* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Pluto's emitting X-rays, and NASA doesn't quite know how

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Re: God of the underworld is speaking...

It has more to do with central banking and dumbfuck politicians who should be burned at hastily erected stakes....

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Re: Bah!

That power supply seems pretty dead. Another successful campaign by Galactic Greenpeace.

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Megaphone

Re: Look closer...

I for one welcome our new fungal overlords etc etc.

Don't bring US presidency politics in this!

Hackers claim they breached Aussie point-of-sale tech firm, try to sell 'customer DB'

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Re: Did I read that right?

Well, homer17 would have been too hard to crack.

Symantec patches AV hole

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Windows

Well, it's Symantec.

Is this the absolutely catastrophic pratfall of Symantec products discovered two months ago, with potential system takeover due to buggy decompression of incoming mail in kernel mode, or some other thing?

Apple seeks patent for paper bag - you read that right, a paper bag

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Windows

Re: It'll never catch on

I remember the times where the only "paper bags" you ever got while doing shopping were brown and crumply (probably made by people at the local prison, too) and you put meat, bottles and cheese into them. Any other articles you were supposed to put into bags that you damn well brought yourself.

These days, Saturday seems to be the Day Of The Luxuriously-Looking Paperbag Airing. It's weird.

2,000 year old man found dead near 2,000 year old computer

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Alien

Any black oil attacks being reported yet?

have claimed the Antikythera mechanism was of extraterrestrial origin

I hate this self-hating shit. It's like claiming that only Sun People can be the source of good love and rythmic music and we need wild foreigners to learn how to commune with nature/the universe/leftover marmelade in the fridge.

NASA starts countdown for Cassini probe's Saturn death dive

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Terminator

Re: Have you had an accident that wasn't your fault?

Not getting satisfaction? Call Jabba & Jubba "The Insurers". Guaranteed Results! More than 100 non-paying low-brow civilizations destroyed!

Encryption backdoors? It's an ongoing dialogue, say anti-terror bods

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Windows

Chutzpah. Chutzpazh everywhere!

Left to their own devices for a few minutes, both Easterly and her co-presenter John Mulligan, deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, start devising how Silicon Valley can help in their fight against groups like ISIL and Al-Qaeda. "We're trying to get the broader ecosystem to reach young people, point out the hypocrisy of the so-called Caliphate"

It would be nice to start looking at oneself before finding "hypocrisy" in others.

The mental and moral corruption, where anything and everything (in particular, wholesale destruction and multi-million ultrakill) can be finagled into a "good thing" sold via trigger words as long as someone is making money on the side, someone's political fantasies are being advanced or Wolf Blitzer types can appear on TV disgusts me. I imagine recruiters of the radical sort can easily exploit the self-contradicting discombobulation of the western self-selecting "elites" to convince interviewees to check out what ISIS can offer.

In this case:

1) Al-Qaeda #1: Currently being helped out in taking over large swathes of Yemen by a frankly evil coalition of the US and Saudi Arabia and where attacking the civilian population has gone to levels where even the UN is emitting farty sounds. Western "decision"-makers should be dragged before war crimes tribunals, again (this must be about the 8th time this century alone). Why is this happening? Well, apparently someone from Iran was at one time seen in Yemen possibly buying shoes, leading to demands by Saudi Arabia to help out against "terrorism", which is always a good reason. Did someome say "28 pages"?

2) Al-Qaeda #2: A potential and likely current ally (under various labels) for meddling in Syria because they want to regime-change the local regime and help out in the fight against ISIS, who are a product of western meddiling in Syria and Iraq, CIA-delivered armements and Saudi-Arabia-delivered doctrine and support. Regime-changing Syria is needed because Syria is part of something called "the Shia crescent" which is apparently scary to Israel and Saudi Arabia, two good allies which we don't want to disappoint. (Israel is now getting 38 billion USD because the US didn't help out enough against scary Iran, which demands adequate compensation be provided, that's definitely not disappointing).

