* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Wake up, Linux hippies: No one 'morally obligated' to give back

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Uh..no.

"This is where governments and laws come in. They arbitrate conflicting individual interests."

Laws, yes. But not governments. They just _are_ another bunch of interests.

Notorious Russian spammer 'admits child abuse'

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Paris Hilton

A kinder, gentler Beria?

How does the source the kids? Do you just borrow them from foster homes?? What is this???

And will the neverending stream of CP advertisements now abate?

Pentagon: Hack attacks can be act of war

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Mushroom

Theft of strategically sensitive information an act of war?

So missiles are currently raining onto Tel Aviv?

As for "sabotage of infrastructure", I eagerly await the international approval when Iran finally decides that enough is enough and transforms a few kilometer square of Israel or the US into powdered, submunition-infested territory.

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Big Brother

If you put a missile down our smokestack...

....maybe we will blow up a few of your fatsos.

Seriously though, does the agressive stupid never end?

Better have those nukes ready just in case they didn't invest in a firewall or decide to start yet another false flag operation - this time literally at the push of button.

At least they will think twice before transforming your streets into DU avenue.

Seagate, WD should put a gun to Brussels' head

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Mushroom

Wow! Where are the retarded statists coming from all of a sudden?

Yep, big EU *please* protect me from those evil merging companies.

It's ridiculous. Enjoy your super-expensive, overtaxed, EU-allowed and, if worst comes to worst, french-company-sourced harddisks.

Anyone who is old enough to know what a "regulated telecoms market in data terminals" looks like knows what I mean.

World Health Organization: Mobile phone cancer risk 'possible'

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Meh

Uh...what?

....extremely low-frequency magnetic fields

...cancer

Must have been taken up at the behest of the international hypochondriac association.

Is the UN actually useful? For anything? Except, you know, a veto and war justification platform for big players?

Apple sues teenager for white iPhone conversion kits

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Angel

Apple customers are none too bright...

They NEED protection from white pieces of plastic that look like the Holy Real Thing. They might get CONFUSED while sourcing polymers from a third-party website and think the are communicating with an AppStore[tm] or even one of one of those rumored Apple Stores that bless us with their Earthly Presence.

Of course, they should inherently sense that the JOBSIANESS is not inherent in these heathen pieces of cheap chinese lookalikes and their IMPATIENCE at the obtaining the Next Holy Gimmick to clad their Holy Product caused them to stray from the path of virtuosity. The flesh is weak.

Bless, bless!

Linux 3.0 all about 'steady plodding progress'

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Pint

20 years already?

Time flies.

I shall drink more tonight.

CEOP announces 'record results' in child protection battle

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Big Brother

The productivity numbers for the 5-year plan are in...

Quango with "Child" and "Protection" in its title claims "record results"...

Expect self-serving political B.S., positioning for a larger role in the State Security Apparatus as well as so much hot air that you dry your hair in mere seconds.

Lockheed-Martin signs on for D-Wave prototype computer

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Boffin

No

A quantum computer can be simulated by a classical one in exponential time. So nothing special is going on here, except more power.

And as for that...

To all evidence, even a honest-to-God quantum computer (as opposed to an "adiabatic" one) won't even dare to step into the boots of the Godlike Nondeterministic Turing Machine.

More here: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec10.html

Ballmer: Time up for 'stuck in the past' Microsoft CEO?

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Trollface

"Linux is still a kludging unstable mess"

LOLNO.

In other news, the recession is over, the war in Lybia is going well and you can have free sex with Miley Cyrus. Or something.

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Angel

Yup...

You suddenly would have a rebranded car in fluffy blue-sky colors.

Unfortunately, the wheels would be gone and you could drive backwards.

Let's watch what happens to Skyprosoft.

Intel switches ARM stance from 'No' to 'Maybe'

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Holmes

"Much more in-depth discussion and analysis"

Expensive female accompangnment and a nice trip on large boat, mylord?

Star Wars fanboys to restore Tatooine Homestead

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Big Brother

Is Gaddafi hiding in there?

Airstrike in three, two....

Modern Warfare 3 prompts hand-wringing, chiming cash tills

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FAIL

Outrage at vidya games?

