* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Plucky ISS 'nauts manage to bodge tricky camera gizmo onto podule IN SPACE

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Devil

Slavshit is best shit!

You no trust in glorious russian engineering? Rockets built by Chief Engineer, who was Stalin's purge survivor, while country wrecked by Great War for Motherland. Still firing strong and lifting goods into orbit today. Consider USA, needs borrow german honorary SS member to get rockets off ground in first place, forgets all about Goddard. I laugh.

Silicon Valley slurped millions of NSA cash for PRISM participation

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: WAR IS GOOD!!!!!

It's okay as long as a honestly riveted flying saucer is not parked alongside.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

It's news when it's news. Not earlier.

Otherwise it's "out there", "fringe", "tinfoil hat" or "Paultardism".

Germany warns: You just CAN'T TRUST some Windows 8 PCs

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Paris Hilton

> Did you know that the KDE project recently lost everything

What. They have less sysop nous than a fly-by-night outfit that sells packages of Bami Goreng on the side?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

Disquieting frankness on your webzine

Microsoft denied there was any backdoor. In a lengthy statement, a spokeswoman insisted that users cannot expect "privacy without good security".

Indeed. We want privacy with excellent security, not "no privacy" with just "good security".

Mickey's soft: just say no to this package..

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

As long as lube is involved and there are state-sponsored donuts at the end, we can go pretty far with nary a peep, just a stream of "denials" and "excuses" followed by "calls for investigation", then more "excuses" and "denials".

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: It gets even better:

when will Microsoft finally wake up and start working their way out of this mess?

.. I'm thinking "never".

Excellent.... excellent.

white_fluffy_cat.jpg

Guardian teams up with New York Times for future Snowden GCHQ coverage

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: damage limitation

The next operation will be an attack on Syria in response to the "Assad kills his own people using chemical weapons, so the President has to do something" meme (yet another "Radio Gleiwitz" type show). That should cause minds to wander.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Sounds like the superstring theory of leakage.

BILLION-TONNE BELCH emitted from Sun to hit Earth this weekend

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

...and a few Petunias

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: This again

You may not know it, but Dinosaurs were into Intelligent Design and never doubted that Raptor Jesus would deflect any asteroidical crap heading their way at the last moment if they just kept the Faith going strong.

Report: Secret British spy base in Middle East taps region's internet

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Christoph Another possibility

after the Israelis evicted the PLO out of Beiruit in 1982

Hell yeah. That's was a success story. Don't remind me.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Black Helicopters

I will barge in at the start and link to Glenn saying there is something fishy

Snowden: UK government now leaking documents about itself -- The NSA whistleblower says: 'I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent'

The Independent's Oliver Wright just tweeted the following:

"For the record: The Independent was not leaked or 'duped' into publishing today's front page story by the Government."

Leaving aside the fact that the Independent article quotes an anonymous "senior Whitehall source", nobody said they were "duped" into publishing anything. The question is: who provided them this document or the information in it? It clearly did not come from Snowden or any of the journalists with whom he has directly worked. The Independent provided no source information whatsoever for their rather significant disclosure of top secret information. Did they see any such documents, and if so, who, generally, provided it to them? I don't mean, obviously, that they should identify their specific source, but at least some information about their basis for these claims, given how significant they are, would be warranted. One would think that they would not have published something like this without either seeing the documents or getting confirmation from someone who has: the class of people who qualify is very small, and includes, most prominently and obviously, the UK government itself.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Relevance

This the Reg, they like to troll.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Wifesatrisq?

Or of course the reference to "lives at risk" and the extreme concern felt by the British (and US) governments regarding Snowden's revelations may not be related to the cable-tapping base at all, but to something else as yet undisclosed.

My popcorn container is running on empty!

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist... Spy HARDER

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

To make your mission challenging, we give you this...

They still use those glow-in-the-dark nightvision goggles, I see.

'Silent' staff stood by as £100m BBC IT project tanked – DG

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Haven't we all seen White Elephant projects like this?

When I was at uni, we already had a book full of that crap. Back then, problems were ascribed to a mythical "software crisis", which no-one ever defined properly. After many years, tons of better tools, and far better software lifecycle management it turns out that, far from being a "software crisis", it was a "management crisis" all along. Now made worse by money-grabbing fumbling lords of arrogance who never had to get near a tech jobl being pumped into the upper strata of organizations.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Baloney

I think you are being too negativist, so shut up. I would like to see some progress. Rome was not built in a day, so work smarter, not harder. I will be away on holidays the next two months btw, so I expect you to manage. Be grateful for this trust and delegation.

Holiday HELL: Pourquoi, monsieur, why is there no merdique Wi-Fi here?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: How very sad...

Whatever their colour, DON'T MENTION THE WAR!

Or, these days, Allah.

Indian IT exporters coin windfall profits as rupee plunges

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

The absolute rate is not so much a concern for the industry as the volatility. Such sudden fluctuations impact the planning process for companies and customers.

