* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractals, dies at 85

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Headmaster

Let's get physical!

So you want to apply this in Physics? This has already happened. Laurent Nottale has tried a fractal approach to spacetime. He gets the expected Higgs mass wrong though and predicts that the large-scale structure of the universe should be self-similar, of which there is not a whole lot of evidence (it's more like a synaptic mess, innit). Maybe he tries too hard:

http://luth2.obspm.fr/~luthier/nottale/ukrechel.htm

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Boffin

Hmmm...

....try to do it on an Z-80 based MSX in Microsoft Basic.

At least something to look forward to when Mom wakes you up in the morning, Coz school .. nah.

Fight cyberwar with cold war doctrines, says former DHS chief

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Oh Yeah?

"Preferably none these networks should use TCP/IP, since using other protocols makes accidental or inadvertent connection that much less possible."

Hey, pointy-haired boss.

Your sandwich, sir.

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The Horror. The Horror...

"Cold war doctrines on how to respond to nuclear attack need to be applied to the 21st century threats of cyber attacks and espionage"

STOP READING.

Robot goes berserk in Balkan lab: 6 boffins given dead arms

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Terminator

A serbian robot maybe?

It just needs tatoos and that arm

as well as a deep voice in which to ask you whether you have a problem.

Manchester cops hit Twitter - spoof feeds fall down stairs

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Thumb Up

There are those US Internet Police Scanner streaming sites..

These are oftentimes hilarious, sometimes not.

Also, the operator ladies let loose with some really lowbrow wisecracks.

Facebook dismisses Ceglia lawsuit as 'scam'

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Coffee/keyboard

Awarding yourself 1% more for each day past due?

What happens if you are at 100%? You declare victory and go home??

This guy should be working at the Federal Reserve.

Former White House advisor wants cybercrime haven crackdown

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Big Brother

So how is that gonna work?

"Clarke said that many nations had offensive cybercrime capabilities, arguing that some form of arm control talks on cyberweapons might be needed."

I would like to see talks at the UN would preclude nations-states from developing some kind of software to be used as a weapon (though Clarke does not seem to mention how this Kuang Grade Fantasy is actually related to the Real World) while the same talks do not preclude nations-states from developing and hoarding nukes and giving the two-finger salute about it to all & sundry (and I'm not talking about Iran but the perennial wailing victim on the Mediterranean)

In the end, I guess this just boils down to a book tour.

Power grid scare stories a 'bunch of hooey'

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Big Brother

Batteries, Aziz!

Maybe so, but that's nothing that cannot be fixed by some infrastructure work.

OTOH, the latest "cybergeddon" alert level pushed among others by Terrorexpert Richard Clarke (See http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/cyberwar-richard-clarke/ and http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/silverbullet ) which is being used among other to shovel tax monies to dubious companies and to hand the Nobel Peace Laureate an Internet Kill Switch is NOT about accidents...

Huge jobs loss to follow public sector cuts

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Big Brother

Looks like "aggregate demand" will take a hit then.

Shouldn't be a problem though. Trivially, tax reductions made possible by less gummint spending should leave more money in the private sector, thus those jobs will reappear elsewhere.

What, no tax reductions? Borrowing from the future, were we? Someone ate the cake already, in a sense.

Well then, prices (including prices for labor) will have to go down. Cue union bosses smelling a good occasion to raise their notoriety.

Facebook is 'killing privacy for commercial gain'

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Unhappy

Attention Schneier: YOU value privacy. People do do NOT value privacy.

"There's no [commercial] market for a Facebook privacy add-on but if Facebook added extra privacy controls people would want it,"

People would also want a free pony if you delivered it to them.

And they would probably tend to the pony more than they would to their "privacy controls".

Bruce Willis relaxes as asteroid skims Singapore

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Pint

Hah!

He would probably call for a bailout.

UK gov could not procure its way out of a paper bag

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Flame

Oh yeah?

“There is no reason why Government should not be as efficient as any good business."

One of the most fracking STUPID things I have ever heard.

Of course there is a good reason. It's the Government. If someone messes up, he gets a BIGGER BUDGET instead of a roach lodge under an underpass.

Hey, let's vote ourselves a pay rise. Hell yeah, that would be the ticket.

Another huge ice discovery made in Asteroid Belt

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Thumb Down

Obama this and that.

He can decide all he wants, it's really out of his hands.

How's the next round of "quantitative easing" coming?

Ubuntu 10.10: date with destiny missed

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Flame

Hey, prof..

...ever used a Linux system in Real Life?

Where like, programs are running that fill partitions to 100%?

No?

Aw well.

Foxconn faces leaked report of worker abuse, violence

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Big Brother

Arbeit macht frei!

Or at least cheap.

Big Brother because some people in the Party and/or the Gov are sure to be enablers.

French cops claimed to hold secret, illegal gypsy database

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Thumb Up

Scanning now...

