* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Three-mile-high pyramid found on alien dwarf world, baffles boffins

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Alien

Re: "Just a minute..."

"Oh Shit!"

Oh, Obama's responded to the petition to pardon Snowden. What'll it be?

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Holmes

I see. I see.

Meanwhile there is dangerous talk of letting Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard go after 30 years inside to appease Israeli histronics over the Iran deal out of humane considerations.

Hold that upgrade: Critical bug in .NET 4.6 'breaks applications'

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Pint

Re: Sensationalism

There's a reason Sun put that "no nukes" disclaimer in Java.

That was legal arse covering (cowering?).

Maybe Sun/Oracle wants to say "our JVM and the sometimes mind-withering runtime libraries are not to be used for high-assurance tasks". That may be so. The Java language however, is not concerned by this. While Java is not exactly the best language for high-assurance programs, restricted Java is bound to be *better* (in the sense of more testable/easier to write and check) than restricted C/C++ code (like MISRA C) because the code can be checked more extensively.

But yeah, I would use an Erlang and its VM at least for the high-level parts of the nuke control ...

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Thumb Down

Re: Just wondering...

If you want the last word in speed you use C/C++ and/or asm regardless of what platform you're on.

I don't know what this even means.

"I have a fast hammer for people who are serially misjudging their skills and resources, so all the world must behave like nail?"

And anyone using assembler on modern CPUs needs to have their head examined. Seriously, go seek help.

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Windows

Re: Sensationalism

It's good to hear there has been some progress since Therac-25 and fly-by-night programming

Puppet draws back the curtain on devops magic with funky gfx and UI

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Holmes

Re: A picture paints a thousand words..

For once an article without an irrelevant and irritating overly large fondleslab/ADHD-yoofcroud-oriented stock picture of dubious taste? It was relaxing like a warm bath with complimentary saké.

Debian Project holds Sparc port's hand, switches off life support

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Coat

I think it's mainly Fujitsu. And RIKEN. Domo arigato!

Got an Android phone? SMASH IT with a hammer – and do it NOW

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Paris Hilton

Day of the Living Deadroids?

So we have some headlining with 10⁹ phones, revised to 0.95 x 10⁹. Is this indeed the number of devices corresponding to "any phones running Android older than 4.1"? If so, how many of those are still in active use and how many are toxic wastevalued recyclable material?

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Re: But its open source

It is?

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Paris Hilton

Dafug?

I have the weird feeling the bugsies are getting better every week...

Hurrah! Windfarms produce whopping one per cent of EU energy

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Holmes

Re: Coal is delicious

uncontrolled by the multi-nationals

I have bad news for you: until you can buy (duly regulated) nanoassemblers at Aunt Martha's "Homebuilding Goodies", those solar cells are coming from some multinational.

So do those windfarms

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Windows

Re: See it

Finally a useful site on the Internet!

Also a bit steampunk-ish

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Re: your forgot a bit

just like diamonds it's held back to increase price ..

Well, I hear the Saudis are pumping like crazy to keep the price down (for not entirely clear reasons ... maybe to mess with Putin or Iran) so no...

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Devil

Re: Why's this a story?

Of course 8% of electricity used isn't the same as 8% of energy used - do you think your readers are stupid? 99% of road transport and 100% of air transport is carbon fueled for instance. Don't you think we realise that?

But that just

1) Makes the problem worse for all the investments in time and materials (which HAVEN'T gone where they would actually make sense) have gone into hard-to-maintain infrastructure that won't deliver; this is known as "malinvestments"

2) Means "8%" is actually shit-tier in terms of real achievements

It's like these end-of-quarter results "made more money than slightly under the worst year we had!" announcements.

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Don't be a weak-willed individual akin to a bundle of sticks.

Ballmer's billion-dollar blunders: When he gambled Microsoft's money and lost

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Holmes

Killed with fire

Once upon a time there was a book with the title "Barbarians led by Bill Gates". Still applies, I guess.

Invisible app ads slug smartmobes with 2GB of daily downloads

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Holmes

T'was a good speech from a balcony in Folkstone, though a bit germanic...

about £300 per year paid to companies like Google by every wage earner in the country

I do hope that UK companies also have customers outside Blighty and the Falklands?

Worse, Google don't really pay any tax anywhere either.

Seriously, citation needed.

That's right, some of that £300 per year in the UK is going into funding foreign pensioners, without it being taxed to help support the UK population first.

How much is "some" .. 0.5%? Any numbers?

