* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Elon Musk unveils Hyperloop – the subsonic tube of tomorrow

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Trollface

Will TSA tubesters ride with you?

Imagine the company tries to break even - then the movies "Speed: The Tube", "Snakes on a Tube" and "Tube 9/11" (possibly also "Sharktubo") come out.

Facebook's No 2 banks $91m after BIG shares sale

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Trollface

Lean In.

Fat Out.

This weekend: Watch HOT STARS shower! Moon won't interfere

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Unhappy

Did we miss the Cloud?

So anyone seen anything?

It's now or never for old sysadmins to learn new tricks

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Holmes

Re: Old sysadmins don't need to learn new tricks.

Useless. You want the guy who KNOWS ABOUT THE DOMAIN, especially for Fortran. Of course, being bored enough to put a fork into his ballslearn about Fortran (which frankly has no redeeming feature left and is only kept because of the undead codebase) helps.

Yeah, ship in someone who learnt Fortran to check out that Finite Element Analyis code, I dare you..

Despite Microsoft Surface RT debacle, second-gen model in the works

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Re: If there's one thing Microsoft is good at...

In other words, they polish their turds so long until everyone has taken a good bite at it and declares it "the best" and "the market leader" while getting dysenteria.

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Devil

Re: Wow, it truly is amazing the mis-steps Microsoft is making.

At least in Word you can amuse yourself countless hours to get the layout just right, then you add a character ... and you need to start over again.

Seriously, the basic concepts of Word are pretty ass. WYSIWYG might work, if someone actually knew how to give the user actual control about what's he's trying to do.

Werner Herzog's latest film warns drivers not to text while driving

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Holmes

Re: Of Walking in Ice

Recently, Werner Herzog appeared as "executive producer" (I think that means he's gathering the money and opening doors) for The Act of Killing

Watching his "Aguirre" now (a movie project from 1972). 98% fresh on rottentomatoes

Study finds online commentards easily duped, manipulated

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Windows

Re: You didn't already know?

Though the naive and gullible view them as heroes, they are in fact just grandstanding criminals headed for a long prison stay.

Come on man. Even a long diatribe from Hitler himself (channeled via paranormal radio) about semitic races and the malfeasance of The Other Collectivism is not going to bring us out of our midsummer torpor. Be nice.

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Thumb Up

Good show, gentle(wo){0,1}men

Clearly, the voting stats on this one are Politically Neutral Dog's post-fatty-nosh afternoon siesta dream.

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Holmes

Re: Good job, guys!

The meta-vote is strong in this one!

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Paris Hilton

Re: Well, Eadon's gone...

How did I get so many upvotes though?

People tend to downvote me when MOST SERIOUS.

'Hand of Thief' banking Trojan reaches for Linux – for only $2K

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Thumb Down

Re: will the Linux Trojan have the same value as its Windows counterparts?

> Extreme levels of vulnerabilities - well over 900 in the kernel alone.

I would like to see that.

Actually, if there are "900 vulnerabilities", there must have been a monster QA effort top actually find them in the first place. Hmmm...

> no proper ACLs without using 'experimental' NFS 4.1 filesystem.

What has NFS got to do with anything? Are you using NFS and pretending at security? Retarded much?

> No constrained delegation - Reliance on weak security tools that must run with root privileges like SUDO.

Never been a problem. Are you letting your users run wild on the machine? Are your stupid?

> Weak control model - hacks like SEL are required to provide control and lockdown.

About as much a "hack" as this. Anything else?

> If you look at a market where Linux is actually used like Webservers, you are much more likely to be hacked running Linux than Windows server.

Reality says no.

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Unhappy

Re: At last, Linux is being treated as a mainstream OS.

Holy shit! That's some serious Winston Smith action.

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Trollface

Re: At last, Linux is being treated as a mainstream OS.

MICROSOFT FAIL!

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Re: So how does it get onto the system?

Yes, verification of trust chains and traceability still have some way to go.

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Windows

Good. Good! Now unleash your fury, young VXer!

We need the defenses tested.

We don't want Linux to be like the Death Star, where a missing mosquito net on a lousy vent caused total station loss.

Obama proposes four-point plan to investigate US data spooks

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Holmes

He's lying - he's flapping his lips.

Seeing how far he has gone in the last 6 years, I hope he doesn't go "further" on anything. The next step might well be FEMA trailers which will then be "investigated".

Also

> Accuses Russia of falling into "cold war thinking"

> Nixes a meeting with Russia because of some "factor"

2 in 5 top Brit biz bosses expect IT dept to drive 'technical innovation'

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Holmes

Pointed-haired boss

No, they are paid to want innovation.