3) ISIS is "not entirely an enemy" of Turkey, a NATO member (these are the US anti-soviet forces in Europe, for those who didn't live through the Cold War, they have nothing to do with Afghanistan or Georgia or even Russia. Oh, wait...). Geniuses in Turkey's byzantine regime apparently think using ISIS as a trump card to get at black market oil and fight against the Kurds and the Syrian government is a good idea. This will evidently lead to blowback of epic proportions because ISIS has no friends and WWII Germans are cultured connaisseurs in comparison. Amazingly the only one who seems to be not ok with this is Russia. Who are then getting scolded by the the US. Who are bombing in Syria. And haven't even been invited to that particular party. WTF!

Azure is on fire, your DNS is terrified

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Re: The cloud strikes again

Number 6 is pushing it.

Better call Rover, then.

French hackers selling hidden .22 calibre pen guns on secret forums

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Headmaster

Re: Newton's Third Law of Motion

".22 is a good caliber for whacking people, you just need to know where to put the round. Do not forget that .223 is..."

Well, .223 is in no way comparable to .22.

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Helium and a breathing mask

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Paris Hilton

Re: "bagging between €5 million to €10 million a month"

And should we really care?

It's probably easier to get a crate of AKM directly from a CIA container in the Middle East / ex-Yougoslavia manufacturer / Ukrainian "security" personnel delivered to Italy / Vienna / Brussels if you want to do ... harmful things.

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Re: Not an Internet story

> In the future when we're all speaking esperanto, it will be las gun.

Your brain will be managed from the bowels of Government Security ("Live Together, Safe, and everyone shall be Harmonized!") and there will be no need for las gun.

EU ends anonymity and rules open Wi-Fi hotspots need passwords

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Unlike first-order classical logic, politics makes no pretense at being consistent. A decision of the ECJ has also scant to do with infrastructure rollout planning.

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Re: Even EU supporters hate these sort of rules.

It's "Juncker" not "Junckers" you dark fart.

Also, I don't see how he is particularly evil.

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Paris Hilton

Can anyone explain AOs conclusion?

The text cited just says that IF the network is password secured, then potentially enforcement of the rights of rightsholders may occur, but in that case, the identity of the people using said password must be ascertained first.

None of this is bound to happen to open hotspots soon, and anyway national laws have to be passed first (well, France may already have a law against this, as in France today there is only one thing that is still allowed: paying taxes)

Pass the 'Milk' to make code run four times faster, say MIT boffins

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Re: Language feature really?

It would probably solve the Halting Problem, too.

Gutted: 6.6M cleartext creds, dox, breached in ClixSense site hack

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Trollface

In an upbeat twist they say ClixSense accounts are now "much more secure" without specifying security controls outside of password resets.

Locking vents, building a flamethrower and looking for stray cats comes to mind.

So, Gov.UK infosec in 2015. 'Chaotic'. Cost £300m. NINE THOUSAND data breaches...

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Re: Have GCHQ systems ever been breached?

Ministers and Civil Servants would be disquieted if you offered to accompany them behind the garden shed...

Sports doping agency WADA says hackers lifted Olympic athletes' medical records

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Re: TUE secrets?

Because medication can be deeply personal - imagine being Caster Semenya - having your very identity become the subject of international news for years

Welcome to competition sports. If you enter, you know what will happen.

That being said, Caster is a swell guy.

Jeff Bezos' thrusting cylinder makes Elon Musk's look minuscule

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Gimp

That photo looks like there is a can of Red Bull lifting off.

I sense a marketing opportunity...

Linux 4.8 rc6 facepalm!

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Linux

What does a pull request have to do with code size?

Airbag bug forces GM to recall 4.3m vehicles – but eh, how about those self-driving cars, huh?

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Terminator

Re: And the 'Sentence of the Year' award goes to...