Also note that this money supports people who might be on the dole without advertising revenue, so you ACTUALLY PAY LESS TAXES FOR DOLE SUPPORT! Isn't that great?

Microsoft to Windows 10 consumers: You'll get updates LIKE IT or NOT

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Re: Add Some Update Music

IT UPDATED HERE!

Happy 30th anniversary, Tengen! Your anti-DRM NES chip fought the law, and the law won

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Re: @Mongo ..."the court ruled that reverse engineering was protected"

I don't think that reverse engineering is still allowed nowadays though. That's want the DMCA is about. And even if it were allowed, you might well run into patents...

Also, how does the copying lawyer trick work? Was there documentation on file ... ? If so, did Nintendo intend to publish it? Otherwise it would have been a trade secret and would never have left the Nintendo "IP Vault"

SpaceX's blast shock delays world's MOST POWERFUL ROCKET

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Holmes

Re: Cough ... Space Elevator ... Cough

Nothing coming off the computer screen soon, mate. Even if the american flag can be seen on the space elevator in question (why not the flag of the Greater Co-dominium of Inner Asia, created in 8060 C.E.? I dunno...)

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Re: Screw jobs

I dont't agree with the diatribe but I'm pretty sure it is not "outdated". Indeed the continuing economic wreckage of the Eurozone, in particular France, should show it to be very far from outdated indeed. The US is not far behind....

It’s DEJA VU: Customer forgets to tell us about essential feature AGAIN

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Pint

[STALKER campfire noise while someone plays the guitar]

NASA: 'Closest thing yet to ANOTHER EARTH' - FOUND

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Holmes

Re: Re. Jinxed

LHC might have found a 2TeV resonance corresponding to M-SUSY

Exceedingly unliked to be true, my good fellow.

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Re: This is far outside Known Space!

You will have to be a super-midget to fit into the small space left on the side of the hyperdrive shunt...

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Alien

Re: 1400 light years

> 2800 years

A mere instant in time for even the most basic sophonts.

One night, Leila stood alone in the garden, watching the sky. From their home world, Najib, they had travelled only to the nearest stars with inhabited worlds, each time losing just a few decades to the journey. They had chosen those limits so as not to alienate themselves from friends and family, and it had never felt like much of a constraint. True, the civilisation of the Amalgam wrapped the galaxy, and a committed traveller could spend two hundred thousand years circling back home, but what was to be gained by such an overblown odyssey? The dozen worlds of their neighbourhood held enough variety for any traveller, and whether more distant realms were filled with fresh novelties or endless repetition hardly seemed to matter. To have a goal, a destination, would be one thing, but to drown in the sheer plenitude of worlds for its own sake seemed utterly pointless.

A destination? Leila overlaid the sky with information, most of it by necessity millennia out of date. There were worlds with spectacular views of nebulas and star clusters, views that could be guaranteed still to be in existence if they travelled to see them, but would taking in such sights firsthand be so much better than immersion in the flawless images already available in Najib’s library? To blink away ten thousand years just to wake beneath a cloud of green and violet gas, however lovely, seemed like a terrible anticlimax.

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Holmes

Re: We don't even understand all of what we need to know

> mistake

Have you ever thought of aborting yourself?

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Alien

Re: Re. Jinxed

> Zeta Reticuli

Which was also selected on a bad match of a "starmap" drawn under hypnosis, based on noisy information about star positions .... you are bound to find a match like that.

The alienselves never even said it was "starmap". Could have been a wormhole diagram into alternate dimensions for all we know. It was also 2+1D in the original form, whether real or imagined (actually, I hear the local planetary alignment at the time of the first flashback after the abduction matches with the big round things being Jupiter and Saturn, but I could never be bothered to check it)

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Alien

This is far outside Known Space!

so we'll need a new form of propulsion to reach it

We would also need a new form of life and a new form of radiation shielding. Only General AIs or maybe personality scans will ever be bothered to take that kind of trip.

AT&T swallows DirecTV in $50 BEELLION biz gulp – moments after FCC OK

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Holmes

Oh my

Getting enormous flashbacks to the pre-Internet-bubble-burst merger mania.

Is money too cheap? Are expectations overblown? Is irrationality at hedge fund levels? Is that a black swan I spy? The truth will be revealed soon!

US State of Georgia sues 'terrorist' for publishing its own laws ... on the internet

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Flame

Major change needed

Deny the right to right to assert copyright in anything extruded from a state outfit. It has already been paid for in the form of tax money shifted to well-connected "friends & operators" and possibly excessive salaries to petulant civil serpents. End of story. Everybody wins.

