* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Ex-Soviet engines fingered after Antares ROCKET launch BLAST

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Headmaster

Re: Re:The simple fact is (@ pseudonymous blowhard)

It's, depending of how you define 'development'. From the top of my head, ~90% of the Russian population back then consisted in peasants living as serfs in a feudal system, which is exactly what Russia was until Red October.

Errr no.

Actually Russia was industrializing up very nicely, and then WWI intervened. The fact that they were in process of industrialization actually made it that they could run the war for some time.

After that, it was only smoke and ruins. After "Red October", it went downhill because Lenin thought that adding more smoke and ruins by attacking Europe through newly formed Poland in 1920 to bring the beleaguered proletarians of Berlin and Rome some freedoms would be a good idea. It was all a mess.

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Pint

There is only one hope for our undertaking....

CLONE KOROLEV!

The Imitation Game: Bringing Alan Turing's classified life to light

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Holmes

RIGHT!

“I think that if it was a film about a straight mathematician, people would never say, 'Oh, how come there’s no sex scenes so we know he’s straight?'”

JJ Abrams will be in charge for pointless affirmation of "hes is NOT GAY, get it?"

Now everybody read On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

Bonus points for reading Alonzo Church's paper, "A Note on the Entscheidungsproblem" (The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Mar., 1936), pp. 40-41.) , which unbelievably for 2014 demands Google-fu to get past the paywall usher on JSTOR. Aaron Swartz's work IS NOT YET COMPLETE.

Background from Jimbo's Nollij Store:

Church's paper was presented to the American Mathematical Society on 19 April 1935 and published on 15 April 1936. Turing, who had made substantial progress in writing up his own results, was disappointed to learn of Church's proof upon its publication (see correspondence between Max Newman and Church in Alonzo Church papers). Turing quickly completed his paper and rushed it to publication; it was received by the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society on 28 May 1936, read on 12 November 1936, and published in series 2, volume 42 (1936-7); it appeared in two sections: in Part 3 (pages 230-240), issued on Nov 30, 1936 and in Part 4 (pages 241–265), issued on Dec 23, 1936; Turing added corrections in volume 43(1937) pp. 544–546.

Forget eyeballs and radar! Brits tackle GPS jammers with WWII technology

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Dead reckoning? MUH... how do do I into pen & paper?

WOAH the pork is in.

Branson on Virgin Galactic fatal crash: 'Space is hard – but worth it'

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Paris Hilton

Re: Is it really worth it IN THIS CASE, though?

There's a school of thought that believes Grissom and his crew (Chaffee, White) were murdered by NASA/CIA etc.

Smoking Man was seen exiting mission control room.

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Holmes

Re: To eternity and beyond...

That was one which went into the books: X-15 Flight 3-65-97

Michael J. Adams got confused and had no way to ascertain the heading:

The ground controllers sought to get the X-15 straightened out, but there was no recommended spin recovery technique for the X-15, and engineers knew nothing about the aircraft's supersonic spin tendencies.

The board made two major recommendations: install a telemetered heading indicator in the control room, visible to the flight controller; and medically screen X-15 pilot candidates for labyrinth (vertigo) sensitivity. As a result of the X-15's crash, the FRC added a ground-based "8 ball" attitude indicator (Horton's idea) in the control room to furnish mission controllers with real time pitch, roll, yaw, heading, angle of attack, and sideslip information.

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Flame

Re: Is it really worth it IN THIS CASE, though?

This is not about space exploration, this is a rich man putting good men at risk in order to develop a sham space experience for other rich men (and women).

Utter bullshit. These people are professionals and hired to do a job. This is no different and arguably morally superior to when the government hires these people to test new weapon systems or whatever idea crawled out of a politicial animal's brainbox. And then possibly denies that they were killed during testing.

Is it really worth it IN THIS CASE, though?

If it goes into the books, it is always worth it. This is the name of the game in this universe.

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Big Brother

Re: Is it really worth it IN THIS CASE, though?

"is there an option to not fully cooperate with the authorities?"