Right.

2012-03-22: Saving India from the Keynesians by Shanmuganathan "Shan" Nagasundaram

"At this point, readers could rightfully ask the question "How then did the same team engineer the reforms of 1990–2010?" The answer is fairly straightforward: all that we have managed is a transition from a nearly communist economy (defined as state ownership of production) to a nearly fascist economy (in which ownership of production is private, but the state plans and controls the means of production.) The above transition was intellectually consistent with the Keynesian beliefs of the reform team and hence was not difficult to implement. Even this limited movement in the direction of "free markets" has given the Indian economy tremendous rewards in terms of growth and poverty reduction.

... Given the challenges ahead in terms of disruptions in the global economy, the right thing for the government to do would be to free up capital by reducing their expenditure (leading to lower taxes and inflation) and dramatically decrease the involvement in economic activities/decision making by allowing competitive forces to decide market outcomes. ... While there would be impediments to implementation as cited above, the bigger stumbling block lies in the realization by the economic team as to why the above is the right thing to do. For a team that has paraded the NREGA as its flagship achievement, indulges in price controls as a way to manage inflation, has praised ministers for presenting socialistic budgets, the intellectual blind spot is the real hurdle. With the repeated hyperbole in the mainstream media of Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh being a "brilliant economist," and given that he has surrounded himself with advisers who are essentially welfare/Keynesian economists, salvation truly lies only within."

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: forget about renegotiating

It is my contention that whenever the word "fair" appears, some economic contingencies have been misunderstood. In particular when the "fairness" is expected to spring from state economic intervention.

Space-walker nearly OPENED HELMET to avoid DROWNING

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Heinlein appealing to the American psyche

"Freedom!" and "Self-reliance!" which are myths

Extreme faceplam demanded. Myths? Is this like the modern version of Logan's Run?

"Freedom and Self-reliance are MYTHS! You will DIE if the government doesn't constantly HELP AND TAX YOU!!11!"

Also:

Jeff Riggenbach: Was Robert A. Heinlein a Libertarian?

Isaac Asimov, who knew Heinlein from the mid-'30s on, was convinced that his personal political views were largely a function of the woman he was married to at the time. In the '30s, when he was married to wife #2, Leslyn MacDonald, whom Asimov describes as "a flaming liberal," Heinlein was working with Upton Sinclair and his EPIC movement. Twenty years later, married to wife #3, Virginia Gerstenfeld, he re-emerged as a Cold Warrior fixated on the supposed nobility of the military and newly devoted to a "free market" for which he had had little use during the years of the Great Depression.

If so it was, I say, "so be it." Many men have tailored their beliefs to match those of their wives. They have found that it helps to preserve and promote domestic harmony. And they believe that domestic harmony is a valuable thing, a thing worth preserving. Robert A. Heinlein was hardly the only man, or even the first man, to venture down this path.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Drowned in space...

Yet Hubbard won the bet with Heinlein about whether more bacon could be brought in by creating a cargo cult for idiots rather than writing SciFi.

Good business acumen. Though sadly bereft of any ethics.

Lenovo to ship all new PCs with Start Menu replacement

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: First PC with 8

The word is "horribad".

NASA restarts WISE telescope to spot potential Earth-killers

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Re: No OMG

The Eye of Japetus had blinked, as if to remove an irritating speck of dust. David Bowman had time for just one broken sentence which the waiting men in Mission Control, nine hundred million miles away and eighty minutes in the future, were never to forget:

"The thing's hollow – it goes on forever – and – ZOMG LOL – it's full of stars! ROFLMAOOoooooo....!"

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Budget cuts, huh?

Ok, the military can have their trillion.

But why not shift the 1.5 billion annual subsidy for Egypt and 3 billion annual subsidy for Israel to NASA?

Oh wait, they are using these for buying US military kit.

EXPLICIT VID: Man filmed trying to bang brand new 'budget iPhone'

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Fake!

It's the one which is liquid, natch.

iCloud outage outrage: Look, iPhoto friends, kitty just learned to... NOOO

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: What's with all these major internet services having these outages?

Has the internet grown to such a point that entropy has set in?

COMMENT SECTION SAYS YES!

Kim Kardashian's bosom pal in bling snatch Instagram unpleasantness

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Ohmigod...

But on the other hand, the money goes to the watchmaker, who will use it to buy the bonds of a company in dire need of cash so that it may extend its capital structure tool up in order to produce more of goodie X. This however, means that worker Y and Z need to be hired, which means that their income can be used to feed wife and children.

So by buying this watch MAY HELP THE ECONOMY!

And the original money came from couch potatoes. CAPITALISM ROCKS!

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Geography

You could probably find a mad scientist eager to use this watch in some gruesome, unethical experiment on live humans.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Coat

If that watch falls down the loo, it will be watcherloo!

