* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Hey Intel, Microsoft: Share those profits with your PC pals, eh? - analyst

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Why is there such a disconnect

"It's painful to see, and certainly isn't great PR for capitalism and the free market"

On the contrary. This opens possibilities for new entrants. That's what it is about. Unless they are kept off the market by "Intellectual Property" (state-subsidized monopoly, that is), which is a pain for everyone.

The alternative is to have a Soviet Computer For Everyone on your desk. You know you don't want that for quite a lot of reasons.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Mature market

"I doubt that the PC is dead. For a lot of purposes, especially business or serious work, you need a keyboard and a mouse and a decent screen at arm's length."

That has always been the case. Even in the area of clunky 486 with horrible OS, you could get a decent machine for approx 10'000 USD (the then-valued USD) from SGI. We may be getting back to that.

NASA-backed fusion engine could cut Mars trip down to 30 days

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Stunning

Why do you want to put social science majors reconverted as webmonkeys into engineering?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: I don't get it

Rocket Equation

Researcher hacks aircraft controls with Android smartphone

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Nope!

The funny thing about feedback loops is that it can end at least two ways.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Now I know how these russian dudes managed to crash an airliner in Die Hard II by just moving the ground's representation on a CRT.

No wait, planes weren't as computerized back then...

Anyway, this all seems rather far-fetched and complicated to pull off when it's easier to blow up a 4x4 at a mall.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Sky's the limit

"Always assume there are people out there much cleverer than you are."

I think you just invalidated your own argument. You are none too clever.

Bitcoin gets a $100 haircut on rollercoaster trading run

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
WTF?

D'Oh!

Well, it's definitely not a Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff's investment pyramid is a Ponzi scheme. "Quantitative Easing" is Ponzi scheme. Social security is a Ponzi scheme. This here? Just the standard "bubble". Bubble up, bubble down.

This dramatic rise has led to people investing into the currency that are not technically skilled enough to understand the complex principles on which the system works

Unskilled? It happens to the "best". Quite a few ministers of finance and economics as well as that nobel-prizewinning economist-clown writing columns in the NYT are not skilled enough to understand even basic economic principles. What you gonna do about it? Always look on the bright side of life...

Bitcoin's virtues as a digital currency may not yet be clear, but right now its devotees are treating it like a commodity, and this can only end in tears.

Money *must* be a commodity, what else? And it must not be easily generated either. Next you will be telling me cheap paper with pretty pictures and flowery signatures of semi-dead males on it and monopolized/imposed by a government outfit hidden in a repurposed 18th-century building with lots of marble and large wooden doors is "money". I laugh!

(Although, is bitcoin a "money"? Opinions diverge)

Windows 8 has put the world's PC market to sleep - IDC

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Muahaha---

Make your kit-shifting dependent on a rape-bus piloted by a head salesman with the meat sweats and staffed with his band of motley fools and serfs trying to follow the yuppie transporter in front.

Reap what you sow.

On a related tack, I'm sure state-worshippers will demand that "austerity" measures be relaxed for a righteous uptick in sales. Yeah, that's gonna help (as if there were any in the first place)

'Close to one in three - sorry, one in eight - SMEs are software pirates'

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

Re: Priorities

Do you forget about TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT? Do you let it fall BY THE WAYSIDE?

Well, yes.

And the actual, REAL priority is PAYING THE TAXMAN. Never ever forget paying your protection money.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Windows

One-eyed Large Disk Rusty sez...

"What do you think, Rocco? Are we pirates?"

"Crooopy! Croooooopy! Arrrrhh!"

ACLU documents shows free access to emails for IRS tax police

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
WTF?

AS IF!

"Intuit fighting hard to retain its market by blocking moves to simplify the tax system"

Uh yeah, Small Bad Capitalists bring YOU to tears by influencing politicians. Crying_Indian.jpg

As if that was needed.

Tax shenanigans are used profitable to solicit votes from this or that voter block. It ain't gonna go anywhere soon.

Hopefully the fact that the confiscation outfit also can check your e-mail will finally kick people into PGP mode.

Frightening fondleslabs branded Hannibal Lecter of UK PC market

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

Re: why are pc's/macs sold

Angry Birds only needs to be written once.

Big Data’s booming. So why hasn't the channel caught on yet?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

"Big Data" sounds more like "Bubble Data"

So the battle for understanding of "The Cloud" is over?

"It took time for resellers and their customers to understand exactly what cloud computing was, and what it could do for their business, and for vendors to educate them about the cost and efficiency benefits it could bring."

