* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Amazon staff toiled in 100°F+ warehouse

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Mushroom

Right. Ok. So what?

"Low-paid Amazon workers, many of whom were temporary agency contractors, sweated this summer in temperatures above 100°F (38°C) in a shipping warehouse, a US newspaper investigation has revealed."

SO DID I during that European Heatwave Attack back when. And I was supposed to write programs.

Bore me with some other unionized worker complaints crap.

How to go from the IT dept to being a rogue trader

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It's called a sociopath breeder

More dangerous than a plutonium breeders coz the IAEA won't come take a look-see.

But in the end, one can just socialize the cost. Hey John, kickstart that printing press, willya? Someone needs a bailout.

Star Wars: The Complete Saga Blu-ray disc set

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Thumb Up

Epic Review is Epic

There were even scenes discussed in Phantom Menace I can't remember. Must have dozed off.

Still, some disturbing "Here Comes Johnny" stuff in there.

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Megaphone

Han shot Solo!

If they were "just films" no-one would buy them, just download them.

This is SERIOUS BUSINESS.

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Pint

"she has two days to realize that she has better things to do"

Keep the hope up you must!

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Alien

22 downvotes!

Let a lesson to you this be!

Google's Native Client goes live in Chrome

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Headmaster

NO!

If you want to crack U-Boat codes, you can hack something up on the quick that may work under certain very specific circumstances and as long as you have a motel of geniuses, a large box of duck tape and a rosary to do your daily hail marys.

If you want to push out some browser thingamabob to the consumerist unwashed masses, you better move the f*ck off the "I do difficult because I can" arms akimbo posture because down that path lay tears, botnets and class action lawsuits.

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Holmes

"Those segment registers aren't "rarely used"; OSes make heavy use of them."

Did I misunderstand that MMUs today do paging?

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FAIL

"Not Turing Complete", eh?

What, considering that you don't want a while loop in your program, what are you gonna do while it runs? Pick nose while listening to bleeping sounds?

AMD spills secret to World Record clock speed

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FAIL

"Helium should be priced x100"

Doesn't know how price finding works.

Helium is luckily not an exclusively government-managed resource, thus available without papers in triplicate, 20-month waiting period and fingering by the TSA.

Apparently buyers and sellers think that the current price at the current quantity on market is correct. So who is to say that it should be 100 times higher?

Ten years on from Nimda: Worm author still at large

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Meh

Dontcha mean...

...Microsoft's counteroffer in the plugin space, the "access all areas" ActiveX?

Resistance 3

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Big Brother

NO!

Unless ... the bid for a Palestinian state is defeated.

Where is my white cat? I can't move around well in this wheelchair.

Sixty-seven WIMPs spotted in the wild, maybe

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Trollface

Apparently Hawking is considered something of a troll in the physics community as he likes to go off on tangents into mathematical wastelands /like euclidean spacetime/ ans is known to big up the controversy and sale of his rather fluffy books by /claiming the existence of/ /denying the existence of/ /claiming to soon know the mind of/ God, which goes down /well/ /badly/ with whatever empirically challenged talking head is currently on TV, especially in the /babylonian/ /fundamentalist/ old USA.

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WTF?

"Didn't the effects of gravity manage to go faster than light"

No.

That's the whole point of General Relativity: Get rid of Newton's infinitely fast action-at-a-distance and replace it by purely local effects - bent spacetime ("matter tells spacetime how to bend, and spacetime tells matter how to move")

Accelerated masses may radiate gravitational waves but these still go only at the fastest speed allowed around here, which as far as everyone knows is exactly equal to the speed of light in a vacuum.

Nigerians panic over killer calls

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Trollface

This is elementary school scare stuff, right?

Next: People who received an IP packet with 0xDEAD in the header checksum will have their explode like in scanners.

Feds probe naked Scarlett Johansson outrage

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Happy

Socially awkward penguin situation

- Click on Scarlett Johannson nude pix newsflash to be first in comment section.

- Two pages of comments!

Scientists discover Tatooine-style world 200 lightyears off

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Paris Hilton

Pizza the Hutt!

"settled by humans and giant Hutts"

I always thought "the Hutt" was meant to indicate a fat-ass thug of notoriety / baron of crime, possibly well-connected with local imperial law enforcement, not a separate species. But I haven't read Encyclopedia Starwarsica.

Now, about physics: how does the planet manage to keep stable orbit in a two-sun system if it's not Solaris? I know that there are unknown phenomena and even in things as simple as an inverse square law - is this one of them?

Hunt: Online file-sharing is a 'direct assault on freedoms'

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Childcatcher

"You don't have any right to download copyrighted material."

A saying that must be appreciated by imagining a powdered whig and a slightly nasal court accent.

This member of the anarcho-syndicalist collective claims that you don't have any right to copyright material.

Fair is fair.

More transistors, Moore’s Law, less juice

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Mushroom

Grrrr.....