Well, seriously. Mentioning "bug" and "self-driving car" in the same sentence is kinda stupid though. If it is "self-driving", does the concept of "bug" still apply? Cause maybe you can't even iron it out, the problem will be hidden behind walls of machine learning results that no-one understands. It will be so complex that we will have to talk about "inappropriate decision-making" or "cognitive excursions" etc.

Same as with human drivers, actually.

US Marine Corps to fly F-35s from HMS Queen Lizzie as UK won't have enough jets

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Re: Stupid

Add the on-shore maintenance facilities, too, please.

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Windows

Hillary knows where Aleppo is. No wonder ... she did it in.

No need. Assad and Putin have that nicely covered already.

Yeah well that's fucking bullshit oozing from the liberventionists. Please take your brainpills.

Remember when Ghaddafi distributed viagra for RAPE! to hurry GENOCIDE! along and we suddenly needed to impose a NO-FLY ZONE! because otherwise A NEW HOLOCAUST SOON!

We are currently at the point in Obama'sHillary's excellent Lybian Adventure where the NOBEL-PEACE-PRIZE PRESIDENT is stationing THE CARRIERS OF FREEDOM off the coast of Lybia for no particular reason except to apparently bomb stuff (based on what? for what? who nows! Maybe to keep Hillary's weapon rat line into Syria intact?). Unfortunately our Lyibian CIA ASSET General Hifter (an ex from Al Qaeda btw) has suddenly been declared as NO LONGER A WINNER as he's not aligned with the TRIPOLI-BASED (or was it Syre-based?) GOVERNMENT that we are currently supporting (or not). I suppose a REGRETTABLE INCIDENT if not DEATH BY LIBERTY DRONE will follow soon.

In Frank Miller's comic "Electra Assassin" the progressive presidential candidate Ken Wind, a smug smooth-talking cardboard cutout who is always looking directly at the reader is actually a product of Evil and the idea is to unleash nuclear war. Luckily this is pre-empted by mind transfer as foul-mouthed, beer-drinking Agent Garret, who fantasizes about Electra dominating him (and who is a Trump lookalike come to think of it) gets to inhabit this empty shell, win the presidency, install the red button on his desk and tell the Soviets what's what, Thompson submachinegun in hand (we are left hoping that the Soviet Ambassador showing up at the White House will accede to demands). It's like Frank got some channelling from the future.

Also, to heat the debate up some more: It Takes A Village Idiot to Vote for Hillary

As the media reminds us, Trump disqualifies himself for the presidency daily. This time it was for speaking the truth about Putin at the forum. The Russian people’s approval of their president stands at 82 percent. But the correct American values, as decreed by our northeastern elites, depend on disparaging Putin and his people. After all, Russians are stupid. They need Clinton and her Radical Republican counterpart, Speaker Paul Ryan (or a color-coded revolution organized by both), to induct them into the American government’s ways.

Enforcer Hillary (and Speaker Ryan) was having none of it. A preference for the Russian president over our American president was plain “unpatriotic and scary,” to be stamped out and marginalized.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton,” argues historian Clyde N. Wilson, whose métier is American intellectual history, “is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee—self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing.”

And this just in: Hillary Clinton’s National Security Advisers Are a “Who’s Who” of the Warfare State

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Windows

Re: US Marine Corps will be flying F-35Bs

As former U.S. military (Navy), I'd say that when you're attached to a foreign command, you obey the commanding officer, regardless, unless it goes against your basic oath of defending the U.S. Constitution.

Also do not forget to disobey orders that are against the Laws of War (Good Luck riding it out in the brig though).

(Also try to evade assignments in "deniable operations" where you will be left hanging dry by the denying weasels in charge once shit hits the fannon-MSM press.)

Dell swings layoffs axe at 3,000 EMC people

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Being there, doing that.

Not a DELLMC, elsewhere...

Star Trek's Enterprise turns 50 and still no sign of a warp drive. Sigh

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So if you cannot go faster than light in normal space then you must use abnormal spece - simples

Let's set up an experiment at a Central Bank!

