* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Crooks and kids (not scary spies paid by govt overlords) are behind most breaches

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...in particular, if they have access to the sysadmin.

Hubble telescope spies massive 'cannonballs' of fire from dying star

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Headmaster

The host star, V Hydrae, is an expanding red giant clinging to life by burning the last of its hydrogen fuel into helium

Actually if it is a Red Giant its "burning" has gone to the next level and it is fusing Helium already, and maybe even heavier elements depending on its mass.

In this case, it seems to be a Carbon Star, an excellent name for the Red Star themed bar I will open one day.

US govt straight up accuses Russia of hacking prez election

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Megaphone

USA: We be incomptent, yo!

"Looks like we have a serious hacking gap. We don't know whether we are secure or not, and either script kiddes or Genetically Engineered Russian Uberhackers who look like Dolph Lundgren wearing a helmet for computer-brain interfaces are hacking us dead. We are not sure which. In spite of putting out the first offensive cyberweapon to uparse the Persians. Or maybe we are just believing our own bullshit that we make the NYT/WaPo print in their front-page informercials. Please halp!!"

Never explain, never apologize: Microsoft silent on Outlook.com email server grief

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Windows

Re: MS haters

There will probably lots of MS hating in these comments.

Not at all. We will just hang around this campfire-in-a-barrel, sing and play the balalaika.

Amazon supremo Bezos' Blue Origin blows its top over Texas desert

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Re: Brilliant. Just brilliant.

You can buy a few books at Amazon....

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Re: The crew capsule of death?

So just launch on an empty stomach.

Y'know that ridiculously expensive Oculus Rift? Yeah, it just got worse

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Facepalm

Has the author developed a sudden brain problem?

Going from

Late last week, The Daily Beast revealed that Luckey was behind a $10,000 donation to a group called Nimble America dedicated to creating and spreading memes that attack Hillary Clinton. In one case, the group took out a giant billboard ad in Pittsburgh with a picture of Clinton's face and the tagline "Too Big to Jail."

to "funding pro-Trump neo-nazi trolls" must be in the hypersonic region of Godwin's Law scale.

And seriously, anyone who doesn't troll supporters of La Madame Klingon (who has btw. her own paid-for troll brigade doing Clinton Hasbara) is missing out.

Did I mention that the Daily Beast is suspiciously pro-Clinton? One can practically hear the cheque hit the bank account...

Stripped of its galaxy, this black hole is wandering naked in the cosmos

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Re: What a relief...

Something which tells you it's there by a gentle, gravitational tug (direct evidence in observation and it's not MOND). But apparently nothing else (seems that even Weak Interaction is being cornered by latest null results, so likely no WIMPs)

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Well, consider that a black hole in a galactic center just hoovers up mass nearby, i.e. gas and passing stars (which go into intersecting orbits when they come too near). The hole grows fast (indeed, it's radius is linearly related to its mass, unlike for normal objects, which then more to radius being third-root of mass) but not that fast, so for the stars outside the central bulge, it will always look like a tiny kernel of multimillion solar-mass far away and they will happily continue to whirl around the galactic center which has not changed in its gravitational nature (although it has changed in structure).

If black holes were able to hoover up large amounts of dark matter like open drains, they might be growing seriously large indeed. This seems to not be happening, so I suppose dark matter has its own internal dynamics which keep it from the event horizon.

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Gimp

Somone in a galaxy far away and long ago is having a bad day

“Extended Groth Strip”

With that kind of dark inside, it should have been called "Extended Goth Trip"

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No, the surrunding galaxy would have been stripped by a larger galaxy nearby.

This would eventually result in a more noisy galaxy (looking a lot more elliptical than spiral) and the massive black hole continuing to follow its path more or less hyperbolically around the center of the larger galaxy.

NIST: People have given up on cybersecurity – it's too much hassle

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Proper design.

It's called proper design.

Remember the procedure for activating the Nostromo self-destruct? That kind of design.

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Re: "People believe that security has become too complex "

And VMs will probably be next with hypervisor attacks.

Not likely. We know how computer works. "Virus breaking out" of a VM should be as hard as "virus breaking out" of the PC. Unless the hardware manufacturer mess up big or one connects a nanoassembler to the USB port.

When one has to invoke "rowhammer" as an attack, things are overall looking pretty good.

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Windows

Bad prognosis

"We were reading through the results and we saw this overwhelming sense of not being able to keep up"

That's my feeling about practically anything, especially the neverending manufactured instability coming out of government offices, parliaments and the PC-enhanced aggressive victim culture. This is what "Standing on Zanzibar" was about.

There is only one way out now.

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Re: I've Given Up - I Get the Attitude

The UK is just the anal gnome of the US.

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Re: So True

You mean. just like the State does?

Is Apple's software getting worse or what?

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Re: The exception that proves the rule...

But the "or what" leaves the door open to objective worsening.

UK.biz ransom cluelessness

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Re: Someone needs firing.

Like playing Pokemon Go in the trainyard.