The fact that state throws money out of the windows to pursue "copyright claims" using "terrorism" as a sort of argument should lead to guillotines being erected on public places and cleansing to begin worthwith.

Happy birthday, Amiga: The 'other' home computer turns 30

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Trollface

Re: Most of my friends had Atari ST

> Allowing oneself to drop into Tramiel's gravity well

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Re: Memories

The delusional loyalty and misplaced hope in comp.sys.amiga.advocacy and the magazines was pretty hilarious though.

;_;

Why so cruel?

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Technically, moore's law means that commodity hardware (x86 PCs) always wins. What can only be achieved on custom hardware today will be done cheaper and better on standard hardware tomorrow.

The Amiga as the Lisp machine of home computing?

With the onset of the "AI winter" and the early beginnings of the microcomputer revolution (which would sweep away the minicomputer and workstation manufacturers), cheaper desktop PCs soon were able to run Lisp programs even faster than Lisp machines, without the use of special purpose hardware. Their high profit margin hardware business eliminated, most Lisp machine manufacturers went out of business by the early 90s, leaving only software based companies like Lucid Inc. or hardware manufacturers who switched to software and services to avoid the crash.

I can live with that.

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Windows

Weird Echo Causing Incomprehension

Guru Meditations in the Hun's language!

At some point I threw out the Addison-Wesley Intuition Reference Manual....

I even had the "Amiga Intern" hardcover, which was also recycled at some point in time...

Basically, memories of the Cold War and the Berliner Mauer.

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Re: Happy Guru Meditation

Plus trying to program all the cool ideas from Scientific American's "Computer Recreations".

SPLAT! STAR THWACKED, GUTS flung into space at 15 per cent of LIGHTSPEED

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Re: Disappointed

Headline has now mysteriously changed

Such things often happen in the Regoverse. It has to do with click.through rates, maybe?

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Paris Hilton

Re: Had an encounter like that at Sainsburys

Getting assblasted by a trolley coming in at 15% lightspeed is bound to ruin your crackday.

Vive le Act Patriotique: Liberté, égalité, fraternité, pick any two. No, not those

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Big Brother

Left-wing politicians passing by on the far right?

Nothing special here. It's ok, they are the GOOD guys!

Three Estonians jailed for malware spree that infected 4 MILLION computers

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Big Brother

Bring out the white cats dressed in confederate flags!

Yep...

The last defendant, Andrey Taame, who is a Russian national, remains at large, and is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

I smell a fish.

Another evil hit by P.U.T.I.N.

Microsoft delivers Exchange 2016 Preview

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Paris Hilton

Why so negative on Cher?

Choc Factory research shows users just don't get security

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Re: I think we do well...

Please explain

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Re: Rubberhose Cryptanalysis

So how about the security experts give recommendations an average person can actually be expected to follow?

It's the same that applies to french fries: STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM IT ALL

Red Hat bolts the stable with RHEL 6.7

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Trollface

Re: systemd!

So it needs a thorough redesign?

Intelsat to FCC: For the love of satellites, STOP ELON MUSK!

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Re: Status 5

Sounds like Lain of the Wired.

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Hmmm...

"A bag of white fluffy cats and a box full of vials marked "biohazard" for a Mr. Musk?"

"Yes?"

"Please sign here."

NSPCC: Two nonces nailed by cops every day

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WTF?

"This is an alarming study" said Claire Lilley

Because it is so bad?

"The prime minister made a bold move in announcing a host of initiatives to tackle this problem"

Rank activism for pushbutton issues? A bold move? Oh no, this is something else entirely, we swear!

Get root on an OS X 10.10 Mac: The exploit is so trivial it fits in a tweet

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Devil

Re: A simple temporary fix or am I missing something here?

wodim and cdrdao

setuid root

I love the whiff of dangerous failure in the afternoon.

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Paris Hilton

Re: *nix

I really hate that "*nix" nonsense. If you mean Unix then say Unix. If you don't then say what you really mean.

But it's an old tradition dating back to the 80s. Because UNIX is the original AT&T stuff(1). See also: Unix-like

Better deal with, dude.

(1) UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Ltd.

OpenSSH server open to almost unlimited password-guessing bug

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Paris Hilton

Because that's what a VPN actually is?

"Hey Dawg, we heard you like VPNs, so we put a VPN into your VPN so you can tunnel while you tunnel"