Anyone remember when "laws" involved Lagrangians, or at least a citation of Maxwell and not some fuddy-duddy empirical stuff pulled out of a noisy spreadsheet ranging over a limited time like it's John Maynard Keynes pulling something pretentiously revolutionary out of his nether regions?

NASA offers space shuttle food and tiles to schools

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Unhappy

Why not give them books on spaceflight and engineering?

Having "Digital Apollo" and "Rocket Propulsion Elements" in the Harry Potter laden school library would be awesome.

On second thoughts, reading about Rocket Propulsion might get some youngsters on the terror watch list or worse.

On third thoughts, are there any school libraries anymore?

Minister seeks to rip 'Like' buttons off German gov web

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Trollface

Raus! Schnell!

Das Komputermaschine ist nicht für gefallenknöpfen und zuckerbergen! Andersfallen ist easy to bekommen marketingsauger, sozialingenören und transferren der personaldaten nach dreiletter bürokratenblockhaus.

Two Larrys to go head-to-head in Google-Oracle case

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Pint

I will CEO in court!

Oracle should be thankful if they get away with more than 100'000 after this meeting.

Rubbing an iPhone on your face won't cure acne - FTC

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Angel

So...

So what about an app that claims to create jobs by pure emission of melodious sounds from podiums followed by printing of colorful repetitive motives onto paper?

It seems to have great success.

UK, US ink boffinry pact on laser fusion 'star power'

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Meh

Hurl!

"We're taking a piece of kit largely paid for by the bomb-makers"

"lump of cash that's been taken away from the bomb-maker's abilities to make bombs"

Implying that somebody else than taxpayers is paying for this and that nuke maintenance and upgrade budgets are being affected by opening the kimono to the civilian sector.

Military *always* gets first choice [that's why there is still several hundred billion USD of industrial cleanup operations to be done on cold war radioactive leftovers - in the best case.]

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"Admiral Nimitz himself"

That was Rickover, actually.

Google Native Client: The web of the future - or the past?

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Unhappy

Sink the Bismarck!

This article is somewhat "fair and balanced" as the USerricans say.

That is, it compares something that may be rather dubious proposition [like torture and the surveillance state] to something that is known to work [e.g. defending civil liberties and keeping state out of your pants] by putting both sides on the same level and explaining away differences by "religious attitudes".

I can empathize with the developers of this thing but can I have some marmalade with this buttery slatherfest of complexity, please?

Clearly a torpedo aimed at the steaming-in-circles Wintel platform. I expect Microsoft to line up the lawyers at some point in the future complaining about various IP violations regarding use of its DLLs.

Galaxy Tab remains illegal in Germany

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Gimp

Optional!

"Copying an iPad, or any innovative product out to be (and is apparently) unlawful."

Guess that should be "ought".

But anyway: Wrong.

It cannot be unlawful and should not be unlawful.

It's immoral and mercantilistic - no state-enforced entrenched monopolies and rent-seeking please. No beggar thy neighbor games in the marketplace.

It's subjective - because what may be "innovative" in the eyes of the starry-eyed fanboi might well be "obviously obvious" in the eyes of anything else.

It's a lie - no "innovation" comes out of the brain of a super-genius fully formed and ready to take over the market. It's always based on existing stuff. If you absolutely want your protection, you should be forced to build your product ex nihilo. Ten years on an isolated island with no access to modern telecom devices should be sufficient, no?

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Trollface

Grow Up, Apple?

But then it would be a Tree.

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Stop

Woah there!

Simply put, this demonstrates what Apple have done.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/Rank_Xerox_8010%2B40_brochure_front.jpg

If you still don't think that's copy after seeing it, then there's no hope for you.

In other words: DEAL WITH IT, FANBUOY!

Apollo 17 Moon landing: Shock revelations

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It must be bad trolling.

Then again, this IS the Internet.

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Holmes

A known fact!

This is why Gus Grissom was blackmailed into sinking his Mercury Capsule, the "Unsinkable Eva Braun", taking the proof of the things he found to the ocean bottom.

Google: SSL alternative won't be added to Chrome

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Suffix? Prefix?

I think the correct label is a "scheme"

Satellite gives better picture of solar flares' effects on Earth

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Thumb Down

Dunno but ya filling in nicely, bro!

Double-barrel net infrastructure hack threatens ecommerce

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Not so

"An SSL certificate certifies that a given domain name maps to an IP address"

No, an SSL certificate certifies that the entity whose distinguished name (which may or may not include a domain name) appears in the certificate is actually in possession of the private key corresponding to the public key in the certificate.

We are not talking DNSSEC here. Though we might.

DigiNotar hacker says he stole huge GlobalSign cache

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Facepalm

Another false flag operation, more like.

> "a totally a state-sponsored attack on the PK infrastructure"

> guy turns up, bragging about the exploits

retard.jpg

Memo to kid coders: Enterprise software exists

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Windows

Good luck with that

"This leads me nicely to the point someone made above. To someone like me, if I want to jump onto enterprise programming, I can do so and get things done properly within 3-6 months even"

That's for various level of "properly". In other words: No. But you *may* be starting off on the good road.