I am in "the industry" and I still don't know what cloud computing is and what it can do for my business. "The cloud" is like Hegelian philosophy: it's obscure, quite probably content-free (if someone managed to drill down through the jargon) and likely to have a hidden nefarious agenda (in Hegel's case, making the Prussian State your New God, Forever).

So, Cloud: Just tell me you want to host my data and do all the ancilliary things: power, data pipes, security, killing roaches in the server room, security, replacing faulty machines, and security. Then I can ask where, how, how often, how do I get out and what are the legal implications (the latter evidently still being worked on at the Eurocratic Offices).

"Big Data is similar. There’s a compelling case for companies to analyse the vast quantities of data sitting idle on servers to better understand and serve customers, and respond in a more agile way to business change. But that education has been piecemeal at best."

I don't know about that compelling case. How many companies do have lots of data of interest that they can legally hold and analyze for some profit? Sure there is scientific companies, research companies, medical companies, engineering companies, but these already know their data and it's not sitting idle. Retailers may have billions of sales slips (pseudo-anonymized via 'fidelity card number', natch), but what to do with these? We already have had the Data Warehouse thing from the '00s...

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Windows

Re: Big Data Solution

Obvious vendor-sponsored posting is obvious.

Boffins propose photon-swapping entanglement experiment on ISS

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: Well at least it's almost science

> But it's also 'proving' something that nobody seriously doubts

You are unfortunately rather clueless. That "nobody" is you and your dog, I suppose?

It is by no means clear whether entanglement should hold over vast distances and speed differences.

> but still pointless

GB2 your PS3.

> Otherwise it's like repeating the Michelson-Morley experiment in Houston to check if the aether exists in the confederacy

Dumbass.

Also, the confederacy had been absorbed in the United States of Lincoln by that time. Unitary presidency, here we come!

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
FAIL

> Hard on the heels of a Chinese claim to have measured the speed at which entanglement can transfer information,

Don't you mean "to have measures the speed at which entanglement does not transfer information"?

French spies do a Barbara Streisand over secret nuke radio base

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Facepalm

1) It is "pas de fumée sans feu"

2) If you want to evade the guns and badges of the french tax nazis, what would that have to do with anything about a military place on wikipedia? An article about belgian expats would be more appropriate.

And then,,,

"The Foundation takes allegations of national security threats seriously and investigated the matter accordingly."

Yeah, they are okay with endlessy discussing/censoring/moderating the particular ways cats fall down stairs, but once the real stuff his the HTTP request, they chill the fuck out.

Fracking peter puffers.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Re: Probably an Idiot

> we advertise engineered solutions to any problem

Does this involve the use of polonium and/or dioxin?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
WTF?

Re: It's preprogrammed...

This "amurrica fuck year" retardation is actually getting tiresome.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: It's not a radio base...

> garlic-breathed onion-seller

Dude, these are jewish!

Free online Uni courses pressure vendors to drop training costs

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

“You're paying for the certification. That's where the value lies.”

Not quite! Cisco is moving the revenue collection onto the place where they still can. Not the same.

The value for CISCO lies in shifting kit at a later time. Fee collection from certification is a nice side-earner, but...

The value for the candidate lies in higher future income. He pays for this with time and dedication. He may also pay for a teaching course in a proper classroom. He may also pay for a certification to more easily show to employers that he indeed attended said course. Does that need to come from CISCO? Not necessarily.

US Air Force reclassifies 6 cyber tools as weapons

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Speaking as a guy who helps companies fill high-tech positions ...

If find your lack of cyberfaith disturbing!

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Quick - use the second amendment....

> If it's a weapon, does that give American citizens the rights to use them

Wait until some progressive makes this His Problem Of Today™, watch concerned people writing Nancy Pelosi about those "military tools that can be downloaded from the Internet totally legally by your creepy neighbour".

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Windows

Re: Full Metal Mouse Pad

"Are you quitting on me? Well, are you? Then quit, you slimy fucking neckbeard-looking piece of shit. Get the fuck off of my terminal. Get the fuck down off of my terminal. Now. Move it. I'm going to rip your balls off, so you cannot contaminate the rest of the world. I will motivate you, Private Pyle, if it short-dicks every coder at Microsoft".

MoneySupermarket: Google never warned us about payday loan AD BAN

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Facepalm

The return of the Nanny State attack. Guest star: Evil Google.

"widespread irresponsible lending"

Isn't that what the European Central Bank does?

If you want to stop problematic payday lending, offer lending services at better conditions. But hey, we only lend to dodgy bankers with billion EUR holes, not to hard-up people with zero cash, right?