I can't heeeeaaar it over the sizzling splattering made by remains of sand**ggers and their couple of kids uncollaterally targetified by hellfire missiles and a fat load of DU.

NASA 'deep space' ship: Humans beyond orbit by 2020?

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Big Brother

The world does not move linearly.

This all assumes that the whole monetary system of the US won't go titsup before 2020 and cause the Federal Gummint to pull the plug on adventures abroad and up high as irate mobs of heavily armed but recently pensionless baby boomers burn down congressmens' mansions [discovering large freezers full of now worthless cash I would hazard].

The odds for that, I would say, are far, far better than even.

Roosevelt managed to enter World War II so the facts about his economic and political insanity managed to be rather conveniently elided from history. This time, the band will play in the open.

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Headmaster

That's an easy one

Post as an AC, I reckon.

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Unhappy

Your unteamplaying is worthy of a Review Item Discrepancy!

Please put it into the Software Requirement Review document version 1.4, annex B [Excel Sheet], then drive 200 miles to see me for a 2-h meeting.

$8.5bn Skype goes titsup again - including website

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Pint

Don't be too hard on rapid hacks.

0) Bad/Missing filesystem error handling

1) Bad charset conversion on reading

2) Using unsecured buffers when reading

3) Bad or buggy or homegrown XML parser

4) Missing XML error handler

5) Not pumped through XML schema verifier

6) XML schema is bad in the first place

7) Subsequent grabbing of values fails due to still unexpected input

8) Inconsistencies between data that is "far away from each other" in the input XML

etc. etc. etc.

It's not easy for fresh meat coders.

Also, incoming flying designer chairs etc.

Danish embassy issues MARMITE WAFFLE

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Big Brother

Well...

It may be the food industry's counterpart to Agent Orange [use industrial waste and repackage it], but the sanity of the principle of "everything which has not been allowed by a committee of government cave dwellers is forbidden" eludes me.

Also, In Soviet Russia, Marmite eats you!

Gadgets give granny disease to kids

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Big Brother

Yes, of course.

A little stint in a local Balilla will put some starch into the collars of those idle youngsters.

Brit expats aghast as Denmark bans Marmite

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Big Brother

Pointless make-work by the tax feeding legal professionals.

But it's good to know that Nanny State is looking out for you.

Now pick up that can!

Ofnuke: UK is not Japan

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Thumb Down

"Unit 2 definitely melted through the steel pressure vessel"

Lolno.

"Coomon knowledge even amongst bloggers"

Says it all, really. GB2WoW.

Official statement is:

Integrity of pressure vessel 1: Damaged or leaking [doesn't say that the core melted through]

Integrity of pressure vessel 2: Status unknown

Integrity of pressure vessel 3: Status unknown

Samsung must cough up Android prototypes to Apple

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Paris Hilton

What do they hope to gain?

Seriously. Except piss off Samsung and manage to have to pay $$$ on patents that previously no-one cared about. This seems just to be a cringeworthy case of a serious outbreak of amour-propre - "It's ours and we have this Beautiful USPTO-Signed Intellectual Property Paper to prove it". It's irrational.

Cray XK6 super mates Opterons with Nvidia GPU workhorses

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Paris Hilton

But how do you program these things?

Message-passing between Vectorprocessors? What kind of problems fit that?

New hack on Comodo reseller exposes private data

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Pirate

Comodo resellers cascading compromise?

Do they use some packaged webapp by Comodo that needs a bit of patching?

Also, xkcd's Exploits of a Mom, Gaius Baltar etc..

Engineering student cracks major riddle of the universe

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Linux

Like this penguin's fat belly, cropped but nearby

If that mass is extragalactic, then it can't contribute much to keeping the galactic rotation curves flat. The mass must be nearby here, in the galactic disk.

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Paris Hilton

No

Just no:

http://www.astrosociety.org/education/publications/tnl/72/images/darkMatterPie-590.jpg

Sarko to Schmidt & co: 'You can't escape' net regulation

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Big Brother

Why, then.

No problem routing from Sarko's left ear to his right ear, then.

Office 15 steals OVERLARGE font, design vision from Windows PHO

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Boffin

Quite so.