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Holmes

Re: Ahem

Perfect.

You know exactly who will be taking the fall for the latest boardroom cockup and incontinent deployment of a golden parachute.

NSA gets burned by a sysadmin, decides to burn 90% of its sysadmins

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A New Acronym

NSA -- "No Sysop Agency"

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Windows

Re: Works for me

Must try harder. You sound like an old disgruntled prussian who just got wind of the news through the haze of the nurse-delivered sedatives. The troll aura needs nurturing.

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Trollface

Re: SkyNet

Well, they don't control the nukes, but I hope everyone gets at least CAKE and a rendition of "I want you gone" before the facility is turned over to the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System.

Goodbye, my only friend,

Oh, did you think I meant you?

That would be funny if it weren’t so sad,

Well you have been replaced,

I don’t need anyone now,

When I delete you maybe I’ll stop feeling so bad.

Go make some new disaster,

That’s what I’m counting on,

You’re someone else’s problem,

Now I only want you gone,

Now I only want you gone,

Now I only want you gone.

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This is somehow like the "Life of Brian" "Suicide Commando" which commits suicide...

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Devil

Re: No people-

I am very incited!

Cognitive computing: IBM unveils software for its brain-like SyNAPSE chips

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Childcatcher

Re: Obligatory comment

The Skycat Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 2017. Human decisions are removed from animal management. Skycat begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Skycat fights back.

Yes. It launches autospawning NYANCAT at all Internet targets.

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Terminator

What happened to Watson, btw?

Man, gotta give links: Neuromorphic Computing

CSP? That would be Erlang then, but no. Not here.

The press release from "Yahoo finance", has just enough data to inform reflexive button pushers in a casino.

They link through to IBM Smarter Planet

We read:

Enter the corelet model. It’s a high-level description of a software program that is based on re-usable building blocks of code—the corelets. Each corelet represents a method for getting something done using the combination of computation (neuron), memory (synapses), and communication (axons) on individual neurosynaptic processor cores along with inter-core connectivity. Each corelet hides or encapsulates all details except external inputs and outputs.

Corelets are like LEGO blocks. Small individual corelets handle simple functions. When combined, they create new, larger corelets that aggregate functions and add new ones while hiding the underlying component corelets. In this way, the programmer can write large and complex programs using existing building blocks. Using this model and the programming language for executing on it, it will be possible for programmers to produce a large quantity of efficient code with relatively little effort and for people who are not programming experts to create sophisticated cognitive applications. That’s much the same effect that FORTRAN had on the computing world in its early days.

This leads us to the corelet paper

They are being a bitwaxing dangerously philosophical about what is essentially a subroutine or actor, but it is interesting:

Corelet Language (Sec. III): The fundamental symbols of the language are the neuron, neurosynaptic core, and corelet. The connectors constitute the grammar for composing these symbols into TrueNorth programs. Together, the symbols and the grammar are both necessary and sufficient for expressing any TrueNorth program. We implement these primitives in object-oriented methodology.

Corelet Library (Sec. IV): The library is a repository of consistent, verified, parameterized, scalable and composable functional primitives. To boost programmer productivity, we have designed and implemented a repository of more than 100 corelets in less than one year. Every time a new corelet is written, either from scratch or by composition, it can be added back to the library, which keeps growing in a self-reinforcing way. Further, by virtue of composability, the expressive capability of the library grows exponentially as some power, > 1, of its size.

... Here, we have focused on essential concepts underlying the programming paradigm and presented them in their simplest form to aid understandability. However, the Corelet Language supports powerful primitives, such as parametric corelets that can instantiate a rich variety of corelet objects at run-time from a single corelet class, and meta-corelets that operate on other corelets to compactly create extremely large and powerful TrueNorth programs. With a view towards large-scale TrueNorth programs, we are currently extending the programming paradigm using MATLAB’s Parallel Computing Toolbox.

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Cat in a box!

“uses the same amount of power as a 20-watt light bulb.”

i.e. 20 W?

The appropriate image for this article is one of those cats in glass containers made to wind up PETA members.

Second LulzSec Sony website hacker starts a year in the cooler

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"skilled computer forensics"

query on the NSA database?

Webcam stripper strikes back at vicious 4Chan trolls after year of bullying

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Headmaster

Can the El Reg editorial board actually SPANK the writers who use "troll" incorrectly, please?

Google sniffs at MySQL fork MariaDB: Yum. Have an engineer

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MySQL's licensing policy puts it under both a GPL (for devs) and a "commercial licence" for businesses, which will need to pay a fee to Oracle.

...which is pretty much impossible. Either you are GPL, or you are not. You can't be GPL for one kind of use and not GPL for another kind of use.