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I'd rather believe God shuffled his feet.

Linus Torvalds admits 'buggy crap' made it into Linux 4.8

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Holmes

It's like churnalism about P.U.T.I.N. in this respect. Or ¡TRUMP! for that matter.

Snoop! stooge! Yahoo! handed! all! your! email! to! Uncle! Sam! – and! any! passing! hacker!

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Pint

When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer

Buy that man a large beer. The dusky shadow of CEO incompetence, if not malfeasance, and Hillary-style "La Reine, C'est Moi" behaviour should be avoided even there is personal cost involved.

Turing, Hauser, Sinclair – haunt computing's Cambridge A-team stamping ground

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Holmes

Re: "The world’s first general purpose stored-program computer was built a few hundred yards away"

Let's have it from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Modern History of Computing

The first fully functioning electronic digital computer was Colossus, used by the Bletchley Park cryptanalysts from February 1944.

Turing's 1945 report ‘Proposed Electronic Calculator’ gave the first relatively complete specification of an electronic stored-program general-purpose digital computer....It was not until May 1950 that a small pilot model of the Automatic Computing Engine, built by Wilkinson, Edward Newman, Mike Woodger, and others, first executed a program.

The earliest general-purpose stored-program electronic digital computer to work was built in Newman's Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University. The Manchester ‘Baby’, as it became known, was constructed by the engineers F.C. Williams and Tom Kilburn, and performed its first calculation on 21 June 1948. ... Turing's early input to the developments at Manchester, hinted at by Williams in his above-quoted reference to Turing, may have been via the lectures on computer design that Turing and Wilkinson gave in London during the period December 1946 to February 1947.

The first fully functioning electronic digital computer to be built in the U.S. was ENIAC, constructed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, for the Army Ordnance Department, by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.

Other notable early stored-program electronic digital computers were:

EDSAC, 1949, built at Cambridge University by Maurice Wilkes

BINAC, 1949, built by Eckert's and Mauchly's Electronic Control Co., Philadelphia (opinions differ over whether BINAC ever actually worked)

Whirlwind I, 1949, Digital Computer Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jay Forrester

SEAC, 1950, US Bureau of Standards Eastern Division, Washington D.C., Samuel Alexander, Ralph Slutz

SWAC, 1950, US Bureau of Standards Western Division, Institute for Numerical Analysis, University of California at Los Angeles, Harry Huskey

UNIVAC, 1951, Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, Philadelphia (the first computer to be available commercially in the U.S.)

the IAS computer, 1952, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, Julian Bigelow, Arthur Burks, Herman Goldstine, von Neumann, and others (thanks to von Neumann's publishing the specifications of the IAS machine, it became the model for a group of computers known as the Princeton Class machines; the IAS computer was also a strong influence on the IBM 701)

How to steal the mind of an AI: Machine-learning models vulnerable to reverse engineering

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Trollface

Re: But when AIs get too smart...

Hmmmm... it would have been cool to groom it into a non-racist, cultured Nazi, playing violin, listening to Schubert, reading Goethe etc. etc.

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Re: AI reverse enginering

Not a fancy database. A COMPRESSED database, from which one can then generalize.

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In further news

IEEE AI & Ethics Summit 2016: Artificial Intelligence and Ethics – Who does the thinking? Tuesday 15 November 2016. The Sofitel Brussels, Europe. Place Jourdan 1, Brussels, 1040, Belgium

Maybe Andrew could be sent to cover this, this would keep him busy and avoid rage attacks about Google's "stealing" of the JDK API.

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Consultancy Accenture earlier this week quantified this enthusiasm, predicting that AI "could double annual economic growth rates by 2035 by changing the nature of work and spawning a new relationship between man and machine" and by boosting labor productivity by 40 per cent.

Shit's ludicrous. "Annual economic growth rates" ... don't they hover at 0.001, only kept up by causally-closed-loop financial engineering, wealth extraction via wars in foreign lands and Quantitative Easing while the growth-enabling infrastructure in knowledge, tools, savings and people decays?

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Windows

Re: BigML's Response

Pretty sure this was posted by a AI-enhanced automatic commentator herding system.

Apple's Breaxit scandal: Frenchman smashes up €50,000 of iThings with his big metal balls

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Pirate

Re: A disturbing trend

No, and shotguns are perfectly fine with dealing with these kinds of noisy "people".

Pollution of the gene pool with bad impulse control neurotics will not be tolerated.

Incidentally, this also seems what "Black Lives Matter" is all about. That and shopping w/o paying. And throwing reporters into fires.

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But someone in China slaved over assembling them nevertheless...

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There's nothing like a disgruntled stormtrooper.

Portsmouth bomb about to be detonated

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Windows

Re: Bah!

Alderney Camps

Organisation Todt work: German Socialistic Quality Product!

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Windows

So...

I someone getting commissions for bad images from Shutterstock or why is this coding-on-a-bomb image up there?

Ludicrous Patent of the Week: Rectangles on a computer screen

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Re: I'll see ya

Just kill everybody.