Otherwise, these practices will just go underground. There is an economic reason why they exist, bureaucrats. Think about it.

'Til heftier engines come aboard, HP Moonshot only about clouds

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Devil

Re: Heat is likely to be a problem

I wonder whether that wouldn't be the case even with today's GPUs.

Library ebooks must SELF-DESTRUCT if scribes want dosh - review

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Childcatcher

'The panel also recommended that digital copies of books should "deteriorate" so publishers can fake them getting worn out and force libraries to buy them again.'

Exactly what we need ... not only the flakiness of the digital copy as opposed to the relative solidity of a book or even its xeroxed counterpart but ... digital deterioration? Fuck. That. Shit. What next? Deteriorating software? More and more NullPointerExceptions until you cash out again? Then the rights holder says "Sorreee, we don't sell that anymore / not in your country / thanks for calling". Then you powerlessly rage and dream of visiting Intellectual Property Advocates to punch them in the face.

You will never again find used books at the recycling center that you then scan and distribute through sneakernet.jpg

HP's 'historic' Project Moonshot servers aim at hyperscale future

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Devil

This can become good.

But ... where is the RAM on that Gemini server node?

And ... Itanium must have been airbrushed out of the future.

Website which 'could have prevented Rwandan genocide' goes live

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: Nonsense

I would watch it.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Of course it couldnt stop it....

These things can only be solved by boots on the ground, and investment in Africa

"boots on the ground": Amurrica Style (how is the Kony bullshit coming, btw?)

"investment in Africa": China Style

You know who will win.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: All well and good but... @Destroy All Monsters

I don't give a wet sock about the opinions of ACs.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: All well and good but...

Thumbs down?

Someone must be looking forward to being the passive protagonist in a cattle transport.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

All well and good but...

Why can't I order up at least small arms of appreciable power (i.e. at least up to .5 in caliber, and including rocket launchers) from that site? Do I really have to dial UN-911, then wait until someone picks up?

“The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.”

Gov report: Actually, evil City traders DIDN'T cause the banking crash

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Just a citation is needed

It's US centric, but then again the world is US centric; thanks WWI and Bretton-Woods!

"Inside Job": A Look at the Heart of the Left - March 15, 2011 by Jeffrey Tucker

I really wanted to love Inside Job, the film that won the Academy award this year for best documentary. And it is a great film, but to see it that way you have to turn your brain “off” even as you push the “on” button on your DVD clicker. The interviews are personal and interesting. The footage of Wall Street and the offices of big players in the world of finance are absolutely gripping. The narrative has energy that pushes this two-hour film forward. It is easy to watch and tells a great story.

Sadly, the filmmakers themselves were hunting for something they did not find. And they did not find it because it is mostly not there. They had decided that the story of the boom of the 2000s and the bust of 2008 was a story of scandal and rampant criminality that purposely sucked away resources from the middle class and the poor to feed the lifestyles of the big shots in high finance. They wanted to find those white-collar criminals who made this whole thing happen and make a case for why they should all be rounded up and jailed.

What they found instead – though they apparently never realized this – was a bunch of interesting and smart people who had mastered the art of chasing prices and chasing paper up during the boom times and down again during the bust times. That’s what entrepreneurs do. If they aren’t going to do that, they could go into some other profession. This isn’t criminality. This riding the business-cycle wave. The problems they are looking for are deeply embedded in the system. They are structural, not personal. If criminals exist in this story, they are most likely to be found within the halls of government. But those people are rather inaccessible whereas the private traders are happy to go on camera.

The biggest problem was that the narrative never asked where all these paper profits were coming from. The monetary angle eluded them completely. The filmmakers missed this structural point because they decided at the outset to trace our problems all the way back to the “eighties.” Now, in the vocabulary of the left, the “eighties” is a curse word. It means Reagan, which means evil. It means capitalism, greed, the rich getting richer, and all the other political cliches we know so well. So rather than looking carefully at the monetary system that generated all this paper, they filmmakers looked to presidents and their great black beast of “deregulation.”

Contrast this point of view with the wonderful speech of David Stockman at the ASC the other day. He was just as passionate about the corruption generated by the system but he found the source in the end of the gold standard. He had a coherent theory that allowed him to see, understand, and explain the world coherently.

The makers of “Inside Job,” by contrast, were all over the place. They are against the boom. But they are against the bust too. They are against the bailouts. But they are against failing to bailout too. They are against housing subsidies. But they are against rationing housing too. They are against the government. But they are against private finance also. Most absurdly, they demand government controls over finance but their own film demonstrates that government is largely captured by private financial interests. They are reduced to looking for ghosts and wishing upon stars.

