* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Google 'Solitaire' ... Just do it

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Re: Warning!

> leet developer

He was some kind of prof

'Second Earth' exoplanet found right under our noses – just four light years away

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Re: I wish they would can "Operation Starshot"

Good luck dragchuting against the light of Proxima from 0.9c downwards. That must be some motherfucking humongous sail.

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Big Brother

Re: Every time someone prefers Hillarycon, Harambe has to die again!

Powering up the Godwiniser already, eh?

Oh yeah you think?

Not even talking hypothetically.

Wrecking a few countries and being onboard for wrecking a few countries using rank propaganda and crying liberals from the safety of the desk, then cackling about it on TV?

I don't know what you need then.

People have been hanging from rafters for far, far less.

As for the "mildly corrupt bureaucrat" .. HA HA!

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Paris Hilton

Re: Green? Blue? Brown?

The light from Proxima has a colour temperature of about 3000K which is rather whiter than a halogen light bulb.

Quite so, but why is it so red on the snaps, then?

Serious question.

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Every time someone prefers Hillarycon, Harambe has to die again!

They're probably thinking "should I vote for the personality-free, mildly corrupt bureaucrat for four more years of the same

I'm sorry, that's an Eichmann-level type of bureaucrat. Banality of evil and all that (which Hillary has publicly sworn to eradicate, imagine that)

Another 4 years of Bushbama WILL kill us, as Russia and China are next.

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Paris Hilton

Re: I wish they would can "Operation Starshot"

Your probes fly to the halfway point, then flip over 180 degrees sail now acts as a drag chute as you approach target star and slow down. Larger ship uses ion drives to the halfway point, flip over then decelerate until space normal maneuvering possible.

Excuse me, we are now reaching no-reaction-mass needed Star Wars Fantasy Manoeuvering.

And how exactly is that "drag chute" thing going to work?

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Paris Hilton

Re: Solar Flares?

An excellent question. Does anyone know anything about the flaring behaviour of Red Dwarfs?

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Alien

Re: it’s completely hypothetical that Proxima b is Earth-like

> a perversion about inseminating cows and anal probing americans

Actually, it's about MUTILATING cows (and other livestock) and ABDUCTING (anal probing is generally not on the books) not only Murricans.

Additionally, it's not a "perversion". Trained tour guides from Zeta Reticuli routinely sell these activities under the heading of "THE LULZ". Confusing the locals has been an ancient tradition since at least Ghrn'Harrr the Contorter.

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Re: Orion and/or Daedalus?

FUND IT!

Though for Deadalus, I dont think there is a viable fusion motor yet.

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Alien

Ah, the dreams of ... I dunno.

"Hence, a habitable rocky planet around Proxima would be the most natural location to where our civilization could aspire to move after the Sun will die, five billion years from now."

100% sure civilization will be done and dusted several orders of magnitude earlier, if we are lucky.

Maybe the machines (possibly "semi-biological", after all protein is excellent for building various stuff) will inherit the solar system. I hope so, one always wants to leave the universe a bit more inhabited.

Additionally, Earth will become non-habitable in about 600 million years as all the CO2 gets scrubbed out of the atmosphere and the habitable zone moves outwards as the Sun heats up. Interesting times for a last run of the evolutionary process.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Ok to go.

> Ok to go. I'm OK to GO.

It always sounded suspiciously like hot sex words to me.

Maybe that's what interstellar travel is all about, too.

Juno probe to graze Jupiter on Saturday

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Re: Interplanatery Warfare

Well, that's having the Iran story a bit of arse-backwards, but thanks for trying and being open to propaganda by the usual Neocon suspects.

> we had a chance to back that uprising against the mullahs

You guys fucked Iran over after the first revolution, please stay out, mmokay?

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Re: Interplanatery Warfare

This is an American mission.

First drop stuff, find out if someone complains later.

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Pint

Re: While we are talking about images from outer space

About that telephoto lens

Suddenly, swallowing another swig of beer, van Dokkum realized he might know of a way out of this predicament. He’d made a hobby of wildlife photography (he recently published a collection of photos of dragonflies), and kept up with camera trends. “I had heard about these awesome new telephoto lenses,” he says. The Japanese optics corporation Canon had started producing high-end lenses coated with a proprietary film of nano-sized cones. By deflecting errant light away from a camera’s detector, Canon claimed, the cones effectively eliminated the effects of scattering. Photographers could now get crisp, true-to-life images—no more ghosts or flares.

Nice!

