technical answer usually given is that, unlike (say) Maxwell's equations, general relativity is not renormalizable. But I think there's also a simpler answer, one that's much more understandable to a doofus layperson like me. The real heart of the matter is that general relativity is a theory of spacetime itself, and so a quantum theory of gravity is going to have to be talking about superpositions over spacetime and fluctuations of spacetime. One of the things you'd expect such a theory to answer is whether closed timelike curves can exist. So quantum gravity seems "CTC-hard", in the sense that it's at least as hard as determining if CTCs are possible! And even I can see that this can't possibly be a trivial question to settle. Even if CTCs are impossible, presumably they're not going to be proven impossible without some far-reaching new insight. Of course, this is just one instantiation of a general problem: that no one really has a clear idea of what it means to treat spacetime itself quantum-mechanically.

In the field I come from, it's never our place to ask if some physical object exists or not, it's to assume it exists and see what computations we can do with it. Thus, from now on, we'll assume CTCs exist. What would the consequences be for computational complexity? Perhaps surprisingly, I'll be able to give a clear and specific answer to that.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Paris Hilton

John Titor told me all about it in 2000!

You may be confusing this with a novel by Dan Brown?

Apple: C'mon, flick on iBeacon. Let us track you. You'll get BADGES

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Everything tastes better with iBacon!

"This promotional scavenger hunt demonstrates our commitment to leveraging the latest in emerging technologies, making CES the most interactive and engaging ..."

Oh snap! I ran out of bingo cards!

Am I now disqualified?

'BILLION-YEAR DISK' to help FUTURE LIFEFORMS study us

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Not bad, but didn't Simon Sharwood talk about that in this ElReg-ism?

Italian woman stunned by exploding artichoke

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Surprise

They are not into "signature strikes". Cyberfa**otcommand is responsible for that.

Hacker backdoors Linksys, Netgear, Cisco and other routers

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Mushroom

Yeah, well

My router here, (the name of which sounds either like a Nasty German from a bad WWII movie or an electric interference) has two ports open to the Internet that are not particularly well documented (i.e. not at all), apparently for "maintenance purposes" by the ISP. Am I happy about this? Hell no. Did I close them? I tried. Turns out it is impossible for one of them. Pretty sure the overpaid "maintenance engineer" from the ISP will give me an earful and threaten "fines" when he next shows up. Can I replace the crud with something acceptable? No, the Incumbent Operator (tm) has a special sauce protocol and configurationn that can only be applied by him to exactly that hardware. What do?

Does anyone take consumer security seriously?

No. Here is a two-year contract instead. F*ck you.

Snapchat vows to shut its hole in wake of 4.6 million user data breach

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Worry more about google

But it never hurts to use more privacy-conscious websites anyway.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Some would say it's due to copyright being relentlessly weakened by evil big business, then call for additional protection of the "creative types" instead.

Problem solved. Or not?

Snowden docs: NSA building encryption-cracking quantum computer

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: @Slawek

In furtherance of which:

The Supreme Court Logic That Could Destroy Privacy in America: It's dangerous for courts to continue adhering to Smith v. Maryland, a decision that was made before the advent of big data.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: Yawn.

Yeah Matt, thank you for statist tax-and-spend, war-is-a-force-that-gives-us-tech message.

Sorry, I nearly fell asleep whilst the sheeple desperately tried to inject some paranoia into yet another very obvious story.

Not enough to post random drivel, apparently. Don't you have the latest HP failure to defend?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Not all darkness

Ken Thompson proved that you can insert exploits into software without having it appear in the source code. It would be especially easy for open source software.

No. It is time to put that stuff to rest.

Countering "Trusting Trust"

It's more likely to have a Bug Of Consequence hidden in plain sight. Plausibly denibale if some takes the time to comb through the code.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Oh yeah?

WILL FACTORIZE LARGE NUMBERS FOR A MODERATE SUM. Quick results or money back. Discreteness guaranteed. Please call [NUMBER] to obtain one-time-pad for further communication.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Down

@Slawek

"NSA did not violate any US laws."

Next: "SS doctors did not violate any german laws"

Yeah, one can twist and turn, spin and obfuscate, lie and dissemble and plaster the Big Lie on every board so that anything can be justified "to the letter of the law". But so what? It's just another way of raw power abuse if done by those in charge and of whistling past the graveyard by the others.

tl;dr: Retarded

AT&T takes aim at T-Mobile with $450 cashback lure

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Childcatcher

T-Mobile has seen stellar growth since it stopped trying to sell itself off and decided to shake up the market instead.

Providing things that customers want instead of what the marketing-financials couple from hell comes up with actually means success: SHOCKER!!

BlackBerry sues American Idol host's company for 'blatant' patent infringement

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Like a qwertz...