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Terminator

Re: Mythic

The universe is a dangerous place, even without Klingons.

Fleshers! They suck at everything.

(The metronomic cackle of what passes as laughter of an AI, heavily entropized by noise, is heard over the radiowaves at 1'666 MHz)

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Holmes

Re: It is all wishful thinking

somehow equate with "godlike powers", though on what basis I can't imagine

I will just pithyly say that if you don't understand why, you need to read more.

But what's the harm in at least doing a little research to see if it is even theoretically possible?

That's what I am saying - it's all in good fun. Go ahead, surprise me!

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Holmes

Re: It is all wishful thinking

Hubris much?

I think the guy with the Hubris problem is the one who thinks that there is an undiscovered and cunningly hidden principle in Nature that allows one to attain *literally* Godlike powers. That kind of juvenile dreamer is bound to be disappointed. Maybe entrepreneurship (honorable) or politician (dishonorable) are career choices to look into for such a person?

Note that all the discoveries in recent centuries have about KNOWING YOUR LIMITS -- not about Yet Another Comic-Strip Worthy Powerdiscovery.

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Windows

Re: FTFY

You are confused.

Are we talking "Trek Science" or "Science"

Making stuff up on TV is fun, but one cannot conclude from that that there is any transference to the Real World..

> The problem is moving the bubble

The problem is that there is no bubble in the Real World.

> gravity waves/particles are being detected by satellites, now, looking for gravity wave events and whatnot.

There is no realistic way to detect the quantum of the gravitational field (if it even exists). Satellites are used for mapping the gravitational field of Earth and Moon, yes, but that's not any different from using a torsionmeter to find that there is a large mountain outside.

> Emitting them may be nothing more than spinning heavy atoms inside a magnetic field [let's say a mercury vapor magnetron].

There is no Science behind these words which align to form a phrase, nothing more.

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Headmaster

Re: How old would those naysayers be?

Is that the equivalent to saying it's impossible to travel at light speed?

No. The equivalent of saying "it's impossible to travel at light speed" is that (the mathematical description that best fits) this universe only allows, indeed enforces, light speed for particles with 0 rest mass. These happen to be photons, the carriers of the electromagnetic force. Matter structure (i.e. spaceships and fleshers therein) cannot be mapped to bunches of photons in any evident way. So no spacecraft at lightspeed.

Addendum 0: Interestingly for a photon, the universe has size zero. Photon trajectories seem to be a very special object that may well indicate a better mathematical description of the whole shebang. Last I heard, Penrose was working on that.

Addendum 1: According to Penrose, an old universe may well see the rest mass of all particles go to zero, in which case everything will be at light speed, which means there won't be any "time" left.

Addendum 2: Why is light speed that special veolcity "1"? The explanation may be at a deeper layer that we don't have access to as yet. Let's grab something from the SciFi bag and listen to Greg Egan (Schild's Ladder) for a few paragraphs:

In the beginning was a graph, more like diamond than graphite. Every node in this graph was tetravalent: connected by four edges to four other nodes. By a count of edges, the shortest path from any node back to itself was a loop six edges long. Every node belonged to twenty-four such loops, as well as forty-eight loops eight edges long, and four hundred and eighty that were ten edges long. The edges had no length or shape, the nodes no position; the graph consisted only of the fact that some nodes were connected to others. This pattern of connections, repeated endlessly, was all there was.

In the beginning? Waking more fully, Cass corrected herself: that was the version she remembered from childhood, but these days she preferred to be more cautious. The Sarumpaet rules let you trace the history of the universe back to the vicinity of the Diamond Graph, and everything you could ask for in a Big Bang was there: low entropy, particle creation, rapidly expanding space. Whether it made sense to follow these signposts all the way back, though, was another question.

