* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Did PlayStation Network hackers plan supercomputer botnet?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Flame

There is also a difference between "spin" and "speculation"

The former is enhancing the truth, the latter trying to discern the truth.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

Back in the PS/2 days [AD2000] ....

It was rumored that Saddam was buying PS/2 in order to [insert preferred Mwahahaha action here]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/12/19/iraq_buys_4000_playstation_2s/

There was as much truth to this as Iraqis throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators, Serbs ultrakilling Kosovars or the more recent Gaddafi handing out Viagra to enable Gang Rape Horror stories -- but at least it was funny.

Legal goons threaten researcher for reporting security bug

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Alert

The constitution doesn't pay legal fees...

...and copies of the same on cheap paper can be found in many cold, dead hands.

"a non-executable documentation is protected by the Federal Republic Of Germany Constitution"

It may be so in principle. Try to publish and be ready for in order of likelihood: a few "Abmahnbriefe", reduced employment prospects, a costly legal defense and jailtime.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Paris Hilton

"more interested in beancounters than binaries"

It's called "having an MBA".

Apple tops Microsoft market cap, revenue, and profits

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Gates Horns

Is that..

The "most despised" company metric or the most despised "company" metric?

Barnes & Noble answers Microsoft's anti-Android suit

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

With this Prussian Understanding of Law And Order...

...we will finally make some progress.

Right, who's up for getting in at the back of the cattle trucks? Remember, it may suck for you, but it's the Law!

China sets out space-station plan, asks public to name it

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

"So Ronery"

Thing is, China is yet to experience the economic crash. Once there, prospects may change.

OCZ shares trashed by short seller's research note

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

So the stock drops, so what?

If there is inherent value in the stock, long sellers will now have a field day. So why complain?

Of course, the accelerated "trading" and rumor-triggered stock market transactions. a.k.a. the self-described "financial industry" fed with cheap paper money like a pig bursting at the seams has no inherent value [it doesn't produce SSDs for example], but that's the way the circus rumbles.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

No really.

"Naked short sellers aren't the lowest scum on earth, but they are vying for the title."

Only if they are bullshitting their clientele about what they are gonna do with the money they are receiving and/or go crying to governemnt upon cratering later.

Otherwise - hell, they can play casino all day for what I care.

Save the planet: Stop the Greens

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Aperture Science Now!

"For it's the subsidies we paid a decade or more ago that have accelerated the industry to this point: yet the near term economic switching point is used as the clinching argument for why we should have whacking great subsidies for the next 20 years."

This is the main problem: Economic knowledge of most all is in La-La Land. Apparently "subsidies" can be had just "for free" and are often credited with "accelerating" a technology.

On the contrary - they mean some committe in the Ministry of Planned Economy has decided that they know better than anybody else and that want to direct scare resources into some politically preferred scheme of "investment" (and this goes for windmills, solar power at home or nukes), while actual solutions and reachable technological paths stay unexplored.

These resources must be pulled either from other taxpayer-funded projects like [favorite program here] or else taxes will be going up. Maybe the government goes a bit into debt with its central bank, and "finances" things through inflation. When the subsidies stop, or the technology tanks for various reasons [hey, Niobium is sooo expensive!], or the money-fuelled bubble pops, resources will have been squandered, pension schemes will have evaporated, companies will have crashed and the dole queue will be longer. Meanwhile, economically reasonable and feasible projects will never have seen the light of day.

But by then it will be nobody's fault in particular. the minister will wash his hands and the usual suspects will be calling for even more control economy, "money injections", "belt tightening", "price controls" to twart "gougers", banning of a recently "dangerous" technology or whatever.

And winters will be colder.

Chinese mapping hotline stays cold

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
FAIL

Calling Captain Kirk.

Some red bureaucrat has time-warped in from the 50's. What do?

WikiLeaks releases classified files on Guantánamo Bay

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Coat

"ANY minute now"

"President Barack Obama ordered the prison closed more than two years ago."

"Autocratic Figurehead X ordered his convenient torture facility closed more than Y years ago"

Your death-head insignia sporting jacket, sir!

ET, phone back: Alien quest seeks earthling coders

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Boffin

Really now...

A GRB burst Gamma Rays, not 21cm radio waves.

All is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Yup, yup.

No alien sexting here (Sexy Queue What?), just power levels.

What happened to Optical/Laser SETI btw?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Well that's easy...

Just write down the mass of the Higgs boson to the nearest keV/c²

Behind Apple's record sales are signs of desperation

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

Vanilla title for iPhan baiting.

iPhans here seem seem to think that not being "copied" is Apple's God-given right.

They also seem to be under the illusion that the concept of "Intellectual Property" is meaningful in the first place. But that's another discussion.

They miss the irony that with hard-core IP protection, Apple would have been in a troublesome situation back during the Apple-Microsoft "look-and-feel" spat due to its "reuse" of a few Xerox Park ideas. Luckily, IP fascism coupled to an entitlement mentality had not yet become the powerful force that it is today, and the full outbreak of "software patent" retardation had not yet been achieved, so Xerox was sent packing, Apple didn't win its case, the GUI idea was set free and we are all the better off for it.