And that's why OpenOffice sucks. They managed to faithfully copy all the retarded annoyances where control is taken away from the object in front of the screen and the silly program imposes its own opinion on where the table/break/formatting should go. Permanently. With no recourse. When you have to hand in the paper in about an hour.

Also:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cohn/thoughts/advice.html

"If you are going to submit a paper to a journal, you should do a professional job of it. If possible, you should write your paper using LaTeX (the TeX users group has information). That's not necessary, but it can't hurt to make it look professional, and it means the journal won't need to retype your paper if it is accepted for publication (which can introduce errors). Almost all research papers in mathematics use LaTeX. "

Judgment Day prophet resets doomsday clock

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FAIL

Is this like String Theory?

Make test! Reality doesn't comply? No problem, clarify what you _really_ wanted to say.

Also, imaginary friends in the sky etc.

Adam Curtis: The Rise of the Machines

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Flame

Yet even Marx predicted the state would eventually "wither away"

Marx predicts the same as Chriswell.

Indeed, the state would wither away, once the "proletariat" had obtained the power to decide exactly what YOU should be doing in the morning, afternoon and evening. In other words: total control. Calling this "withering away" is just an extreme example of doublethink. When everyone wears the uniform, nobody does, right?

Anyway, what's new? We once had Newton's Clockwork Universe with philosophers ponderously debating whether free will could exist in such a system or not. Then came quantum mechanics. Same hard thinking in the corner. Old social ideas were put on paper and to the test; Communism, Fascism, Socialism, New Deals, New Society, Big Society; same shit different jars, people nearly incapable of following a thread of logic for more than two inferences suddenly are in the seat of power or glom onto the next upwardly mobile sociopath, go apeshit and decide to turn the knobs. The hard thinking went on and on until the leather-elbow-patch tweed jacket wearers had killed about 300 million people in a quarter of a century. Managerialism indeed. Nice doing, intellectuals.

Hands off those knobs, I say!

Making a storage mountain out of a molecule

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Boffin

"a depleted uranium molecule, one with its radio-active element removed"

Not really.

U-238 still decays with a half-life of 4 x 10⁹ y, which is around 10 times longer than U-235. Still, not a lot.

Read-only nation: can Open Source change the British way?

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Paris Hilton

Seems apposite

"But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I’d literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he’s smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust him, and I still do."

I hope IP-encumbered closed stuff gives similar warm and fuzzy feelings to people who need to play Gimp to someone.

Comcast 'Tweetgate' apology thrown back in face

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Go

You will have to pass this Voight-Kampff test first...

People doing the revolving-door thing are not covering themselves in glory?

Luckily they generally don't care as they most likely belong to the set of specially deficient people who can crush adorable puppies with a steamroller while plotting about obtaining a new Ferrari at the peons' expense.

Google was 'warned repeatedly' about rogue drug ads

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Big Brother

A clear example of government's looting of deep pockets.

http://mises.org/daily/5298/The-Google-Pharm-Case

Over the years, Google has accepted some advertising from some of these so-called rogue elements. In a free market, they would be perfectly legitimate advertisers. Google makes no guarantee of the exact nature of the goods and services of all those who choose to advertise on its network. It has some degree of interest in quality control, of course, but if the customers are buying and happy, what could be the problem?

Well, the medical cartel, of course, and it asked for the Justice Department to intervene. As of this writing, Google is assuming that it is going to be in hot water very soon. Its recent report to stockholders says that it has put half a billion dollars in escrow to deal with the Justice Department investigation. The presumption here is that Google is going to be held liable for permitting ads to run from market-based drug sellers.

The only way to maintain a cartel is through government regulations, and this is what the pharmacy industry has long relied upon, much to the detriment of consumer well-being. The attempt to crack down on free-market advertising of prescription drugs is all about protecting an industry from competition, and has nothing at all to do with protecting the consumer.

£1.1bn Royal Navy warship finally armed, sort of

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Pirate

It's good to know...

...that at least Somali pirates are quaking in their sandals before them thar mighty ships.

Yarrr!!

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Thumb Up

Captain is pleased?

