* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Top Euro court ends mega ebook VAT slash in France, Luxembourg

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Re: Bah!

Have you ever seen the containers of papers with official EU texts spewing forth from the printing presses? One could probably bury a small country in it.

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Holmes

It's impossible for a tax like VAT to hurt a company, since it is always passed on to the end consumer.

I don't know just how totally politician-level of utterly stupid one must be in order to not realize that upping the price towards the "consumer" (don't you mean "customer")? by 20% or thereabouts for no particular reason whatsover won't impact sales and thence "hurt a company".

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Holmes

Re: Your Kindle purchases are about to get dearer

1) Buy a book at Amazon

2) Check the that nice slip of paper that comes with it (commonly called an "invoice" or "bill")

3) ???

4) 3% VAT

You can't just charge the VAT rate you bloody well like.

I would also like to see the EU-whatever-retardo-decision-group-of-the-week lovingly treated to a healthy dose of Zyklon B to tell them in no uncertain terms that Orwellianically deciding that people just don't pay enough to the loving, indispensable state for the privilege of buying a book is just not on.

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Holmes

Re: VAT Fraud!

"VAT is a luxury tax."

what complete and utter bollocks

Downvoted for stating facts?

The commentariat is even more outrageously retarded as usually.

Massive gravitational lens flare unveils EINSTEIN CROSS SUPERNOVA

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Headmaster

Light gets bent, big-time

I think that should be "minimal (proper) time"

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El Reg will now find some old mechanic dude who worked on subs and make him editor.

IBM System x biz sales: The numbers are out... and they're not pretty

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Facepalm

Der Aufschwung!

But some customers deferred purchases due to some lingering economic uncertainty

"lingering" as in "this Chernobyl reactor core sure has been lingering during the last 2 seconds"?

Lost WHITE CITY of the MONKEY GOD found after 500 years

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If it even exists and hasn't been made up by journosensationalists.

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Headmaster

Re: (Optional) Tsk you humans

So maybe extrem e wealth implied a longer lasting relationship with the environment capable of sustaining life for generations rather than a magpie habit of putting stuff (usually non-perishable?) in safe places?

Superior new age eco bullshit of impeccable pedigree.

People may have reached the healthy age of 40-50.

They still had to pay the taxman or hide the little they had from his prying eyes. While the leader of state and his sycophants accumulated gilded stuff on which to sit on.

It has always been thus.

a magpie habit of putting stuff (usually non-perishable?) in safe places?

Not very skilled in economics either. This is called "saving". It is what causes investments to happen. Unless (like now) financial repression goes full out like what happens currently (and happend in the roman empire a bit before the crash).

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Thumb Up

Re: Alternatively...

I don't know what exactly is going on but this seems like another case of NatGeo QUALITY reporting / reportutainment.

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Re: WTF is this?

Explorers will attempt to uncover extreme wealth even if there isn't any extreme wealth to find. Does that answer your question?

I suppose you are able to answer your question yourself with "not really".

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Re: WTF is this?

Wealth doesn't mean money, eg precious metals and jewels

How is the life in My Little Ponyland?

Oddly enough, some people prize knowledge over money.

Oddly enough, Conquistadors didn't. Oddly enough, "wealth" never meant "large libraries". "Excuse me peasant, would you indicate the shortest path to the next library or do you want me behead you after a short introduction to Christianity?". Yeah, I think not.

As for the vast tracts of land, jungles grow. Fast.

Relevance?

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Paris Hilton

WTF is this?

Explorers have attempted to uncover the extreme wealth of "Ciudad Blanca", so called because its buildings and a wall around it were of white stone, since the time of Hernán Cortés and the Spanish conquistadors in 1520.

How can there be a city of "extreme wealth" (probably relative) somewhere in Honduras just like that? There needs to be a supporting civilization and vast tracts of land to support that city to the point where asking a local would most likely result in finger-pointing into the general direction of said city. What gives?

As an example, it's not like the location of Mesopotamian cities was particularly unknown (indeed Mongols amused themselves to "un-wealth" those cities something fierce, having evidently easily detected them).

Paul Allen hunts down sunken Japanese WWII super-battleship

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Re: Last gasps of the battleship

we were totally unprepared for Iraq

Why not stay home in that case?