In a snowy parking lot filled with amateur stargazers, they attached the lens to a camera, mounted it on a tripod, and trained the diminutive telescope on a spiral galaxy known as M51. First observed in the late 1700s, M51 has been intensely studied and photographed for centuries. But after a two-hour exposure, Canon’s lens captured a sight that scientists had only gleaned hints of before: Extending far beyond M51’s bright central spiral was a distinct halo of diffuse matter. “We quickly realized that the lens really was as outstanding as we had hoped,” van Dokkum says.

Those guys!

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Thumb Up

Re: What a time to be alive

Everything is going extremely well. There are no complaints.

New booze guidelines: We'd rather you didn't enjoy yourselves

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Paris Hilton

What happened to the "coffee causes cancer" WHO recommendation?

I haven't heard anything about it in a couple of years.

Did the civil servant tasked with acting on it die of leukemia due to Wifi irradiation?

Voyager 2's closest Saturn swoop was 35 years ago today

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I always make time for Ballard!

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Re: Shorely we wouldn't coast all the way?

Depends on what sort of technology is availiabe.

Physics indicates strongly that we should stop being juvenile and there are no magic solutions. Very much sub-c, acceleration means having reaction mass and the best you can do getting energy is total conversion of matter (there may be better ways to do that than having antimatter at hand).

Engineering all of that is out there. We barely manage to keep a nuclear submarine running with large maintenance bases conveniently not far away.

Economics... uh, oh!

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Re: Shorely we wouldn't coast all the way?

I would like to note that the idea of constant 1G acceleration is a bit stupid as you would need vastly oversized motors to accelerate all that fuel mass at trip's start, whereas a trip's end you are down to a few tons so very much smaller motors would suffice. Better choose constant thrust for engineering reasons.

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Holmes

Re: Shorely we wouldn't coast all the way?

> Assume we don't have gravity generators yet

The only way to "generate gravity" is to pack a shitload of mass~energy into a small volume (because gravity and shitloads of stuff are essentially two sides of the same coin). Smells strongly like "no gravity generator in this universe", sorry!

As for the res,t according to

http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel.php

1G to Proxima with a perfect fusion motor (0.008 kg/m² fuel conversion) to put 25 tons into Proxima at rest (i.e. not zip through) will have you reach speed 0.95c at midpoint, will be 42 month ship time and will cost you 117'916 tons of fuel at start (this is the mass of one Israeli apple crop export).

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Re: A stellar achievement

You mean interplanetary, right?

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Windows

Re: Nice reference ;-)

Some of us SAW IT IN-THEATRE!

Have a gander at the animation of the Voyager 2 Saturn flyby using top-end graphics code and hardware. Not sure this is the one called "Voyager 2 - Blinn et al." presented at Siggraph '79, as accoording to Jim Blinn's page, there was a presentation at Siggraph '82. Time entropizes memories...

Instead of Brian Eno, the applicable music shoudl either be Lux Aeterna or the Jerry Goldsmith's intro to Alien, not sure which.

Vale, LOGO creator Seymour Papert, who taught us that code can be creative play

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Windows

Re: Slight Criticism

Of course.

Does anyone remember Perceptrons, the classic? (See also, here)

I have to say ... I haven't read it myself. But I remember a "Computer Recreations" article Scientific American by Dewdney discussing the failings of the perceptron. The idea of wanting to build a "box that lights a little light if you point it at a cat" just blew my mind.

(Update: It grabbed a copy from the SciAm store for a few dollars. This was a special issue on "Computer Software" and it has articles by Alan Kay, Niklaus Wirth, Lawrence Tesler, Peter Denning & Robert Brown, Terry Winograd, Andries van Dam, Michael lesk, Alfred Spector, Stephen Wolfram, Douglas Lenat. Damn!

It also discusses "inherently safe nuclear reactors", we are still not there. And is ad-laden to the point of unreadability ...)

Facebook, Twitter and Google are to blame for terrorism, say MPs

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Re: back in the good old days

Anyone who has lived through the "Red Terror" scares of the 80s (some of which are likely to have been entirely manufactured by NATO wingnuts) knows this is just the same old, same old.

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Windows

Re: electible again because

He's not "my" candidate (anyway too old to care all that much, I noticed myself starting to dream of sitting on my front porch with a dog and a beer reserve), but you have to give him his dues. Making the press panic and the establishment candidates whore even more loudly than usual is a sight to behold. It is also telling. Telling that we are entering the final sprint and the system is now making more noises than a submarine at implosion depth.

As for "releasing tax returns" (which, I am sure, are not entirely clean) we have "The Clinton Media’s Manufactured Reality" by Ilana Mercer, who is, of course, strongly into Trump:

The coda to every article written by the presstitutes exalting Hillary’s “heroic” tax disclosure asserts that, “By not releasing [his taxes] during the campaign, [Trump] is breaking with a 40-year bipartisan tradition of transparency expected of presidential nominees,” and that “there is nothing to prevent Trump from doing the same during an audit.”