So Apple is being "copied"? So big deal. This means that its product is well-established and that the time of premium pricing is coming to end. This means that it's time for the pony's next trick. With several deca-billion in the bank and sales going strong [as iPhans are not loth to emphasize again and again], Apple should be able to handle this and innovate its way forward. Or maybe not. Patent law being what it is, who knows what will come up.

Japanese gov makes Fukushima evac zone compulsory

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
WTF?

Fascinating

"We still risk a huge steam explosion spraying huge amounts of lethal radiation if molten material ever contacts ground water."

[Citation needed]

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Stop

Wuh?

It got worse?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Coat

Who is this "we" we are talking about?

"We should've executed the top 11 executives of BP as well as taken over all BP operations and given it to the US government as payment."

Because oil flows better and more securely if the means of production have been nationalized and top executives are shot whenever sabotage/snafus/fishkill occurs?

Your political commissar coat, m'lord.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Terminator

Time to consider just building the reactors on large floating platforms

Easy Cooling, easy failsafety, lots of shielding around, easily defended against terros and greens.

Rogue waves, electricty transport, damage due to sea environment and fuel rod logistics would be a problem though.

Portal 2

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Happy

Tears of joy!

GLaDOS - just like mom!

Must.. play... !

Google Linux servers hit with $5m patent infringement verdict

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

Read again - it's a "jury"

A jury in which probably no-one ever saw a hashing algorithm or garbage collection algorithm in a dusty textbook from the 80's.

A jury which probably thinks that patents make sense and are granted by people with a brain.

Could be you would fit in.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

What!

I'm pretty sure we have done that in programming 101 in the freshman year of 89. For frack's sake.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Grenade

BUY IT????

I would go to prison if I walked around the neighborhood and demanded that people pay up or else because they happen to have been noticed by me.

Why is this different?

Multimillionaire's private space ship 'can land on Mars'

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Up

Where is Ayn Rand?

Next up: SpaceX destroyed by Federal Read Tape and the tax collector.

Animal lovers stamp on goldfish racing

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Grenade

Self-styled "Animal Lovers" turn me into Animal Lovers' hater.

That is all.

iPhones secretly track 'scary amount' of your movements

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Coat

"Your location down to the second"

But what if you can do the Kessel Run in under fifteen seconds?

Death threats against 'worst song ever' YouTube teen

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Austrian Schnauzer

Release a song which might or might not be acceptable, and you are NEARLY LIKE HITLER?

Holy cow! Whatever next??

"Hitler's entry to the Eurovision song contest, singing about increasing Lebensraum, upping the Bruttosozialprodukt, übering the EURO and his love towards his dog. After this message..."

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

Yet more 4chan prank calls?

Wouldn't surprise me.

Meanwhile, I wanted to share this interpretation of the song. Useful for people still in high school or those doing literature studies:

http://www.neoseeker.com/forums/18/t1629965-in-depth-analysis-of-rebecca-blacks-friday/

Redaction FAIL: Dull nuke sub document revealed in full

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Alert

Yeah!

Because fish cannot resist a plutonium shrimp!

Server vendors and the dead hand of commoditisation

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

I drink to that

"COMMODITY HARDWARE IS MUCH LIKE XML, OR VIOLENCE. IF IT DOESN'T SOLVE THE PROBLEM, YOU ARE NOT USING ENOUGH OF IT."

Obama gets personal V-22 Osprey tiltrotor

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

Sadly not.

But we have come a long way from when the president was considered something of an arbiter of public affairs to today's Prussian-style unitary President complete with Military-Grade Führertransporter.

"We all adore Jefferson but we live in Hamilton's world"

Beer because we can Hail to that!

Project Ceylon – Red Hat builds Java killer replacement

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Badgers

I can relate to feeling bad about the usual Sun technogasm.

Let's take a look at this....

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2006/06/an_ejb_3_glossa.html

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Up

Gavin King thinks the lambda calculus notation is "unnatural"?

Apart from that, this Ceylon should not be thrown out of the airlock. A first look at the syntax says this can be explained in the original K&R "thin book of C" style, a good sign. An interfaces can contain mixin code.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
FAIL

Ya don't get it...

"Bean" is not a specific class type. It's just a class written to a convention so that another program can introspect it.

"Pojo" is an ordinary class in the context of persistence frameworks - as opposed to "J2EE Enterprise Java Beans" (bletch), which have nothing to do with the aforementioned Beans but are objects that, to be persisted, have to be of a class that is a subclass of some framework-provided class, which fracks up all the already pock-marked beauty of framework-managed persistence in the first place. Luckily we now have JPA and Hibernate, so that's all old history and you can persist your POJOs. Get it? More in the fat Hibernate Book.

0 on the test sheet.

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

Red Hat is now Red Eye

They seem to have a plan.... but where are the hotties?

MYSTERY of huge Canadian chicken-shed EXPLOSION

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Flame

Unfortunately not transitive

This does not imply that chicken droppings is good for making bombs.