Probably not and as authorities are meant to check for problems in the routine to make the routine even less risk-free (or not), they will be fecking useless here.

"Ummm... you were using a novel rocket motor? Uh, err........"

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Mushroom

People die in railroad switching yards all the time.

This commiseration theatre is as disgusting as the perpetual "thanking the troops" freakshow.

Tales of infiltration from Fight Club man Chuck Palahniuk, Peter Carey and Anonymous

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Women are ... leaving homes, work and families behind in the continual search for pleasure.

So what's new?

Microsoft jolts awake, remembers it still makes Office for Mac

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Tell your boss right out he is a fscking arsehole.

Trolls pop malformed heads above bridge to sling abuse at Tim Cook

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Holmes

Re: How come we did not noticed earlier...

If only we stopped exporting our freedoms we could laugh at them from orbit.

Virgin's SpaceShipTwo crashes in Mojave Desert during test flight

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Headmaster

Re: Insurance Premiums...

> If fact, you cannot launch anything without it.

OH REALLY? Citation needed. Will an irate insurance agent follow you to orbit?

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Facepalm

Re: Well, unfortunately, testing new craft does involve risk.

If you want a glimpse in to future that Sir Richard Branson and his like are taking you to, then watch Elysium!

Anyone who thinks Elysium is some True Message Against Rampant Capitalism has any lesson beyond Hollywood retardation and Matt Damon's pseudo-social arsehattery should have his head examined pronto.

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Stop

Re: THE RIGHT STUFF

Pioneers == Those who come back to tell the tale.

Marc Benioff tethers Salesforce cloud to Blighty

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Headmaster

Reg_Tombstone.jpg

The problem for European customers is one of corporate and customer data leaving the relatively favourable regulation of the EU for the US.

How does that make sense?

Insulation from the US was one reason cited by the AWS host, saying customers could now architect clouds for back-up and redundancy while keeping their data in the US, as they can now make their clouds span the Frankfurt and existing Dublin regions.

Here is a low-hanging fruit for improvement, El Reg: get an intern and make him read what you have written. Choose one who has "reading comprehension" on his CV though. Today one can never be sure.

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Trollface

Re: Question is...

Do you think you are special?

Free government-penned crypto can swipe identities

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Paris Hilton

Probably a portemanteau term of "inadvisable" and "umentionable".

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Windows

Yes

The PLAID (Protocol for Lightweight Authentication of Identity) cryptography kit appears to be insecure designed by government.

Beleaguered cards spat out junk data encrypted with an RSA shill key and it was this ciphertext which could be crunched to discover the key used, and a users' card number with accuracy that increased significantly with the number of scans.

Finally that final sequence in War Games makes sense. Armed forces used PLAID to secure the launch codes.

Programming Office 365: Hands On with Microsoft's new APIs

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Holmes

Re: Ah, the old MS Solution

I can only agree with the "JSON is for confused freshman who think everything needs to look like a JavaScript structure and have never had to deal with 'enterprisey' problems". Avoid like the plague.

SOAP and WSDL may be "overengineered" but at least they are engineered. Use them. But avoid RPC mode, that idea was dumb when Distributed Computing Environment was a thing, it is dumb today.

Also: Rick Hickey in: "The language of the system"

FIFTEEN whole dollars on offer for cranky Pentium 4 buyers

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Mushroom

Trusting Intel on anything ever

Sadly these people don't get paid with greenbacks sporting trollface.

DRUPAL-OPCALYPSE! Devs say best assume your CMS is owned

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Paris Hilton

Re: Horrendous piece of software

So it's like nodejs, only less bad?

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Trollface

Re: Bobby Tables

Unfortunately, you do not have an audience ...

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Coat

Society for Rational Network Management, War Trackers Interest Group

Subject: Ping

Language path: Optima

From: Society for Rational Investigation

Distribution: Threat of the Blight, Society for Rational Network Management, War Trackers Interest Group

"You should proceed under the assumption that every Drupal 7 website was compromised unless updated or patched before Oct 15, 11pm UTC, that is seven hours after the announcement,

Humanity now making about 41 mobes EACH SECOND

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Alien

Now if we could just isotropically throw them at the universe at 0.999c ...