"It is at the heart of government that the most serious threat to social order is to be found".

HOLY COW! SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH DETECTED!

Germans radio tag ID cards and phones

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Pint

So?

They will just open another fly-by-night Döner.

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Welcome

Duh

This is like mugging some paraplegic in a wheelchair while he is squeezed in between a wall and 4-wheeler.

Danube sludge peril: Brown trouser time or not?

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WTF?

Arrogant towards Greenpeace?

It's really not too hard.

20 years ago I saw a demo against the use of Chlorine.

I laughed out loud and erased Greenpeace from my concerns.

Never looked back.

MySQL price hikes reveal depth of Oracle's wallet love

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Unhappy

Yeah...

...and I have never understood how that is even possible,

The GPL side of the release specifically nixes such shenanigans.

Cisco jump-starts home 'telepresence'

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Big Brother

Well, you gotta love the "governement services" part

You can be asked in a deep baritone whether you ever have or currently are providing material support to terrorists.

Then the SWAT team comes...

Bulgarians bag German pair for pinching panzer

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Thumb Up

A Mark IV?

What Ausführung though? These came from in anything from A to H, with continuous improvements along the way.

I would pay for it to be put in my garden with the main hose suitably pointed at the neighbor's window.

A very stylish machine.

Kiss frontman gives file-sharers tongue-lashing

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Megaphone

"And so now we're left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs."

Wow. I didn't know that the western educational system creates hundreds of thousands of people whose sole possibility of gainful employment, whose very purpose of life even depends on whether there is a plant in China that spits out shiny round pieces of plastic.

Let Social Darwinism cleanse this, I say!

Ex-General Electric boss unleashes bile on HP board

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Pint

I forsee people in tailor-made suits...

...throwing glasses of expensive Ouisky into each other's faces at the next club meeting.

Cryptome vows to pursue those who breached site

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Big Brother

Must be Lamo

(body)

Russian authorities detain suspected bank carding kingpin

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Big Brother

Hey, marked one, what's with those credit cards?

"Now it seems that this trend is changing, more and more these criminal rings are getting caught"

You wish. These guys are annoying but small fry.

The Real Stuff is several orders of magnitude larger, fuelled and protected by government and involves assorted Ponzi schemes and/or lots of dead people. Not going away soon.

Apple wants halt to $600m patent case

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Grenade

"Yale Professor David Gerlernter."

That's GELERNTER.

Also developed the "Linda" programming language, basically agents coordinating over tuplespaces. Tuplespaces must have been patented, too, then I reckon.

So he has patents and been so wronged that 600 million dollar are coming his way?

It's amazing that people still work. If everyone was filing patents and sueing each other, we could actually push the economy into miracle land.

Hull man guilty of snooping on hundreds of medical records

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Makes you want to go back to paper filing cabinets.

Or you could convince the Bastard Operatrix to perform a quick DELETE FROM LOG, right?

Larry Ellison comes out fighting against HP Apotheker 'madness'

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Alert

But it IS self regulating

That's the meaning of "running into the ground" innit.

And if the shareholders are asleep at wheel or are as uninterested in the company as a in a roulette ball - well, what are you gonna do?

Of course, if it gets real bad, a quick call will ensure a speedy "bailout" because "we are too big to fail" and "the social climate must be saved" and trade unions must be placated or some such stupidity.

Fruitcake profs demand strict curbs on killer robots

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Dead Vulture

Oh yeah?

"Everyone acknowledged that these systems pose ethical and strategic problems especially with regard to their effect on civilian casualties and their rapid proliferation."

If anyone has a problem with that statement, maybe he needs to have his head examined pronto.

Currently whitey blows up and barbequeues sandniggers' kids, goats and wimmin's from Langley, USA using remote-presence tech (Illegally - and that's only US law, btw. But with a Peace Prize Laureate in the Driving Seat, nothing can go wrong, eh?)

Any dumbfuck cretin who has been within a hundred miles of military-machine-empire of the West knows that the feedback loop will close ASAP and that "Ho, Ho, Ho it's just collateral damage. Shrug." pronouncements will only get worse.

US navy to battle Iranian mini-ekranoplan swarms with rayguns

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WTF?

What are you, some testosterone-filled flyboy?

Get back to your ship and help your commander reach his well-deserved pension scheme status.

Texan smut baron spanked over UK schoolgirl snap

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Coat

Luckily I never pay for porn.

Handing money to these guys would be too much.

Brazil welcomes Street View with open coffins

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Thumb Up

But will the face blurring algorithm work on dead citizen?

...and will it then be a corpse blurring alorithm? Questions are left unanswered.

Microsoft sends in the tanks against Motorola, Android

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Thumb Down

And your point is?

If you buy crap, don't complain here.

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Thumb Down

Fail hard

You seem to assume that patents presuppose that any "R&D" had to carried out and that companies can "freely tap or copy R&D" carried out by others.