Oh yes there is.

Clinton will never be perp-walked for flouting state secrecy laws, much less audited, or, conversely, criminalized by the IRS in the course of an audit. Were he merely to be accused of tax violations; Mr. Trump is certain to be destroyed by both political factions.

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty,” forewarned Thomas Jefferson. When it comes to the IRS, Jefferson’s bar has been met. Trump needs to be very afraid.

P.S. ...I don't know the story about "The Clinton Foundation" (all comers welcome, favors repaid later, pay now because we will not accept your donation after the election) and the "The Clinton Family Foundation" (some othe rfoundation, as it seems), but these seem murky at best.

Anyway, getting off-topic, here, har har!

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Mushroom

Isn't "Vaz" some kind of lubricant?

We should utilise the brightest talent of the world’s creative industries to counter terrorist propaganda with even more sophisticated anti-radicalising material. In the face of this new threat, we need a terrestrial star wars.

What kind of utter collectible moron says this kind of shit?

The Darth Vaderesque collection of even greater collectible morons in nominal charge on our side should give anyone with even a passing knowledge of history since at least "Darth Clinton" pause (soon with a neoconnish reboot in "Clinton II: Darth Harder", electible again because of the "female+liberal=caring" meme complex)

Salesforce's NA14 nods again

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Holmes

NA14 is the equivalent of the Haunted Missile Silo.

Better shut it down and let the otherworlders in peace.

Excel hell messes up ~20 per cent of genetic science papers

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Windows

Re: Why this happens

It's like when computer programmers produce some egregious piece of rubbish instead of a usable program

Not at all. When someone suddenly decides to write a program in INTERCAL, this will be readily apparent and a robust bollocking will hopefully ensue.

Spreadsheets in general (and the horrific Excel in particular) are the equivalent of INTERCAL for the business user. This is NOT readily apparent because they hide their in-built awfulness behind nice graphics, bells and whistles, tradition and the mindest that "there is nothing else". An acceptable idea back in the seventies, after Microsoft grabbed the market and added its "special user-friendly sauce" on top, they are now used way beyond what they should be used for.

Time to rethink this.

Your wget is broken and should DIE, dev tells Microsoft

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Re: post summed up in one meme :P

Is that Scumbag Steve's hat?

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Gimp

1) How often did the shell move from /usr/bin/bash and /bin/bash lately?

2) Code "conservatively" is actually an alias "not using features that make shell scripting less horribad". Are you still coding in original Perl? Why suffer needlessly for a couple of survivalist stuckists loudly proclaiming their insanity on the interwupps who insist on "original sh code" and who are unlikely to ever encounter your script in any case? It's rank masochism. And you don't even get a woman traipsing all over you on the plus side.

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Windows

That's the idea. You want to leave the user the possibiity to soft-replace an executable using PATH if he is in the mood of pretending to know what he's doing.

Except for the shebang line, where you want to (actually, must) use #!/bin/bash or something (some people prepend "#!/usr/bin/env bash" which completely bonkers in a pretend-more-flexible-than-you way.

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Re: They are quick to shutter services

After a while the RFC will be forgotten and people will accept the MS versions of wget and curl as the defacto ones

What kind of people are those?

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Holmes

Re: If only ...

You know, they kept shipping a bad implementation of something that looks like a crippled command-line shell for 20+ years ...

US Treasury to launch pre-emptive strike on EU's Ireland tax probe

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"Seeking shelter in foreign lands" is not illegal.

It is not even immoral unless the assumption is that The State (or at least one of them ,if not several) owns your goods, your work and your arse. I don't think anybody signed up for this.

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Windows

Re: I don't think so. The US has a huge debt that they need to address sooner or later.

But the can kicking is now nearing the level of "better start a new World War rapidos now, before things get dicey in here and the guillotine gets erected", not sure where this is going.

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Windows

I say!

Well, nothing that can be fixed with a bit of hitlerization followed by regime change, really.

(I don't think the EUC can unilaterally demand the monies without ECJ having a say... )

Thumb it down, Hillary voters. Are your ready for Madame Nuland at the head of the State Department doing her pivots wherever they are needed?

Corbyn lied, Virgin Trains lied, Harambe died

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Facepalm

Re: OK Jeremy--renationalization--what then?

Corbyn's job is to just get the legislation passed, that's why he's a MP and not an engineer.

Not the same at all.

An engineer has to go up against reality.

An MP has to go up against the public and his peers using manufactured reality.