Four ways the Guardian could have protected Snowden – by THE NSA

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Count me among the paranoid

> and the favoring of AES, a cipher sponsored by a government known to spy on its own citizens

Yeah, roll your own cipher?

Therein lies crankosity and madness.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Why not send removable media through international express packages?

"Yet another package with russian dolls for you. Do you collect them?"

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: A wrong assumption

AES does not come from the NSA, nor has it been designed by the NSA and I really trust the saying of a large ensemble of non-NSA people who while away their time for a decade cracking the thing and come away with --- not much.

NASDAQ halts stock trading, citing data-feed glitch

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

In a statement, the Securities and Exchange Commission said it was monitoring the situation.

Nov 2007: SEC: The Great Overseer Fails in Oversight of Self

"Today it was announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had a material weakness in the internal controls over its financial reporting. The SEC avoided a big fat “E” last year via its remediation of internal control problems, but this year the SEC’s material weaknesses included control deficiencies related to its accounts receivable balances, “period-end closing process, accounting for transaction fee revenue, and preparation of financial statement disclosures.”

Now, since the SEC implements and enforces the provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley 404 (which requires management to report on its internal controls over financial reporting), how can this inept organization possibly be trusted to oversee that which it can’t manage within its own organization?

Non-compliance with 404 has been disastrous for private companies that have had material weaknesses (massive stock declines and even bankruptcy), however, the SEC, which is not subject to market forces, has responded with this: “During fiscal year 2007, SEC improved its controls over the accuracy, timeliness, and completeness of the disgorgement and penalty data and used a much improved database for the initial recording and tracking of these data.” Ummm, so? This is like throwing fluff at a charging rhino.

12 simple rules: How Ted Codd transformed the humble database

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Facepalm

thatisthepoint.jpg

To get rid of the unmaintainable mess of pointers.

And mixing the two concepts is just ... no.

Fame-hating planets don't need to hang around STARS – boffins

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: "less than 50 times the distance between the Sun and Neptune"

No that is

d < 50 * 30 AU - halfway to the Oort.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Re: What will they call all this "dark matter"?

Schwarzwälder dusting?

And no, it doesn't make much a dent into the real "dark matter".

-->> http://hetdex.org/dark_energy/dark_matter.php

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

I recommend you stop ordering mind-enhancing goods at "Internet Pharmacies".

Snowden journo's partner wins partial injunction on seized data

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

The 51st state informs...

Very good.

The unstated (and entirely unchallenged) assumption here is that USUK are joined at the hip. Not entirely unexpected, as the last 10 years was enlivened mainly by the sound of brains falling on the floor and politicians fartingly rolling over, but still...

"Ah, shit! I meant to take care of him, not fuckin' take care of him!"

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Re: We're playing a game of symbolism here (@ DavCrav)

Right...

It seems that there is little understanding that it was banking secrecy that helped to resist twentieth-century dictatorships and that high tax rates — not money havens — are responsible for tax evasion, as Prince Hans-Adam of Lichtenstein has pinpointed. Clearly the amount of information collected for the purpose of future tax investigation is enormous, leaving little place for human privacy and dignity. Most importantly, it raises a question as to who gave participating states a right to gather information on people that are not their citizens.

Marissa Mayer in Vogue fashion shoot

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Dammit, El Reg!

Ok, fixed now.

Barnes & Noble booked for running out of £29 Nooks

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Facepalm

Help! Help! I am being victimized! Did you seem him victimizing me?

"It's consumer protection to prevent customers being hoodwinked by incredible bargains"

Yeah, starting off by assuming the people you want to "protect" are incredibly retarded is pretty much self-defeating.

Oh wait, they are phoning ASA to complain they didn't get the bargain they are entitled to ... never mind.

Mystery of Guardian mobos and graphics cards which 'held Snowden files'

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Meh

Re: Memory Imprinting

> doing so isn't beyond the realm of possibility.

It certainly is beyond the realm of the Guardian's BOFH.

This "realm of possibility" are well-equipped university labs writing papers on how it is in the realm of possibility to do XY in a laboratory setting, may I recall.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Re: The Guardian had a chance to ....

Also ask the Jewish community in the UK about the promotion of xenophobia and racism, you will find they mention the Guardian a lot more than the Daily Mail.

Ohhh.... I feel we are getting in "Criticism of MUH ISRAEL" territory here. Scary.

Well, I'm following Robert Fisk on that subject. He's with the Indy, generally.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Secure destruction of hard drives

Official UK Secrets from a US three-letter agency communicated by a (possibly ex) US citizen?

How bizarre.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

1) Take 0.8 cm drill

2) Drill hole into plaster wall

3) Put 32 GiB flash memory with data in there, safely encased in a bit of tinfoil and epoxy

4) Plaster over

5) ???

6) Yes, m'ylod we no longer have no files

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

Re: insurance scam

Right. Call the PFY, the work's sorted for today. We are heading for the pub.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Symbolism

Do you really want to flatten Berlin AGAIN?