Thank you for playing. Come back when you got out of first grade.

Stuxnet worm slithers into China, heralds alien invasion

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Go

"A centrifuge in a uranium processing plant"

But what would happen? That centrifuge is just throwing UF6 around (UF6? UFOs? Hmmm.. a possible link here?). Could the system make it rev up? Slow down? More action could be had by connecting the Siemens Control Machine to a mixer filled with frogs.

"Centerum Censeo" that Iran is fully within the rights granted to it by the NPT to build and run an Uranium enrichment plant for civilian purposes. Said purposes being verified by the IAEA which continually fails to find any diversion of nuclear material for military purposes etc. etc. etc.

IE 'Twitter rolling' attack trivial to launch

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Coffee/keyboard

Awesome quote

"Until developers get that through their head, we're going to have to live with lots of XSS holes."

This shall be saved for ..err ... posterity.

Canada prostitution laws pulverised: politicians apoplectic

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Happy

Gov in arrogant fascist parrot mode, as usual.

"Federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson claimed that it is for government to decide how best to protect prostitutes and local communities"

"I and myself in my infinite benevolent knowledge shall tell you how to lead your life and death."

BIS will name'n'shame Scrooge bosses

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Big Brother

Anyone care to explain...

...what the minimum wage is actually for except as a social feel-good measure?

Do employers actually hold a monopoly so that they manage to avoid their employees drifting off to higher-paying jobs?

Now, if those employees were illegals, or unable to read the job offer pages or if they were actually doing a job that generates rock-bottom additional value (below the minimum wage), I would have an explanation. But otherwise??

Note that minimum wage legislation kills off those rock-bottom additional value jobs, in other words some things you have to yourself, or hire students at 0/hour.

The Navitaire cock-up, filleted

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Headmaster

Welcome to the real...

...where failover systems don't.

Now, for some editorial logic. We read:

"Alternatively, why didn't it run the system off the remote data centre holding the SnapMirror data? The implication is that, because it didn't do this, the Snapmirror process of sending OLTP data to the second data centre was useless."

The deduction goes the wrong way and should be replaced by an *induction*:

Instead of saying

"Navitaire didn't run the system off the remote data centre, therefore the process was useless."

one should mean to say

"As Navitaire didn't run the system off the remote data centre, that process was presumably useless."

Tweety profs offer political smear-meme 'truthiness' ratings

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Big Brother

The 21st century...

Where people try to tell other people which of the cretinous soundbites they expose themselves to 24/7 to actually believe. Using soundbites.

Then everyone gets asked to vote for Palin, Obama, McCain or some other cancerous dreck.

Car wrecks rise after texting bans imposed

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Big Brother

"Must do something" activist politicians in no result shocker!

But hey, it keeps the cops and bureaucrats alive and well-fed.

ACS:Law's mocking of 4chan could cost it £500k

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Pint

I still don't know

...whether it's Quad-Chan or Four-Chan. Or maybe Yon-Chan?

Iowa police mugshot exposes world's worst tattoo

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Big Brother

But he hasn't got a nuke in a sidecar...

Which would be awesome.

Feds want backdoors built into VoIP and email

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Big Brother

"armed with legal wiretap orders under federal legislation"

Pffff.....

Ridiculous.

No-one asks for any of those anymore.

Even the phrasing is quaint. "Legislation?"

UN appoints alien liaison boffin

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WTF?

Hawking is a troll

“I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet."

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I saw that movie too.

Maybe talk about religion? Oh wait!

CIA used 'illegal, inaccurate code to target kill drones'

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FAIL

Not against it, eh?

Compare:

"President Obama has significantly expanded use of clandestine drone assassinations [operating in countries not at war with US], despite heavy criticism from the UN and others."

"Comrade Stalin has significantly expanded use of clandestine NKVD assassination [operating in countries not at war with the USSR], despite heavy criticism from the UN and others."

At least Stalin could not be embarrassed by lousy and overpaid state employees trying to crack one off playing Software Management Gurus.

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Big Brother

You don't understand...

The "biggest proponent of enhanced action against those distributing Hollywood films" is not the government but the "content-producing industry". Which is wining and dining Congress.

If the government decides tomorrow to seize and use for its own ends whatever it needs, it does so. It may even leisurely twist some arms to retrospectively pass a law legitimize things (or maybe you didn't pay your taxes or gave material assistance to terrorists?)

And if you are lucky and actually getting paid, well it's money fresh off the printers of the federal reserve. Which is what... a few bucks a container?

"A Government of Men, Not Laws"

Apple in 873-page legal claim to word 'Pod'

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Grenade

Weapons pod

“What I'm hoping to do with this case is to really reach a lot broader of an audience and make it so entrepreneurs and small businesses can use the English language as they see fit in branding their products”

I'm sure an Armalite 15 would reach that goal far quicker than a doing the "case" song-and-dance.