Wouldn't you be pleased to be on a naval vessel on which you have to occasion to pass the command

"LAUNCH ALL VIPERS"

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Alert

A broken record may be right all day

Additionally regarding "most advanced destroyer", a morality tale:

http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html

LinkedIn goes ballistic following IPO

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Big Brother

Really now...

That would be at least Bubble 3.0 [in the ned millenium], the one after the dot.com having being inflated by cheap credit which arrived in the housing market. The current one, pumped by Quantitative Easing 1 and 2, will be a Sendai Earthquake event.

German salesmen rewarded with meticulously organised orgy

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Paris Hilton

Do want.

Germans - they now how to party in an Italian Sci-Fi Flick way.

Eight New Yorkers sue Baidu for $16m

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Big Brother

To the whole world except to the USA.

If AIPAC had a search service, would anyone sue it?

Schmidt: 'Elites' not 'common men' fret over net privacy

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WTF?

You are now reading this in the voice of GlaDOS

"So your searches - and again this is all very fully disclosed - are kept for 12 to 18 months in a complex series of ways, and after that, we anonymize them"

For the next test chamber...

US admiral reveals safety plan for Zombie Apocalypse

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Thumb Up

As long as Alyx Vance stays around...

Bring it on!

Stuxnet-style SCADA attack kept quiet after US gov tests

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Thumb Up

Neurotoxin in your research center? I's more likely than you think.

Sounds like reasonable behaviour all around for once.

If the bugs ain't fixed but are in the process of being so, wait a bit.

We don't want Sony-Sized Events with industrial hardware. No, we don't.

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer set to sniff out strangelets

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Boffin

Good point....

In principle, a magnetic field does not do work - it acts on moving charges only -- orthogonally to the vector of movement, thus FORCE dotproduct VELOCITY is zero. Ok, that doesn't help here.

Now, if your wrench is pulled towards the permanent magnet because the electrons have some correlation in their orbital movements [in the classical approach], then clearly work is being done. It must come from the potential energy inherent in the start configuration. Once the wrench is on the magnet, the total field magnetic should be reduced, as the wrench will start to behave like a magnet with inverse polarity.... that should be about it...

Anyway ... something for physicsexchange, I reckon.

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Headmaster

Yes, you behind the bikesheds! Stand still laddy!

"Strangelets – a "a totally new form of matter" comprising three quarks (u, d and s), as opposed to our modest earthly matter, which has only two quarks (u and d)."

NO!

Strangelets have a "strange" quark, so hadrons (3-quark units) like [up, down, strange] or mesons (2-quark units) like [up, strange] belong to that set.

Bog standard low-energy matter as we encounter everyday uses up and down exclusively so hadrons like the neutron [up, down, down] or mesons like [up, down] belong to that set.

David Davis: Jobless should dig trenches for fat UK pipes

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Welcome

The purring of the fat cat

>>massive government subsidies to the incumbent operator

Diversion of resources to building infrastructure that possibly no-one needs? No telco is against THAT.

>>not having had to open up its network to rival operators

Higher prices [not to mention "licensing fees" etc.] than would be provided in a competitive environment? No telco is against THAT.

Third mighty WD 'data tub' launched

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Boffin

The "Battle Against Any Raid F*" (including Six) goes on!

No RAID Four, Five nor Six!

http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/BAARF2.html

NHS IT dino-project NPfIT should be killed off - NAO

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Big Brother

Pretty much that...

But I have also personally noticed:

- Out-of-this world requirements from functionairies on the other side of the table who assume that implementation of magic functionality is either "already covered" or can be done "on the side". Consequence: pad the price beforehand because you know it's coming.

- Constantly changing requirements from functionairies on the other side of the table who assume that basically changing the system on political whim is either "already covered" or is just "a minor change". Consequence: pad the price beforehand because you know it's coming.

- Excessive bureaucratisation of the development and implementation process because functionairies on the other side of the table assume that delivering a whole truck of "documentation" that no-one can read is going to bring "clarity" or "transparency". Consequence: pad the price beforehand because you know it's coming.

- Red tape, arbitrary onerous requirements regarding "compliance" to ISO whatever as well as the minister's preferred management scheme as well as "working together" with politically favoured, already established players will make your life hell, kill your dog and make your spouse flee to Havana. Consequence: pad the price beforehand because you know it's coming.