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Trollface

Re: Cant see where he lied

Stuck in a short train at Paddington at rush hour, waiting and waiting, people packing in and packing in, waiting and waiting...and dripping inside one's shirt...

Dark, satanic trains of the monopolistic capitalists. They are probably even transporting children in there.

If only there were some germanic communistic discontent with eschatological tendencies, scant knowledge of economics but who had studied that totally tripping absolutistic-monarchy-selling court philosopher Hegel. He could write a multi-volume book about these terrible conditions which could then be distributed via amazon.

'Neural network' spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 silicon brain

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Re: Wow

That was back before the War on Durror (that's when I read the last IEEE Micro, after that I had to change my interests)

Get one for USD 94 here now:

http://www.cognimem.com/products/chips-and-modules/CM1K-Chip/

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Windows

Re: Most Surprised

They matter a lot if you're doing VR. Sloppy latency on scene calculations is a good way of inducing motion sickness. Given that everyone is getting into VR these days this might end up being of concern.

I don't understand this at all. VR and we are talking sub-microsecond realtime arrival times ... ON THE FSCKING CPU (yes, the CPU, not the graphgics pipeline)

Not going slightly overboard here? And I mean hanging on a 15 meter outrigger slightly overboard?

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Holmes

Re: Most Surprised

Whether CISC or RISC (a useless distinction nowadays, how about simpy "ISC"), there needs to be instruction pipelines. Otherwise how are you going to keep the various elements of the chip busy. Indeed, pipelines were just on RISCs in the first place to be able to issue an instruction at every clock cycle: RISC pipeline.

OTOH, this pipeline seems very deep. Recovering from a bad branch (i.e. emptying the pipeline, then refilling it) will take a few cycles.

Well, it would probably take a few hours to study the design in detail. Not my area now..

It does mean that this is useless for hard real-time applications. Branch execution time is now impossible to predict.

Well, "hard real-time" is still in the ms range, right, a few orders of magnitude slower? I don't think this is going to matter.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Cool

"Your Exynos only makes my penis harder!"

Seriously, I would not have considered a neural network used in branch prediction ... but in retrospect why the hell not?

OTOH, what are the features that enter into the (clearly supervised) learning phase, when is the learning over when is the network reset (likely not whenever another process gets schedule..)?

Sex ban IT man loses appeal – but judge labels order 'unpoliceable'

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Re: downvote here

Precrime is now a thing.

A commentard called Naughtyhorse demands it!

Microsoft promises free terrible coffee every month you use Edge

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Re: You dont' know what bad coffee is

$5 cups of coffee, that's real money, as opposed to giving away cloud storage space which is virtual money

Uh, venerable ancient ... you know ... about that US dollar....

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Terminator

Re: '20 of which must be made on mobile'

The current version of Bing Rewards (sometimes) distinguishes between PC and mobile searches; currently users can earn 15 credits on the PC and 10 on mobile (regardless of device or OS used). That said it would be nice if Microsoft gave extra credits to those of us who do use W10 Mobile.

Thank you, Cortana!

Please tell me more about Windows 10 mobile.

Snowden files confirm Shadow Brokers spilled NSA's Equation Group spy tools over the web

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Gimp

Direct from "The Laundry"

That FOXACID manual is pretty hilarious.

Hack technician instructions ... I like it ... although the english style is not the best it's more lively than MS prose. And NSA is using ClearCase, it seems.

I think I will use this as an example to demonstrate technical writing at our place.

The Intercept forgot to [redact] an example IP 203.99.XX.XX, somewhere in Pakistan...

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Windows

"It's going to be an ugly summer"

Seriously?

ALL the fucking summers since 2001 have been ugly, and there isn't even anyone who wants to actively democratize, liberate, genocidate, extraordinarily rendition, gazaify, ukrainimate or shock-and-awe me (not to mention slap me with surveillance order, ASBO, terror writ, sexual deviance order, looking-cross-at-hallowed-politican oder or what-have-you). As far as I know.

Seriously.

UK's mass-surveillance draft law grants spies incredible powers for no real reason – review

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Re: Business as usual

Eh? Who killed Fusilier Lee Rigby? Who blew up three underground trains and a bus?

Yes. Some people mistake an itch for cancer.

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Holmes

Re: Business as usual

> This is how we won World War 1

I think that whatever was left of the British Empire disagrees that Britain won WW1 in any form or shape.

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Holmes

Re: "Privacy built in"

"Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide". John Adams, Letter, April 15, 1814

It's like accumulation of entropy. At the end, legal and executive cruft overwhelms the system and the amount of power in crabby hands at the end of brains that have neither the intelligence nor the mandate to wield it is so overwhelming that blood needs to be spilled.

Then the cycle starts again.