Cass let the graph's honeycomb pattern linger in the darkness of her skull. Having relinquished her

child's-eye view of the world, she was unable to decide which epoch of her life she actually inhabited. It was one of the minor perils of longevity: waking could be like to trying to find your way home on a street with ten thousand houses, all of which had once been your own. That the clues on the other side of her eyelids might be more enlightening was beside the point; she had to follow the internal logic of her memories back into the present before she could jolt herself awake.

The Sarumpaet rules assigned a quantum amplitude to the possibility of any one graph being followed by another. Among other things, the rules predicted that if a graph contained a loop consisting of three trivalent nodes alternating with three pentavalent ones, its most likely successors would share the same pattern, but it would be shifted to an adjoining set of nodes. A loop like this was known as a photon. The rules predicted that the photon would move. (Which way? All directions were equally likely. To aim the photon took more work, superimposing a swarm of different versions that would interfere and cancel each other out when they traveled in all but one favored direction.) Other patterns could propagate in a similar fashion, and their symmetries and interactions matched up perfectly with the known fundamental particles. Every graph was still just a graph, a collection of nodes and their mutual connections, but the flaws in the diamond took on a life of their own.

The current state of the universe was a long way from the Diamond Graph. Even a patch of near-vacuum in the middle of interstellar space owed its near-Euclidean geometry to the fact that it was an elaborate superposition of a multitude of graphs, each one riddled with virtual particles. And while an ideal vacuum, in all its complexity, was a known quantity, most real space departed from that ideal in an uncontrollable manner: shot through with cosmic radiation, molecular contaminants, neutrinos, and the endless faint ripple of gravitational waves.

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Holmes

Re: It is all wishful thinking

Well, that's the comment section of the register. It's a mix of youthful know-nothings full of hope and old curmudgeons who assume they know what the deal is.

The latter are probably right.

Pity all those PhDs at NASA Eagleworks are apparently wasting their time looking into questions like these without assumptions that they already know everything about how physics actually works

I never understood how that actually works. It's probably just a weekly get-together of the young lions and all in good fun. They have never produced anything beyond flashy CGI either.

Yeah, it looks like we pretty much know how the universe works at the lowest levels. Much work has to be done in fleshing out the mathematics and there may be some additional surprises but easy & fast interstellar travel at least by fleshies is not likely to be among them. Machines at sub-c sent out by the millions so that one may arrive once there is enough spare capacity in the economy for such fun? Possible, but that's too vanilla for TV.

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Headmaster

Re: EM Drive is an impossible idea

Remember 20, 30 years ago. It was impossible that stomach ulcers in humans were caused by a virus ? Hello Heliobactor pylorii !

Yeah. It's a bacterium. And what has that to do with the fabulous EM drive?

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Re: How old would those naysayers be?

Context: If said gentleman says to go up against the laws of nature, he is probably a crank.

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That is unlikely but it wouldn't help you.

With every particle of your transport thingamabob suddenly leaving your docking bay at lightspeed in all directions, you might as well blow yourself up with a fusion bomb.

Also note that the Higgs is only responsible for the rest masses. Most of the mass in matter is in the energetic glue fields.

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Linux

Re: Sir

If you can create those, you can make them time-travelling, and then P=NP (see the end). Instant computational superpowers!

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Re: FTFY

Can't unhear!

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Re: EmDrive is NASA's?

And probably patented at the USPTO

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Headmaster

FTFY

Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed that if a spacecraft was placed within a ring of “exotic matter” that could warp the space around it, the spacecraft travelling in the warped bubble could bypass the speed of light.

Glaswegian physicist Imma Musingmyself Wiffequations proposed that if cats were actually magic beings with the power of extruding rainbows from their arse, a spacecraft that was placed within a ring of “exotic kittens” could "move over the rainbow" and thus bypass the speed of light.

The only way we know how to "warp space" (and that only one way) is to move shitloads of matter into the place to be warped.

And we know that if there is something that moves faster than the speed of light, there are reference systems in which an observer can see causality relations invovling this faster-than-light-signalling going the wrong way, and that is a no-no. Indeed, Mother Nature consistently goes to extremes to interdict any possibility of faster-than-light-signalling that may appear in QM and QFT.