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Re: And the thrid ship

each with separate plans which were destroyed upon completion

Sure is gonna help repairs.

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Re: and expect a new anime to follow out of Japan

You are making shit up, I don't recognize a story by Leiji Matsumoto at all.

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Re: "Sister ship - The Yamato"

Still awaiting delivery of the engines.

They are being made in China.

EU annoys industry and activists with net neutrality proposal

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Holmes

Re: The problem is the infrastructure

Once the debt-laden governments wake up to the fact that we are working on a scarcity model and make the taxpayer (and increasingly the poor mugs expecting pension payouts) do something about it

FTFY. HTH.

Oh, I forgot:

Debt Gone Wild! 23 Countries Have Leverage Ratios Above 200 Percent (Debt Growth Escalates At Low Central Bank Rates)

Just for reference, should any particular questions crop up.

Boffins find Earth's earliest Homo in Ethiopian hilltop

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Re: Let them chew on this

Except if they are Nazi scientists.

"One of the persistent questions that people have, and not just specialists, but everyone wonders about where did we come from?"

Software archeology is as interesting, unfortunately not many old artifacts are left. Time to read Julian Jaynes one more time.

Storm in a K-Cup: My SHAME over the eco-monster I created, says coffee pod inventor

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Re: Never made it to civilisation.

So how about those little paper-encased pads?. They work pretty well.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Too good to last

Yes, because that will lead to good products that are easy to recycle.

Makes sense only if recycling is your primary goal. A feel-good-factor selling, basically.

I actually want to use the product, too.

IBM buys 'deep learning' upstart Alchemy API, inhales 40,000 devs

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Holmes

> and hire 40,000 new developers

Ok, now tell me:

1) How do you actually FIND 40'000 new developers (and I don't mean randomly hired grunts who know how to fire up an editor and code Hello World - real developers skilled in whatever stuff you actually want them to do)

2) What does this do to salaries (WHEEE!!)

3) How do you manage this kind of extreme bing-hiring in the first place?

Oracle's piping hot new pot of Java takes out the trash (faster)

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FAIL

> Hopefully it collects itself and deletes....Java is horrible, bloated and insecure mess.

> Which bit is ignorant? Seems spot on to me.

Samefag!

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ITT: Discussion GCs like it's 1989.

I have worked with Java since it was released in the mid-1990's

You are a re[dacted]. You know that JVM implementations have several types of GC and there are quite a few GCs for specialized applications?

> Java's mark/sweep methods are inherently non-deterministic

The only deterministic methods when GCing are those that have strictly pre-planned and limited memory usage. Good luck finding those outside of aerospace applications.

> I had finished a deterministic reference-counted garbage collector which after 20+ years is still running many major semiconductor

Yeah, I did that as a student, too. And then circular data structures showed up.

> 10+ million lines of code with no deletes and no memory leaks

Do you even know what you are talking about.

> go find someone else who has a taste for self-flagillation...

I hope somebody spell-checked your IEEE paper for you.

SpaceX lofts two all-electric ion-drive comsats to Clarke orbit

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Paris Hilton

The free Palin republic?

50 shades of grey can turn Adobe Reader into a hot mess

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Windows

Detections were duly added to AV products and as a result, the generated PDF files became increasingly obfuscated as malware attempted to circumvent the scanners.

What an "industry". Managing to allow execution of data streams. Then kludging detectors on top of that to avoid SHTF situations. Only a world economic crash can cleanse us anymore. You could have stopped it!

I have said it before, I will say it again: OCCUPY BABEL!

Here comes Vulkan: The next generation of the OpenGL graphics API

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Naysayers in my comment section?

Amateurs, please!

Gb2 XBox 360

(And too cheap to buy the docs? I laugh.)

EasyGroup continues bizarre, time-travelling domain crusade

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Trollface

As time goes by.

Maybe easis will get rid of this problem. They must be good for something.

Incredibly a single WIPO panelist actually agreed with this creative interpretation of trademark law over the domain 'easytrain.com'.

Cages. Fire.

Twitter probes terror threat: Medieval murder mob ISIS allegedly puts co-founder in crosshairs

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Holmes

This is a "movement" not a centralized state of the authoritarian sort. So no decapitation strike getter-out. Sorry, based Hollywood-solution lovers, we will be hearing from those guys for some time yet.