I don't know of any other engineering sector in which young people assume that they can do something "properly" in 6 months. In 6 months you will just have survived the first horrendous pile up.

Now go fetch me some coffee.

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Angel

AND!

With some luck you will be wheeled straight from the doorstep of the retirement home to a consulting position.

Win!

I remember a Bob The Dinosaur. He could code COBOL and point to errors in stacks of RPG 80-column horrors but if you tried to ask him something, he just mumbled incoherently like a version of Alan Greenspan until you went away. He eloquently complained about the young ones though.

Inside 'Operation Black Tulip': DigiNotar hack analysed

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Holmes

Post Your Own Message

These are not script kiddies installing r57.php via Joomla driveby.

These are the kind of people I dread to find on my servers and this only because they wanted me to.

And who was that bot herder who died? Wouldn't surprise me; these circles are shady and not filled with nice people. I remember the story of the german carder dude who suicided out of the blue in a public park. Hagbard was it?

NASA releases stunning new moon-landing snaps

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Holy shi*!

It all makes sense now!

French bloke fined for failing to shag missus

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Trollface

Exchange role of female and male

...see law going the other way.

Jesus appears, acquires vast following, bitchslaps Justin Bieber

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Paris Hilton

Guardian angels?

The one who drop your passwords all over the place?

DNS hijack hits The Register: All well

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Headmaster

"update their records more quickly"

LAWYERS!

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Unhappy

AnonyTurk or TurkSec or LulzTurk?

They are not hackers, they are defacers.

Anyone who feels the Freudian Itch to put his nationality in front of his "exploits" is dubious at best anyway.

Sea eagles menace Scottish children

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Devil

"That will remove what should be a healthy fear of humans."

All is going according to plan!

The next step will be to attach .... lasers. Once my trusty hunchback Hanif has perfected them.

Allah is Great!

Apple gives green light to Eton solar cell iPhone case

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Meh

It's for the good elements of humanity -- "sun people"

"I'm talking on sunshine..."

Seriously El Reg, how long did you keep that one in the drawer waiting for the right moment?

WikiLeaks releases full searchable US secret cable files

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Trollface

Go for it!

1) Go to cryptome.org, download

2) Spend a couple hours scripting and setting up website on 127.0.0.1 (finally an occasion to use Lucene!)

3) ???

4) Search!

"Our foreign minister said WHAT?"

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Headmaster

Try keeping up in the back rows!

Bestest overview in Der Spiegel:

"A Dispatch Disaster in Six Acts"

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,783778,00.html

Best commentary:

http://nigelparry.com/news/guardian-david-leigh-cablegate.shtml

Apple's ex-cop and the case of the lost iPhone 5

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Facepalm

Woah.

Well, with this kind of stuff I guess the DA will just *have* to start a criminal investigation against Apple.

Next: iPhone 5 lost on plane during rendition flight of a truculent employee. Film at 11.

Boffin melds quantum processor with quantum RAM

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Windows

Why oh why

Why are people afraid of saying what "superposition" is?

It's just a vector of length 1, with complex-valued coefficients.

It lies on the unit sphere of an N-dimensional vector space.

Each dimension of that vector space represents the state of the system.

If the vector lies perfectly aligned with one of the axis, the system is in a definite state. Otherwise it is in a superposition.

For example, the qubit can be in states 0 or 1.

This gives a 2-dimensional complex vector space, with the state vector on a "circle" (actually a 4-d real sphere)

A system with 2 qubits can be in states 00 01 10 or 11.

This gives a 4-dimensional complex vector space, with the state vector on a 4-D complex sphere.

Etc.

The quantum computer rotates that vector according to some linear differential equation.

For "observation", in the simplest case, you take the coordinates of the vector along each of the principal axes for 00, 01, 10, 11 (this is a complex number). Take the length of the complex number, square it. This is the classical probability of "observing" the system to be in respective classical state 00, 01, 10, 11.

Given that you want to solve a problem, you will set things up so that one of the axes is solution that you seek (evidently, it corresponds to a bitpattern). So you want your quantum computer to follow the linear differential equation that gives you the correct bitpattern with reasonable good probability upon "observation".

And this is actually an extension of classical probability theory, it's just that nature apparently likes complex numbers: working with real-valued probabilities and state vectors moving on planes in an N-dimensional real state space is tired.

Now, what kind of algorithms can be build with this extended probability calculus?

Fast factorization. Simulation of quantum systems. Fast lookup in databases. Any other.. ?

How to solve the "find the differential equation for my problem"? How to map the differential equation to the architecture described in the article? There is work to do!!

All WikiLeaks' secret US cables are on BitTorrent in full

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Devil

Peachy 2!

A Dispatch Disaster in Six Acts

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,783778,00.html