They end with a demand for people to be locked up, not people in government (I’m all ears on that) but rather people in investment banking, though it it not clear what they did wrong. The worst crime that the film can drag up is how traders were both denouncing certain kinds of commercial paper as junk even as they pushed it on buyers. But look: this shows you what is so wrong about inflated markets. They make junk profitable and depreciate quality as unprofitable. It’s an upside down world when the Fed and moral hazard take over. There really is not contradiction in seeing certain investment vehicles are pure trash even as you sincerely see them as good investments.

This film demonstrates all you need to know about the worldview of the American left, and it is completely barren of sound theory. They weave tales of demons all around, even as they lack the intellectual apparatus to understand events rationally. It really is pathetic. This film is a gigantic missed opportunity. They started to tell a good story and instead ended up chasing around ideological conventions and coming up empty handed. That said, if you can provide your own voice overs, Inside Job is worth an evening.

Upstart $3bn forex trader dumps Oracle JVM for Azul's Zing

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Devil

It's Syndrome, and he's using his Zero-Point Energy Beam to Trade!

Yah Very Nice

... but can one do something useful with it except try to mint dollars from brownian motion?

Spooky action at a distance is faster than light

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: IMHO

> if you change the state of one "particle" you change the state of the other

That's not how it works. You can decide to extract information about the entangled system at once particle, which gives you a classical value - and fixes the classical value at the other end. This does not imply that you "change" anything here or that you "change" anything there.

> Therefore we see 2 "particles" but the entangled "particle" only knows about itself, so you have to look at what's happening from the "particle's" reference point not from ours.

It's two particles though they have correlated state.

The entangled particles "knows" nothing. And you can easily select relatively moving frames in which Alice measures before Bob, and others in which Bob measures before Alice. They will still find the same classical values, surprise! Actually not a surprise if you just drop the idea that states are described by classical vectors or hidden variables. Of course, one can posit magically invisible metaphysical mechanisms to keep this all in the classical space of ideas .. looking at you, Bohmians.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Fallacy?

There is no "frame of reference of the photon". That's what light speed is.

You can do without "c" for spacetime very well indeed. Just stay Galilean.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Yummie crypto

Its not possible. That's what this is about.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Well done ... again.

Still measuring how quickly a statement about a system propagates?

This is basically a null experiment.

- You have a blue and a red car

- One car is a million miles away

- One of the cars is hidden behind a curtain

- When you peek behind the curtain and find out that the there car is blue...

...how fast does the other car become red?

Seriously fast!!

(Ok, so i QM the colors are not set at the start because the mathematics are an extension of classical probability calculus from R to C, but that's basically it)

NASA rules out leading new human lunar expedition

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Terminator

Manned asteroid landing? I'm for that!

Easier than Mars, for sure.

Otherwise, work on those fracking robots. We demand more autonomy.

Android's US market share continues to slip

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Boffin

Re: North American centric sales surveys are less than meaningful ...

Where we go, we don't need no handbook!

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Windows

Re: It's because Americans pay the same on a long-term contract no matter the phone we buy

> runs linux, BSD or friggin VAX?

Where can I get this VAXFONE?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: The real success story ...

They are just resting!

US jobs grew at slower pace in March, says gov

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Keynesianism dead, festering even with bought cretins columning in the NYT and The Indy

"There He Goes Again" - Hunter Lewis - Wednesday, December 12th, 2012

We now have the announcement that Ben Bernanke’s Fed will buy $45 billion a month in treasuries, QE4, until unemployment reaches 6.5% or his version of inflation exceeds 2.5%. What a surprise!

Last September, when Bernanke announced the third phase of the government’s program of borrowing from itself by creating new money and using it to buy government bonds, I wrote:

"Bernanke says that the new announced round of money printing (QE3 plus more Twist) is intended to reduce unemployment. Does he believe that? It is possible that Bernanke really drinks his own Cool Aid, but I doubt it. Does he think that stock market gains will boost confidence and somehow help employment indirectly? Perhaps. He has in the past claimed credit for spiking the stock market, although he must know that the empirical evidence does not show a link to employment gains."...