Elon Musk says SpaceX Falcon 9 fireball investigation is 'biggest challenge yet'

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Black Helicopters

Yeah I saw that happen at 9-11. EXACTLY THE SAME!!

Furthermore, 15 PhD-ed structural engineers have stated that rockets do not explode in the way shown in the footage (which has been doctored with anyway). The fireball is too red and balloons outwards more rapidly than would be expected normally. They thus have stated in a non-existent European Physics Journal that is being financed by friends of George Soros that what we are looking at here was actually a controlled demolition, possibly to celebrate the 50th anniversay of Star Trek.

IBM lifts lid, unleashes Linux-based x86 killer on unsuspecting world

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Re: We've come a long way...

Yes that. Burns power like there is no tomorrow but basically fast.

No longer the economically sweet spot for supercomputing today...

Save us, Jack Dorsey!

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Holmes

Weird that no-one has ever brought up these claims regarding AIPAC for example.

I strongly suspect that this is all preparation in case Trumps unexpectedly wins. The "t'was Russia" clamor will go into overdrive, the Supreme Court will annul the result and hand the result to La Néoconne Corrompue Madame Clinton.

This might be followed by a little war with Russia (US vs Germany was started on similar shaky grounds), because the propaganda apparatus is rolling, and hey, never let a manufactured crisis go to waste (What else that woman gonna do? She has already declared that "Putin is Hitler", thus ensuring that she is the laughing stock of the other serious economies - and that "her mission is to fight evil worldwide" - and you know what that means for a neocon).

Better get out of Europe while you can. Anyway it's hopeless crap now, what with Mutti Merkel the Obama admirer, the amazing decaying Eurozone, perma-PIGS, French socialistic terminal illness, brown people coming home to roost and as addendum the festering corpse of Ukraine ripped apart by Nazis and oligarchs (soon to be more Euro-Integrated, that's gonna be fun).

Fujitsu's billion-dollar ARM supercomputer delayed by up to 2 years

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Windows

Delay ... but so what!!

Only in Management Land can one both work on the bleeding edge and still be on-time and on-budget. Because the bleeding edge can just be looked up in books, right, how hard can it be.

These programs are "industrial policy" anyway - get new researchers into the field, keep the knowledge alive, build the bases to attack the next problem earlier than the country next door. The money will flow (even it it has to be printed). It's all in good fun.

(Anybody remember the "Strategic Defense Initiative"? It started off with the idea of building Intelligent Machines (always good for Cold War machism), then when it became clear that that was kinda out there, quickly veered into supercomputing and integrated communications. Success!)

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Re: Bampots

Go back to your talk show!

Microsoft thought of the children and decided to ban some browsers

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Mushroom

Re: MSN default homepage ???

MSN, possibly the most sluggish image and flash heavy site

Possibly the most shitty and cruddy "news" site too. Just look at it. Lousy gossip newskebabs, "people" stories and clickbait. Makes one physically sick. Frankly, I would be at the Daily Mail if I needed that.

Vomit-chan.jpg

BA check-in system checks out: Staff flung back to cruel '90s world of paper

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Holmes

Re: If you'd had any real IT awareness beyond Windows

You may of course have tons of experience that is non Windows, but if it's not Linux then the snobs on here won't miss a chance to lord it over you whatever you may know.

On the contrary! Relevant skills in cooking, internal combustion engine tuning, martial arts, nuclear engineering and hot raw sex are always appreciated.

Skills in Windows, however, must, sadly be relegated to the dustbin of the fakers: people who are in IT because they heard it pays so much and are otherwise so uninterested in anything that they buy the proverbial cat in the bag. As a consequence they are mainly staring at goatsscreens telling them to wait because "Windows is updating".

Red-faced VESK scratches '100% uptime' claim after 2-day outage

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Trollface

"VESK not so tough since being molested by Murphy"

Reality bites extreme uptime claims