Everybody.

The DNA pool is deep enough, we won't lose anything.

No surprise: Microsoft seeks Windows Update boss with 'ability to reduce chaos, stress'

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It's as if clueless harebrained idiots from the upper reaches of product development and marketing were running interference.

But that can be, it's Microsoft, a serious company.

Yahoo! couldn't! detect! hackers! in! its! network! but! can! spot! NSFW! smut! in! your! office?

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Gimp

Re: "I know it when I see it"

A typical american problem.

Also, I fap to pictures of fully colthed deliciously gender-ambivalent black Olympic runners.

Top interview: Dr Patrick McCarthy – boss of the world's future largest optical telescope

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Thumb Up

This is what's it all about!

Far away from the dross of IP lawsuits, Election Bullshit, Social Meedja, and the Nontrepreneuriat.

Let's get some real work done!

Hopefully no-one will find a spotted owl or an ancient burial ground that is tangentially related to a far ancestor to spoil the fun via PC-conscious politicos.

D-Wave doubles qubit count

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Re: Shouldn't that headline read:

Let's just say it's a Heisenfraud.

It may or may not be a fraud, and if you observe it, it collapses into distinct opinions.

I think there has been some analysis that shows that quantum effects are indeed being used at the D-Wave Device, although not as much as the hype would suggest.

D-Wave reckons those new features and the new processor mean its next machine goes 1,000 times faster than its old kit.

How come a larger state space makes it anneal three orders of magnitude faster? This is a statement out of a Gundam anime.

Oracle loses (again) in battle to get Google Java case retried (again)

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Holmes

Meanwhile, other languages beckon...

Hmmm.... Haskell? Elixir? λProlog? Clojure transpiling to JavaScript? Elm?

So much to learn!

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Paris Hilton

Re: A Comedy of Errors

> Oracle is confident it will win on appeal.

So are certain writers.

Doesn't mean this will happen. Even if there are three judges who are less racist against "Intellectual Property" than Judge Alsup.

Oracle at least can hope for a pot of gold at the end of this legal cud chewing. But why would a blogger cheer them on ... except to be "controversial"?

FCC death vote looms for the Golden Age of American TV

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Windows

Clearly their sense of drama is lacking.....

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Re: We’re living in a “Golden Age of TV”

It's the "Golden Arch" of TV.

Fast food, somehwat fatty and bland.

Sendspace shrugs at phishers exploiting free service

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Re: The picture

After the chestbuster, the earbuster!

Russian hackers target MH17 journalists for embarrassing Putin

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Holmes

Journalists or Churnalists?

The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) recently announced that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine in July 2014 by a missile transported from Russia.

..."transported from Russia" on the wheeled missile-porting equipment, that is.

Unfortunately, this still seems to be a dicey proposition.. It assumes that Russia would just hand over a long-range anti-air system without either the support systems or the team that knows how to handle it.

And also:

The JIT video report on the MH-17 case, which was released on Wednesday, also didn’t address questions about the location of several Ukrainian Buk missile batteries that Dutch (i.e. NATO) intelligence placed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, the day that MH-17 was shot down. A finding from the Dutch intelligence service, MIVD, released last October, said the only high-powered anti-aircraft missile systems in eastern Ukraine at that time, capable of bringing down MH-17 at 33,000 feet and killing all 298 people onboard, belonged to the Ukrainian military, not the rebels.

Yes, someone pressed the button. Whether drunken Ukrainians or nervous rebels playing around we might never know for sure.

Pokemon NO! Hospital demands ban on virtual creatures after addicts invade private wards

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Windows

Millenials can't remember but we had those when the Tamagotchi craze was unfolding back in the 90s.

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Alien

Re: Kids wandering into unsuitable places, particularly roads. Without looking

Kids (and US presidents) have often trouble distinguishing the Real World and the Make Believe world.

Maybe VR games mixing the two are civilizationally-wise not the best idea. Just a thought.

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Re: "Help Dr Kuhlman / San Cristobal Medical Facility - Intensive care unit"

...or maybe it is about the Music of Erich Zann, who evidently is an excellent Geiger keeping otherworldy terrors muscially subdued.

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"Help Dr Kuhlman / San Cristobal Medical Facility - Intensive care unit"

So, who is that "Geiger" guy?

Even Wikipedia gets it right: H.R. Giger

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Paris Hilton

Re: Kids wandering into unsuitable places, particularly roads. Without looking

"digital monsters appearing in nazi gas chambers"

What has Charles Stross got to do with any of that.

Exchange down for Android and iOS users

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Headmaster

Third parties had to license the XML-based EAS while REST is free.

Someone is mixing up things here.

1) REST may or may not include XML payloads.

2) The protocol of EAS used to vehiculate said XML is left unstated

Elon Musk: I'm gonna turn Mars into a $10bn death-dealing interplanetary gas station

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Gimp

Re: I think my wife has a scale model of the rocket...

Blessed be the wives that like models of those uniquely Russian-style knobby rocket contraptions.