* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

All hail AT&T! Champion of the open internet and users' privacy!

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Big Brother

Sigh!

Referring to the extraordinary news that Donald Trump Jr had taken a meeting with a Russian government lawyer offering damaging information on his father's presidential rival – and then repeatedly lied about it

You see, dear author. You cannot accuse others of cynicism when you yourself are providing "facts" that just aren't, embiggened with fast-breathing partisanship.

> "extraordinary news"

A prior judgement. Is this news "extraordinary"? Really. I doubt it. But adding adjectives is a nice way of penetrating the filters of the target audience.

> a meeting with a Russian government lawyer

Shock! Ties to Russia! Well, let's cite RT (and why not, it's better than Vox and shit along that line)

Natalia Veselnitskaya was almost certainly not representing the Kremlin when she courted baby Trump. Rather she was lobbying on behalf of a client, mixed up in the Sergei Magnitsky case [a very politicised case that seems to be smokescreened by everybody involved]. To that end, the ex-UK tabloid hack Robert Goldstone exaggerated her usefulness to attract Donald Jr.’s attention. By Trump's own account, he quickly sussed this distorted pretext and pulled back. Plus, it’s worth mentioning how she’s also engaged plenty of Democrats as part of her campaign.

So, did she deliver on La Madame? As far as we are being told, she didn't.

> and then repeatedly lied about it

Should Mr. Trump Jr. have accepted the meeting? Heck no. Did he break "campaign finance laws"? Doubtful. Did he lie? It seems so, as he did not correctly disclose the content or the subject of the meeting. But let's be realistic: It frankly sounds like a set-up. Would you really tell world & dog that a russian lawyer has contacted you about oppo, when fingers are already being pointed at you with the accusation that your ties are less clean than they should be?

Meanwhile, triple-A memoryholed: Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire - Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.-.

Weird, eh?

Funnily enough, charging ££££s for trashy bling-phones wasn't a great idea

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Paris Hilton

Should have marketed this at repellent hip-hoppers with money to burn

Also:

> £128m ($168m) in the red.

How is that even possible? Just melt the metal casings and recover most of the value.

Dark web souk AlphaBay shuts for good after police raids

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Yeah, sounds convenient.

Maybe one wants to look into "services provided but not documented" for various State agencies.

Luxembourg passes first EU space mining law. One can possess the Spice

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Re: wtf ??

It's a law about companies on Earth dealing with mining in space, in particular property and taxation aspects.

This is just standard.

Unfortunately we are very far away from having viable space mining tech.

The way things are going, maybe infinitely away. Well, I have confidence the Chinese can pull something off eventually.

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Re: Dodgy Picture

Replaced shortly before 16:58 by the sandy version.

Come on El Reg.

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> climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

Yup, but not in the next 600 millions years.

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Re: Dodgy Picture

It's actually a picture of Anti-Rakis, where everything is reversed, sand is water, the Harkonnen are the good guys and the Atreides are evil terrorists that need to be defuned/sanctioned.

A bit like in the newspapers.

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Holmes

This assumption is correct.

The problem is that there is correctly zero tech to do any sort of space mining whatsoever, and you will have to touchdown in China or the US or the Africa-reformatted-by-China, and thus pay "landing taxes"...

It also doesn't agree with Luxembourg's anti-nuclear stance. Chemical rocket space mining? I laugh. Now, if the next law allows plutonium reprocessing to begin in the industrial wastelands of its southern part, I will change my current sarcastic stance.

Interestingly, Peter Marquez served as director of space policy under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama

Looks pretty junior. I don't know what he got paid for his efforts, pretty sure it must be a 7-number figure. It sounds like he has one of those close-to-State revolving door jobs that are amply rewarded for emitting Word documents.

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Alien

Of course it was a Grey area.

And it will stay that way, goddammit.

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Re: Existing Sentient claims

You better hire the United States Space Corps to protect your claims.

Looking forward to seeing actual Space Marines in action.

Eggheads identify the last animal that will survive on Earth until the Sun dies

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Re: Tardigrades will Inherit the Earth

This is a teaser for Half-Life 3, right?

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Paris Hilton

Prof, please!

If Tardigrades are Earth's most resilient species, who knows what else is out there?

Well, either nothing or more tardigrades?

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Re: Primitive Life?

You just need a centrally held map on how the hell you are supposed to look like and rebuild rthe organism around that. It would even fix the cancer problems.