"Helicopter Ben Runs Out of Ideas for Creating Money" - Joseph Salerno - Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

Ben Bernanke’s confided yesterday that he is unaware of any new method of stimulating economic growth. Spoke Bernanke: “As far as I’m aware, there’s no completely new method that we haven’t [already tapped].” So Helicopter Ben has run out of innovative and unconventional ways to create new money. Lest you be tempted to breathe a bit easier, however, rest assured that the now conventional method of quantitative easing, involving the Fed’s monthly purchase of $85 billion worth of mortgage-backed and U.S. government securities, seems to be working just fine according to Bernanke and he foresees its continuation. Noting the stubbornly high unemployment rate combined with the low inflation rate in the U.S. economy, Bernanke stated, “That is the case for being aggressive, which we are trying to do.” Although he is “cautiously optimistic,” he does promise to closely monitor the risks, efficacy, costs and benefits of this inflationary policy.

It's going swimmingly. Mussolini-admirer Roosevelt keynesianed ahead at full steam for 8 years before starting to ask himself the question whether the problem might be sitting in the Presidential Chair. We are nearly there.

And finally, "The Great Deformation" is out in hardback. Might be a good read.

(...) Accordingly, the central banking branch of the state remains hostage to Wall Street speculators who threaten a hissy fit sell-off unless they are juiced again and again. Monetary policy has thus become an engine of reverse Robin Hood redistribution; it flails about implementing quasi-Keynesian demand–pumping theories that punish Main Street savers, workers, and businessmen while creating endless opportunities, as shown below, for speculative gain in the Wall Street casino.

At the same time, Keynesian economists of both parties urged prompt fiscal action, and the elected politicians obligingly piled on with budget-busting tax cuts and spending initiatives. The United States thus became fiscally ungovernable. Washington has been afraid to disturb a purported economic recovery that is not real or sustainable, and therefore has continued to borrow and spend to keep the macroeconomic “prints” inching upward. In the long run this will bury the nation in debt, but in the near term it has been sufficient to keep the stock averages rising and the harvest of speculative winnings flowing to the top 1 percent.

The breakdown of sound money has now finally generated a cruel endgame. The fiscal and central banking branches of the state have endlessly bludgeoned the free market, eviscerating its capacity to generate wealth and growth. This growing economic failure, in turn, generates political demands for state action to stimulate recovery and jobs.

Boffins shine new light on dark matter

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Re: >wrong how?

I should add the the paper mentioned above seems to imply that dark matter behaves the same as matter whereas it apparently behaves more like a sloshing bosonic liquid...

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Alien

Re: >wrong how?

> no more than the intrusions into our space-time

Could also be invisible ponies. All this "extra dimensions" stuff sounds far fetched and a tad on the "play loose" side to me.

Here is another idea, not that I understand much of it or condone any of it, but there may be solutions right under our nose. Note that this is a classical theory, so you still need to cross the plateau of leng and bring back the key to "quantization" :

MATTER-ANTIMATTER ASYMMETRY AND DARK MATTER FROM TORSION

We propose a simple scenario which explains the observed matter-antimatter imbalance and the origin of dark matter in the Universe. We use the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory of gravity which naturally extends general relativity to include the intrinsic spin of matter. Spacetime torsion produced by spin generates, in the classical Dirac equation, the Hehl-Datta term which is cubic in spinor fields. We show that under a charge-conjugation transformation this term changes sign relative to the mass term. A classical Dirac spinor and its charge conjugate therefore satisfy different field equations. Fermions in the presence of torsion have higher energy levels than antifermions, which leads to their decay asymmetry. Such a difference is significant only at extremely high densities that existed in the very early Universe. We propose that this difference caused a mechanism, according to which heavy fermions existing in such a Universe and carrying the baryon number decayed mostly to normal matter, whereas their antiparticles decayed mostly to hidden antimatter which forms dark matter. The conserved total baryon number of the Universe remained zero.

Bitcoin exchange: Greedy traders to blame for DDoS attack

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

Re: End Point

In government-enforced fiat currencies, we have the inverse problem. The monetary mass is not constant and inflation happens first through issue of new money by the central bank (money which goes to the treasury, then to well-connected cronies for some righteous "spending" at pre-inflation prices, which is the wealth-transfer effect), followed by pyramiding in fracres banking system (1000 units go into your account, 800 units can be lent out while you can still write cheques on your 1000). This quickly causes the purchasing power to decrease (hidden taxation) and zeroes to pile up at the end of prices even though the prices in an improving and non-deteriorating economy should go down.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Re: End Point

> There comes a point where there isn't enough to go around.

There is enough ... to do what exactly?

What you want is a possibility to SUBDIVIDE the money as its purchasing power increases (or alternatively, as price deflation sets in because the possibilities of production are greater). So if a cup of coffee was worth 1 unit, it may be had at 0.001 units after a few years. There is no problem here. You just have to be able to set the decimal point.