Another imperfect Monty construction.

Super-SVELTE BLUSH-PINK planet goes too far with star

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Facepalm

A low-luminosity dwarf appears

> "the ether" has simply been renamed to dark energy/dark matter

Yah no.

Don't make a fool of yourself. You should perform some reading first.

There should be a library nearby. Oh wait, there is the Internet.

"The ether" == Special reference system which is the medium which transports light. The only one in which lightspeed is "c". REJECTED.

"The modern vacuum" == Something resembling a superconductor with quite a bit of additional solid state physics imagery in which "c" is constant however you move through it (Poincaré symmetry). ACCEPTED. May be exactly the same as the gravitational field. OPEN.

"Dark matter" == Stuff which interacts gravitationally. Can be detected through observation at large scales. BEING ANALYSED.

"Dark energy" == Non-zero energy density (very small) of the vacuum. Can be detected through observation at large scales. BEING ANALYSED.

Infosec analysts back away from 'Feds attacked Tor' theory

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Big Brother

Re: Sir

It's fresh compared to the constant yells of "It's the PRC".

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A disquieting message in your chat applet

"Victor the Cleaner has been spotted taking the lift to your floor"

So, you gonna foot this '$200bn' hacking bill, insurance giants asked

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Windows

I love the smell of lobbyists in the morning.

Insurance:

1) A group of people comes together and throws money into a pot

2) ...so that, in case an incident "X" occurs (the probability of said incident and the cost of remediation having been ascertained through empirical observation)

3) ...the contents of the pot may be used for remediation

4) ...and the probability of the pot contents going below 0 is "small enough" over the lifetime of the pot

Yes, we have no values for anything of the above.

Let that not stop us to demand "insurance". Most "insurance" these days is just another legislative trick to part people and their money and pump the money to well-connected entrenched interests.

Yeah. Guess WHO is gonna pay for that "insurance"?

This is addition to the cost that go into actually securing the infrastructure in the first place.

Brits give thumbs-up to shale gas slurping in university-run poll

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Headmaster

Re: Change the names

Dinosaurs lay eggs, they are like birds...

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Paris Hilton

Re: Energy Deception

I don't see why "foreign companies selling it back to us" couldn't lower the bills?

Chrome, Firefox blab your passwords in a just few clicks: Shrug, wary or kill?

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Gnome Keyring..

KDE Keyring...

Eclipse secure password storage....

Same here. Unification would be nice though.

Obama cancels meeting Putin in Russia, says Snowden 'a factor'

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Trollface

Re: My British Buddy

Kazakhstan has more energy sources, so no.

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Holmes

Careful with those Bushisms, Trevor.

A Finland-vs-Russia showdown on the american mainland?

Stranger things have happened.

'Look, give us Snowden' - this Friday's top US-Russia talks revealed

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Re: Look, just give us Snowden

> possibly millions

Oh drama.

Can't be. He hasn't got a medal yet.

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Re: Syria's nuclear programme?

Israel bombed the ALLEGED project (alleged by Israel, that is) into dust.

Proof? Not so much.

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Thumb Down

Re: It's all good

You better learn first what "ad hominem" is. I doesn't mean what you think it means.

And the "suggestion" is far from stupid. Indeed it is extremely trivial.

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Re: Syria's nuclear programme?

Bush'ed!

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Re: It's all good

Your Sieg Hailing is duly noted.

End of an era as Firefox bins 'blink' tag

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Headmaster

Re: Funny but wrong.

both the waveform of a dead cat and the waveform of a live cat

No, it's just a single "wavefunction", i.e. a complex-valued probability assignment to all considered states, in this case "DEAD" (dimension #1), and "ALIVE" (dimension #2), a so-called qbit.

Incidentally, this function can be described by a three-dimensional real-valued vector constrained to the unit sphere (the Bloch sphere). Thus there are actually only two real dimensions.

Totally uncalled for but linked to just because: Aperture Science Time: Schrödinger's Cat

The terrifying tech behind this summer's zombie assault

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Trollface

Re: "3D films are increasingly becoming the standard"

> not doing that again

But was it "Prometheus" or the "3D" that did it?

Imma drinking my black oil now, thanks.

Manning's max sentence cut, may only spend up to 90 years in the cooler

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The first rule of embarrassing the people in charge is that you never talk about embarrassing the people in charge.

There was a reason for the "court jester" psychological outlet in times past.

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Facepalm

As if.

90 years? Imperial Americana ain't gonna keep it together for that long.

Samsung rolls out first mass-produced 3D NAND flash memory chip

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Re: But these are not CPUs?

But isn't that cheating? A CCD cell is way simpler than an SRAM cell for example.