Microsoft breaks own world record for IE nonsense

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Gates Halo

Nativity HTML?

Now with Holy Spirit injection and Virgin Mary experience.

's great!

Cisco Flips consumer unit out with trash

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

"greater profitability" on Linksys products?

They are switching to "Dora-Mittelbau" employment profile, then?

RadioShack gun giveaway: A clarification

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Coat

I'm ok with that ...

...even if Michael Moore is probably gonna have fun about this.

But why is that satellite TV package glued to my Barrett Light 50?

Paramount to recount The Martian Chronicles

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
WTF?

The Horror, the Horror....

Why not Uwe Boll?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Alien

Bradbury dismissed it as "boring".

Bradbury is an ass who also claimed rights to the movie title "Fahrenheit 911" it may be remembered.

Old writers age badly.

That said, do we really need ecological/humanitarian/coldwar 50's SF redone on the silver screen?

World pays tribute to Yuri Gagarin

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Boffin

There is someone who needs to build that ICBM, ya know...

Hommage to Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, too, please!

http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0206/thechiefdesigner.shtml

Google hits 'prove we killed no Afghans' – Assange™

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

Spin it as you might...

Throwing up 15'000 previously unaccounted-for dead Afghans [Iraq war logs reveal 15,000 previously unlisted civilian deaths: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/true-civilian-body-count-iraq] _does_ count for something.

And all because a pipeline didn't get okayed and a frat boy and a poodle get instrumented in a jiffy. Nice.

How is SSL hopelessly broken? Let us count the ways

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

Internet drama!

"here's hoping the industry puts aside its security theater antics""

immediately followed by White Hat Security CTO Jeremiah Grossman beying cited as saying

“It is definitely weak. It could fall down at anytime.”

Robo-warship sub hunter: Free DARPA crowdsauce game

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Down

Right...

You sure isn't just DARPA testing how many people can be suckered into giving the installation program admin access?

For frack's sake...

Deep-space travel bad for astronauts' tickers, say boffins

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Pint

By Larry Niven: The Hole Man

"On Earth, Andrew Lear's habits would have been no more than a character trait. In a hurry, he might choose mismatched socks. He might put off using the dishwasher for a day or two if he were involved in something interesting. He would prefer a house that looked "lived in." God help the maid who tried to clean up his study. He'd never be able to find anything afterward.

He was a brilliant but one-sided man. Backpacking or skin diving might have changed his habits—in such pursuits you learn not to forget any least trivial thing— but they would never have tempted him. An expedition to Mars was something he simply could not turn down. A pity, because neatness is worth your life in space.

You don't leave your fly open in a pressure suit.

A month after the landing, Childrey caught Lear doing just that.

The "fly" on a pressure suit is a soft rubber tube over your male member. It leads to a bladder, and there's a spring clamp on it. You open the clamp to use it. Then you close the clamp and open an outside spigot to evacuate the bladder into vacuum.

Similar designs for women involve a catheter, which is hideously uncomfortable. I presume the designers will keep trying. It seems wrong to bar half the human race from our ultimate destiny.

Lear was addicted to long walks. He loved the Martian desert scene: the hard violet sky and the soft blur of whirling orange dust, the sharp close horizon, the endless emptiness. More: he needed the room. He was spending all his working time on the alien communicator, with the ceiling too close over his head and everything else too close to his bony elbows.

He was coming back from a walk, and he met Childrey coming out. Childrey noticed that the waste spigot on Lear's suit was open, the spring broken. Lear had been out for hours. If he'd had to go, he might have bled to death through flesh ruptured by vacuum.

We never learned all that Childrey said to him out there. But Lear came in very red about the ears, muttering under his breath. He wouldn't talk to anyone.

The NASA psychologists should not have put them both on that small a planet. Hindsight is wonderful, right? But Lear and Childrey were each the best choice for competence coupled to the kind of health they would need to survive the trip. There were astrophysicists as competent and as famous as Lear, but they were decades older. And Childrey had a thousand spaceflight hours to his credit. He had been one of the last men on the moon.

Individually, each of us was the best possible man. It was a damn shame."

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Alert

Still waiting for a hearty Fukushima update...

I have people around me that have the ironclad belief that "hundreds have died" and "millions will die" and are convinced that the Pacific ocean is currently glowing in the dark with whales pumping out their last whalesong. They are actually refusing to go to Tokyo in the summer.

I needs fresh clarification material, although the earlier dose seems to not have helped.

Israel mulls creation of elite counter-cyberterrorist unit

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

Money injections from Washington enable fox to guard henhouse.

"The proposed unit would supplement the efforts of Mossad and other agencies in fighting cyberespionage".

In the same league: Mobsters setting up a shop to fight break-ins, extortion and prostitution.

Fukushima fearmongers are stealing our Jetsons future

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Big Brother

Apart from that...

Nationalization means there's some guys from State who run those machines. Yep, that's gonna work for sure....

But then again, expectations would be lower, so, overall, things would be subjectively better.