... that would be awesome.

No nudity, please, we're GAMING: Twitch asks players to cover up

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NO FUN ALLOWED!

WHITE HOUSE network DOWN: Nation-sponsored attack likely

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Re: ITS PROBABLY BILL CLINTON...

More like Hillary rubbing it in.

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Big Brother

Re: Presumably this crack is legal

Weed's legal in Colorado!

Cracks legal in D.C.!

Time to upgrade the war on terror so that people buying cough syrup in the US and communist peasants in Mexico get what they are asking for!

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Big Brother

I hope these "sources" are on github.

The attack, blamed by US government sources on Russian hackers

Or maybe ISIS.

Or the Ayatollahs, if not the Ayy Lmaos.

Or maybe the halloweenized Ghaddafi, undead and baying for viagra-powered genocide.

Could be Beaucoup Haram or "Koni 2013".

Or what about Khorasan, the wholly-made-up "new terror threat"?

Or hybridized Russo-Chinese superhackers, reinforced with North Korean DNA?

Or the Ebola, now being fought by the National Guard in Liberia.

Or maybe the french terror clowns.

Enough enemies to make any neurotic go mad.

BlackEnergy crimeware coursing through US control systems

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Re: Simple fix

How do I download module from arxiv?

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Alien

Tron!

Every weel another layers of pwnage is being discovered.

It's like the "agressive clown spree" that has reportedly been plaguing european cities in recent times.

Maybe there is a connection between the planes of existence of the real world and the information world? How can we know?

BONFIRE of the MEGA-BUCKS: $200m+ BURNED in SECONDS in Antares launch blast

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Re: Blame the terrorists !

> outsourced to India

Not even once!

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Trollface

Oh, a thumbdown. Carry on, comrade!

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Trollface

... especially when you are at the very edge of what government-industrial-policy-propelled tech can do.

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Trollface

Taking a Walloping!

We have confidence we can understand the problems and get back flying when we're ready to fly.

And, as Obama is wont to say "...so that after this initial surge of activity, we can have a more regular process just to make sure that we’re crossing all the T’s and dotting all the I’s going forward”

KRAKKOOOM! Space Station supply mission in PODULE PRANG EXPLOSION CHAOS

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Re: Won't anyone think of the scientists?!

I suppose that the biggest effort goes into design and getting everyone to sign off the exact shape of gimmick X.

Production? Piddles.

Men who sleep with lots of women lessen risk of prostate cancer

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Holmes

It would seem that putting it to frequent use can have beneficial consequences.

I have heard that is because you are getting rid of all the shitty nasty fat-seeking molecules that we now have everywhere in our tuna. We need the converse examination for women. Also include male and female lactation, please.

Oh, I can I have a larger version of the "hook-me" picture for this story?

I'll cap internet tax, says Hungarian PM as mob attacks his party HQ

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Trollface

A little bit of history

The Window Tax

The window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house. It was a significant social, cultural, and architectural force in England, France and Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. To avoid the tax some houses from the period can be seen to have bricked-up window-spaces (ready to be glazed or reglazed at a later date), as a result of the tax. In England and Wales it was introduced in 1696 and was repealed in 1851, 156 years after first being introduced. France (established 1798, repealed 1926) and Scotland both had window taxes for similar reasons.

It sure made for pallid citizens and mold/mushroom cultivation.

Mozilla: Spidermonkey ATE Apple's JavaScriptCore, THRASHED Google V8

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Headmaster

Also, El Reg: That nice quadruped on the headline image is an actual fox. A firefox looks like a fat weasel.

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Trollface

Re: day late and a dollar short

With Muskian Aggro-Intelligence doing the coding, all of that arrogance and complacency would be a thing of the PAST!

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If you really need the money, you ask the central bank.

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Re: More security flaws per second...

No, but all these "unresponsive scripts" will now be a yotta less unresponsive than earlier.

Planning to fly? Pour out your shampoo, toss your scissors, rename terrorist Wi-fi!

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Headmaster

Newspapers

Those too, but it's mainly the bureaucratic/politician complex.