Nature is too distributed.

Electric driverless cars could make petrol and diesel motors 'socially unacceptable'

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Re: Batteries are expensive and take longer than 5 min to charge

How the holy hell do you run on ammonia?

It might be useful as reaction mass for space-going vehicles (like in 2001), but on Earth?

It's highly toxi and volatile, too.

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Holmes

Re: The man thing...

Lafferty's "Interurban Queen" was a short story with a very Progressive Obamite/Hillarite Outlook:

“Lafferty depicts an America where electric interurban transport had won out over the automobile, which the group-centred interurbanites have outlawed. The picture he paints is of a friendly, idyllic land free of urban blight, agriculture and industry being blended into lovely, evenly-populated “quasiurbia”, unified by convenient public transport. But it is also a land where competition having yielded completely to cooperation, the individualist and the loner are not tolerated; and those who persist in driving bootleg cars are considered incorrigible menaces to society, whom it is the duty of all right-thinking citizens to shoot on sight in approved vigilante manner. What makes “Interurban Queen” so remarkable, though, is the incredible tonal balance with which Lafferty handles the two sides of this question: I cannot tell, even with inside knowledge of Lafferty's personal politics, where his sympathies lie — probably a historic first in s-f of this type.”

—Sheryl Smith, Riverside Quarterly Vol. 7 No. 2 (1982)

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Mushroom

Electric vehicles everywhere

Where's my thousands of nuclear reactors and Plutonium reprocessing plants at, green punk?

Fake Newspaper steals Reg design to spruik storage upstart

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Re: You're having a laugh?

Come on, you know this was just a 'mercial to put Weka.io on the map.

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Re: The Delirium Brief

Something to read then, but frankly the current news cycle is (Neocon) Delirium Brief enough for me.

U Vlad bro? Docker accidentally cuts off Ukraine

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Holmes

S.772: "Countering Iran's Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017"

I don't manage to follow US conflict-generating behaviour on a day-to-day basis but apparently an additional sanction bill is winding its way through the legislative digestive system and it has already been accepted by the Senate: Senate passes measure to expand sanctions on Iran and Russia. The Reps House will have to give its opinion on this next.

Well, this bill is a fresh, hardcorer approach at getting rid of Putler:

US SENATE STRIKES FOR RUSSIAN EQUALITY – THE OLIGARCHS TARGETED IN NEW SANCTIONS BILL

Not since the German government arranged for Vladimir Lenin to return to Russia, crossing German territory in a sealed train on April 16, 1917, has a foreign state at war with Russia done something as revolutionary as the US Senate did on June 15, 2017. That is when, by a vote of 98 to 2, the senators began the process of attacking the Russian oligarchs. They are the men who have dominated the Russian economy for more than twenty years, concentrating more national wealth in their hands than can be found in any other major state in the world today.

Unremarked by the senators themselves; unreported by the American press; and unnoticed, almost, in Russia, the new measure — if adopted by the full Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump — will target the oligarchs’ lines of credit to international banks; the brokers, repositories and clearinghouses of their shares and bonds; their trade with the US and Europe; their US companies, bank accounts, boats on the high seas and homes abroad. If targeting the oligarchs is followed by formal sanctions, the aim will be to destroy their power at home and abroad. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation hasn’t contemplated this much.

...

S.722 goes much further, codifying the existing Russian sanctions in statute which the White House cannot relieve by presidential decree; imposing new sanctions the same way; and setting up a scheme of reporting of new targets. By itself, the report process will immediately trigger informal sanctions, with or without the formal orders to follow.

In this new Senate bill, the targeting is no longer crimes committed, or even the restraint of competition, but Russian wealth itself, and the oligarchs who have most of it. That is revolutionary. So is the exception in Section 241(a)(1)(A) for “their closeness to the Russian regime”. That’s a call for the oligarchs to join Mikhail Khodorkovsky in open rebellion.

This is going to be tremendous.

UK spookhaus GCHQ can crack end-to-end encryption, claims Australian A-G

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Facepalm

These are the people who are in charge

Top. Men!

In related matters, IMF exhorts Germans to "save less, spend more".

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Re: So what's the use?

You may notice that the Law of Supply and Demand has been legislated away some time ago by the introduction of Central Banking.

Why, you can get credits of 0% or lower these days, while your savings that you hand to somebody to use actually give you negative interest.