Now ordering Patrick Cockburn's explainer on what this caliphose freakshow is about.

US military SATELLITE suddenly BLOWS UP: 'Temperature spike' blamed

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Alien

Chalk it up to P.U.T.I.N.

He's offing stuff left and right now and probably is behind our perenially non-escape-velocitiing economy too. Remember David Kelly!

Out of time: Huawei, LG unveil watches nobody wants to buy

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Re: I just want...

Both smart and stupid? Smupid!

NASA 'nauts complete another EPIC SPACEWALK to route cables around ISS

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Also: SpaceWire uses LVDS at ~1V. The idea seems to be to suppress emission of radio energy.

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Holmes

The sheer amount of cosmic radiation would drown out any WiFi signal, it would even drown out a wired network connection at normal voltages

WTF? You seem to mistake space for the interior of a nuclear reactor mysteriously working in the radio-wave spectrum.

Looks like all these communication satellites are big conspiracy.

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Re: Routing cables?

No

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Thumb Up

Any minimally acceptable spacestation has riveted joints, fat, snaking cabling on floor, ceiling and inside barely accessible ducts, flickering and/or inexistent interior lighting and people with slavic accents (possibly with US-style baseball caps and gaily colored mission patches).

We are getting to it. Slowly.

NERDGASM as Apple announces 'special event'

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It is about a small jade figurine, curiously fashioned into a winged creature with a kraken head, and a bit squamous, yet ruguous to the touch.

Soon to be mass-produced.

I, ROBOT ~ YOU, MORON. How else will automated news work?

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Re: It had to be said

The feel when that was nearly 20 years ago.

feelguy.jpg

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Trollface

A robot named Marvin

More like a passive-agressive version of R2D2.

BLEEP BLOOP F*CKETY F*CK!

BOFFINS: Oxygen-free, methane-based ALIENS may EXIST on icy SATURN moon Titan

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No, hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being expended to fund the homeland security which just issued "OMG! Thermite on Planes! It's UNDETECTABLE" surpriso-research.

Problem?

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Re: bad units

but 292 degrees below zero is just wrong when used in any technical field

You better chill out...

He's baaack: Microsoft's axeman Nadella to give Chinese staff the chop

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Paris Hilton

Linebacker III

Presumably president Obama, using drones?

El Reg regains atomic keyring capability

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Paris Hilton

Re: Originals still going strong

Why would Iran try to obtain tritium by dogdy means when they can very easily get a container of it (or even produce it themselves) by placing a phone call, being NPT signatories and all that?

Paranoid Android Kaymera smartmobe takes on Blackphone

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Headmaster

> Israeli

> Mobile security platform

More like, now comes with Komodo/Superfish and special Hezbollah detector.

Net neutrality secrecy: No one knows what the FCC approved (BUT Google has a good idea)

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Democratic process is heavily democratic

Secret decisions about unspecified objectives to assert control? Obama administration standard operating procedure.

Well, there will be leaks soon.

Say cheese! Europe's antitrust chief has Google boss in her sights – reports

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Paris Hilton

Random application of guns & badges to fix problems we think might possibly exist

I think there is some kind of problem these people are supposed to solve here? Can anyone recall what the problem is?

Lenovo CTO: Hey, look around – we're not the only ones with a crapware infection

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"pave over paradise and put up a parking lot"

...then install Jack in the Box at the corner, just next to the illegal dumping ground.

Zeus scumbag infects itself, buddies, with rival Trojan

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Re: talk about awkward

It will just be another plastic bag leaving the premises.

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Trollface

MUAH!

It is amazing this kind of RNA exchange happens on systems several orders of magnitude simpler than actual biological systems.

Bodes well for the time when people will be able to buy genetic sequencers at Wal-Mart, promoted by (whatever will be the future version of) George Clooney.

Amazon tries to patent 3D printers on trucks

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Trollface

Hitler patents execution commandos on trucks!

PATENT WAR with STALIN: Use of concentration camps deemed covered by "prior art".

Japanes file amicus curiae brief, also claims impromptu beheadings by katana are a national first.