Newspapers started carrying utterly fucking absurd criticism of the police/security services over not being able to put together 2 incredibly tiny clues out of a batch of around 20 billion such clues

Those poor security forces. They are being forced to be retarded!! But seriously, did any newspaper carry anything along the lines of the above criticism, instead of grandious hailing of "those who eat donuts and serve to protect our remarkable freedoms"?

Bruce Fein writes:

Sermonizing on behalf of the president at Harvard Law School on Sept. 16, John Brennan, current Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and then Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, declared: “[O]ur highest priority is — and always will be — the safety and security of the American people. As President Obama has said, we have no greater responsibility as a government.”

But the president and DCI profoundly err. They have subordinated liberty to an effete quest for a risk-free existence, and inverted the nation’s philosophy and Constitution.

The highest and only priority of government was elaborated in the American Declaration of Independence: to secure unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, i.e, wisdom and virtue. The Declaration endorsed John Locke’s version of the social contract elaborated in The Second Treatise on Civil Government. Men consent to surrendering their freedom in a state of nature in exhange for the government’s protecton of their liberty and property from domestic or external predation or aggression.

The paramount end of the social contract is liberty. It accepts the risk of evil or anti-social conduct as necessary and inevitable. Otherwise, safety and security would crush liberty like czarist pogroms crushed Jews.

A Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality is latent in all humans. If safety and security trump all else — as Messrs. Obama and Brennan assert — then every creature on the planet is a candidate for extermination at the whim of the president and DCI.

Boffins snap first pics of hot white dwarf nova bursting out of its shell

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Holmes

Re: I'm sure the pictures are very interesting...

Well, it is "Nature" magazine that is charging the money for the research paper. This is a for-profit outfit (Macmillan Publishers Limited, to be precise). You can probably download the raw picture from the researchers' website - sometimes even a preprint of the paper or the paper itself if the authors were good at "clarifying" intellectual property rights.

Here is how it works:

1) Scientist gets funding to do Science from NSF or other sources

2) Writes up paper

3) Decides to publish in Journal "X" (today many papers are put onto the arxiv for free though)

4) Journal X goes into Kyubee mode, puts out a contract saying "we pay you Z" (I have no idea what the going rate is; if it is negative, beware, it is probably a 'pay to publish' scam), "BUT you have to transfer the exclusive copyright to us, then we will peer-review it and if accepted it will appear in our renowned journal etc."

5) Journal with the research paper is published and sold generally to libraries (these subscriptions are expensive). Nature can be found at the street vendor's stall too though; I once found one in a shop in Madeira, of all places.

6) You may have a subscription to access all areas of the journal's web-enabled archive (often at rates that are very good in case you need more than 20 papers per year) or else pay lots of dosh for the reprint of a single article (in this case GBP 22). Inflation is nasty. IEEE articles that you now have to pay USD 30 for a single PDF may still have written "reprints can be obtained for 0.2 USD" underneath.

HUGE SHARK as big as a WWII SUBMARINE died out, allowing whales to exist

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Alien

Re: Correlation does not prove causation.

Frankly, it's hard to decide whether I prefer a hot planet (corals reefs up north) or a cool planet (dry regions, glittering ice on the horizon and big sea cows). Both have their charms.

Maybe I should buy both, with one a bit closer to the galactic core, should I need a pied-à-terre for these stupid bicentennial meetings....

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Go to bed Calvin.

Voyager 1 now EIGHTEEN LIGHT HOURS from home

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It's because space is really really big and asteroid belts are more like in 2001 than Star Wars.

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... where they will find out that it has been totally dismantled and picked apart, then filled with the remains of a roadside picnic (non bio-degradeable) because Sol is situated in a galactic ghetto.

Painfully trendy: Someone just spent $200k on ebola.com

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Re: Local version

Your marketing skills need some honing.

Unless you are planning a big event on bad taste murrica horror fun dayHalloween.

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Re: ISIS TLD?

At some point they will have to request ".caliphate" at ICANN.

There will be only a single address: "www.nofunallowed.caliphate"