Set your alarms for 2.40am UTC – so you can watch Unix time hit 1,500,000,000

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Re: I may have a problem Huston

Download jQuery

Will the last person at Basho please turn out the lights?

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Re: and the UK NHS thought this was a mature technology to pin the NHS "Spine" on?

Actually Erlang (or Elixir, also running on the BEAM virtual machine) is very cool, although anytyped. These days, you can get the Actor model on the JVM as Akka too (in Scala).

I just want to find the time behind a sofa to study the Phoenix web server ....

Dear racist Airbnb host, we've enrolled you in an Asian American studies course

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Big Brother

It's called fascism, I mean "progressivism".

An Airbnb host who cancelled a guest's booking at the last minute because she was Asian has been fined $5,000 and told to attend a course on Asian American studies.

Yup, reeducation camp. Can't have you have an opinion that is contrary to The Only Allowed Opinion You Can Have, Ever.

War is Peace.

Conformity Is Strength.

Obama was the Saviour and We Don't Deserve Him.

Trust The Reeducation!

Hey, remember that monkey selfie copyright drama a few years ago? Get this – It's just hit the US appeals courts

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Mushroom

Chimp Copyrights Matter! Not!

This is not a genetically uplifted chimp, discontinue this stupidity forthwith!

Naruto will be on the dinner plate or otherwise deceased until this is over in any case.

Brit military scolded for being too selfish with sexy high-end tech

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Trollface

Muh dominance of the seas!

It's all well and good having two new aircraft carriers to dominate the high seas

Yes. When Putler drove his coal-fired Bismarksoff cruise thing through the Channel, the Home Fleet and the Press showed him good!

Now two largish targets cruising around, trying to keep away from any areas reachable by missiles or possibly ICBMs will better the put-downs immensely.

Uncle Sam says 'nyet' to Kaspersky amid fresh claims of Russian ties

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Facepalm

Seriously? Someone has ties?

Hopefully, american businesses working closely with US government entities will be banned outside of the "homeland".

That sure would simplify things and increase overall manageability.

Hackers able to turbo-charge DJI drones way beyond what's legal

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Mushroom

Re: "It's a bit silly to leave debug code in production apps"

It is absolutely correct to leave debug code in production apps.

Only idiots permanently thinking of the terrorists or people "stealing muh intellectual prupperty" would disagree.

(One guy in particular who wrote something about terror attacks via John Deere tractors or some equally abysmally stupid idea, can't remember. It's easier to commandeer a random truck, that's just the satb of a knife away.)

Meanwhile: AI to Ensure Fewer UFOs: To respond to a plague of drones, airports and other venues deploy AI systems to track and identify intruders

Trump to world: Forget moving to America to do a startup

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Paris Hilton

Late Obama Age Crazyness

What a weird rule.

1) Obtain 250K in taxpayer money (how?)

2) Move to the FreedomLand to have a good time, sit on sofas, click on iPad things, drive around in Teslas

3) Stay when the money runs out (?)

It sounds weirdly like sponsored immigration or maybe just another scheme to push out all that printed fake money into the populace, a thing Obama was popular for.

Don't see what the fuss is in delaying its implementation.

America doesn't need even more startups, but companies that are not thriving on monetarist policies.

passed it on the second-last day of his presidency

That was when he was going a bit coo-coo in the head and quickly allowing the Security State to "share because they care".

Also The Madman Maestro vs CNN

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Holmes

Re: Chinese entrepeneures....so his buddy Putin can rule the world

I guess the Russians have given up on Europe and either wait until sanity prevails and Europe manages to disentangle from the the NATO cancer and have its own non-neoconned politicial outlook or until the who sad confusion crumbles under its own contradictions and rampant immigration.

Meanwhile they are looking at China. That's where the money is: The Russo-Chinese "Alliance" Explained

Bloke takes over every .io domain by snapping up crucial name servers

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Re: Matthew Bryant

Somebody must ask him whether he hates anything Sun and Solaris.

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Re: It was predicted by Arthur C. Clarke...

Because that is now a subdomain of .africa?

LHC finds a new and very charming particle: the Xicc++ baryon

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Re: 1.7 femtobarns?

hitting a Java vehicle should be easier, it's quite larger than a barn

It's probably a Java Enterprise Edition vehicle then.

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Holmes

Re: Quote of the day

I prefer Fermi's warning to Louis Slotin to stop monkeying around in an agile way with a Plutonium core:

“Keep doing that experiment that way and you’ll be dead within a year.”

Slotin was dead within a year.

Never disregard an Italian's advice when death is on the line.

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Holmes

Re: When does it all go wrong?

No.

The Standard Model indeed predicts nothing drastic will happen anywhere, it is regarded as a "low energy" approximation of .... something.

Which may be everything.

The moving of the goalposts for the energy scale at which supersymmetric particles are supposed to appear is symptomatic.

The idea is setting in that "the big desert" hypotheses may well hold: Nothing drastic happens up to energy scales so high as to be unattainable except by God itself.

Weinberg on the Desert, Seiberg on QFT: Posted on December 9, 2014 by woit

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Headmaster

“In contrast to other baryons, in which the three quarks perform an elaborate dance around each other, a doubly heavy baryon is expected to act like a planetary system, where the two heavy quarks play the role of heavy stars orbiting one around the other, with the lighter quark orbiting around this binary system”.

This is apparently not the right image to have in mind.

Check this nice stack overflow entry: How (or when) do gluons change the color of a quark?

Why does the universe infrastructure perform these crazy girations with complex probabilities tacked onto everything? Lattice QCD simulations of a simple nuclean on 16×16×16×32 grids eat CPU cycles raw.

OMG, dad, you're so embarrassing! Are you P2P file sharing again?

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Okay.

I'm off to a riot for some undocumented shopping.

Roland McGrath steps down as glibc maintainer after 30 years

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Re: Somebody Please

Me too.

Also, donate to the FSF or wherever.

Largest advertising company in the world still wincing after NotPetya punch

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Re: Class action lawsuit against the NSA?

My Chinese Cookie says "unlikely"

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Trollface

Re: Local admin rights

Why on earth does an accounting application require local admin rights other than perhaps for installations?

Preemptive tax auditing & collection?

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We need to merge boardroom meetings, malware and Grenfell tower conflagrations. But how?

Trump's CNN tantrum could delay $85bn AT&T-Time Warner merger

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Trollface

Muh CNN!

Best commentary on the dumbass attack suffered by CNN actually on RT:

The Hunt for Reddit User: CNN proves it can do investigative journalism

RT is quite like El Reg: Between the sponsored content and lines fed by the ministry of goodthink, there is stuff one can agree with.

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Re: Anti-Trump bias?

CNN viewership is up in the last year. They are gaining viewers.

Liberventionist mindcontrol emitter aka Clinton News Network. A sad statement about Murric, really.

May the excessive force be with you: Chap cuffed after Star Trek v Star Wars row turns bloody

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Mushroom

What is this ballot?

There isn't even "Alien" (aka "Space Truckers vs. Illegal Immigrants") on it. Space-Pirate based arms-bearing libertarianism is also forgotten. Why even vote? And one cannot even disfigure the ballot. Is this modern democracy!

Completely gratuitous article on voter abstention by someone who actually likes Corbyn: Elections: Absenteeism, Boycotts and the Class Struggle.

While USA is distracted by its President's antics, China is busy breaking another fusion record

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Re: "some physicists reject his theories"

Hydrinos are still alive?

I remember when it was just claimed that the electrons improbably dropped down an orbital to yield "compacter hydrogen" and energy. 20 years ago or so?

So the story changed to "conversion to dark matter".

Microsoft hits Alt-F4 on 3,000 global sales staff

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Re: Does this mean an end to the extortion calls?

There will just be a menacing van with Victor the Lawyer doing daily rounds, creating management sweatstains,

Tape lives! The tape archive bit bucket is becoming bottomless

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Re: Long term problem

Regularly re-read random tapes from the vault just to see?

You will notice unavailable tape drives relatively quickly.

It's like checking that all the plutonium is still in the basement vault.

Windows Insiders with SD cards turn into OneDrive outsiders

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Paris Hilton

Wut?

the industry standard of support for NTFS

That's a new one. I thought it was FAT?

DeepMind needs to think about the broader implications of its tech – report

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Re: Clinical trials

isn't there a formal protocol to make a statistical comparison between the outcomes of Google's diagnosis and those of existing diagnostic methods?

I thought this basically is the statistical comparison?

Create a user called '0day', get bonus root privs – thanks, Systemd!

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Re: the problem with clueless amateurs...

must return values for things like "the file wasn't opened" and "attempting to overflow the buffer

Any other good ideas from the medieval era?