Posts by Destroy All Monsters 16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
Good question - the body's cleanup mechanism, I reckon.
Now, the interesting part of this is: a good part a few percent at least of the body mass is bacteria and assorted hangers-on. Any side effects here?
Still, good work. Anyway is the research on phage theraphy coming btw?
A regional court in Hamburg said it was an infringement of German copyright laws to circumvent the technological protection measure.
Hmmm.... the state-enforced handing out of exclusive rights at duplication morphs into state-enforced interdiction of applying certain manipulations meant to circumvent share denial.
I love the smell of cancerous legislative creep in the afternoon.
"..and allowed for the fact that individual CPUs are getting more powerful..."
Yes.
[John Cleese Pause]
It is absolutely justifiable to make customers pay for the faster CPUs they enjoy, because, after all, these other companies' (i.e. Intel's) work is not being Microsoft-taxed by default! The customer paid for hardware out of his own pocket! Without giving Microsoft a cut!! This is irresponsible, akin to refusing to pay VAT or income tax, which goes to the support of widows, children and roads. What is the world coming to when QUALITY work by Redmond is no longer appreciated and people start to dispute adequate remuneration! Microsoft could decide to just withhold its products, leaving you die slowly in the basement with an unsupported NT kernel and a festering IIS, so be grateful!
"These restrictions, if proven, may lead to higher consumer prices or the unavailability of products through certain online sales channels."
MAY and CERTAIN channels, and is this with or without EURO inflation?
Sounds very vague, I hope this is not about cheap alarm clocks nor going to cost another gadzillion EUR, nor result in 10 pence off and a large payout for lawyers and yurocrats.
I hope that so far, all the expenses are born by the companies allegedly accused of alleged collusion. I also hope that those costs will not be passed on to end customers so that I can sleep easy because I hope that I shall be spared another intempestive action against "gougers" and "speculators" down the line.
> morally bankrupt crusader
Yeah well no. They may be quite a few things, but the morally bankrupt side is "us", with our liberal interventionists always ready to shoot and cry.
We also dirty bombed quite a few cities AFAIK. Just pray that God doesn't exist or there will be hell to pay.
Microsoft is looking at the future while being utterly incapable of running two production lines of a consumer-grade OS, one for the old bum doing his work on the PC and one for the rest of the population that wants to play around with cat videos and show off their mating prowess (no, the delta between "Standard", "Pro", "Ultra" and "Extra Retarded" does not count).
They are toast.
I am not ready for a post-productivity input paradigm. I am too old and set in my ways to make the jump. Touch is a consumptive design method. I can't think of myself as "just another consumer." So I'll keep keyboards and precision pointers around. I'll use old tech if I have to. I'll even exit IT and look for a new career as a writer.
You are irrelevant and these machines are not for you, in the same ways as automotive car programming tools cannot be found in the standard home.
"BUT I AM A TECHIE"
Yeah so what.
The problem with this argument is...
There is no problem with the argument. You are off mass shell.
If you give an infant a fondleslap that says
COMMODORE BASIC V7.0 122365 BYTES FREE<br>
(C)1985 COMMODORE ELECTRONICS, LTD.<br>
(C)1977 MICROSOFT CORP.<br>
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED<br>
and then just dumbly blinks at it, it will throw into the corner.
That's what "intuitive" means. You can use without opening the manual. In this case, you can even use it by just relying on a little bit of hard-coded knowledge in the eye-hand-brain system. That's pretty good.
That Kids Can't Use Computers... article is fscking epic stuff. I now feel both old and sad.
Stop fixing things for your kids. You spend hours of your time potty-training them when they’re in their infancy, because being able to use the toilet is pretty much an essential skill in modern society. You need to do the same with technology. Buy them a computer by all means, but if it goes wrong, get them to fix it. Buy them a smartphone, give them £10 of app store credit a year and let them learn why in-app-purchases are a bad idea. When we teach kids to ride a bike, at some point we have to take the training wheels off. Here’s an idea. When they hit eleven, give them a plaintext file with ten-thousand WPA2 keys and tell them that the real one is in there somewhere. See how quickly they discover Python or Bash then.
Yes.
there's a ton of things you can do with Excel (or any other decent spreadsheet) to make a visual check of the data easy on the eyes, convert whatever you get in to the $format you need to feed it to your own setup and make pretty graphs for the higher-ups who are not interested in how things work
The ONLY thing that that abortion (which used to be a so-so and half-arsed idea to make PCs useful back in the early 90s) is good at is shooting yourself in the foot. And I do hope the medication for the FSCKING UTTER IDIOTS OF EPIC POINTYHEAR UNIVERSITY who don't realize this is computed by their docs in Excel.
88% of spreadsheets have errors: Research: Bad math rampant in family budgets and Harvard studies
Close to 90% of spreadsheet documents contain errors, a 2008 analysis of multiple studies suggests. “Spreadsheets, even after careful development, contain errors in 1% or more of all formula cells,” writes Ray Panko , a professor of IT management at the University of Hawaii and an authority on bad spreadsheet practices. “In large spreadsheets with thousands of formulas, there will be dozens of undetected errors.”
That's right.
I'm being forced to run Win8.1 + Office stack it in VirtualBox just to generate interchangeable PowerPoint presentations with the useless marketing glitz $MUHCOMPANY demands.
I'm trying not to be saddened about the money splurge for an otherwise useless license key that might have been better spent supporting Open Software of dying children in Somalia, but one has to say MS does have a winner in the Open Document Format shenanigan.
Do you have the slightest idea how absurd it would be to try to physically fling huge quantities of metal back and forth across the world for no reason other than getting a fuzzy-wuzzy feeling about the good old days?
"Metal transport will be needed" fallacy.
That was what banks and cheques were intially about, you know: You store your goods in the bank, then draw a cheque on those goods. End of story. "Getting a loan" actually meant getting access right to the stuff stored in the bank. Sometimes rumors would say that the bank was loaning out a bit more than it was sitting on, bank runs occurred, bank went titsup instead of being bailed out by the state. Excellent. (I will elide the discussion of 100% reserve banking, which to me is just a discussion about having a risky product in the market the risk of which should be on the bank)
There is also a funny description of interbank settlement in Hong-Kong in the 1930's in Neal Stepehenson's CRYPTONOMICON. Recommended.
"because somebody can always dig some more of the crap up"
Yes, so what? In an economy, people perform economic activities shocker. So the money supply increases slowly, making people selling shovels richer.
Currently a bureaucrat can always print more of the crap up, taxing you unawares via money inflation (the concomitant price increases are then blamed on greedy capitalists, speculators and - in past times - Jews) while enriching the people who get to the new money first. Win-Lose situation. You lose. They win.
Fiat currency is not the same - it is backed by the faith in the government, the GDP behind that government and the government's ability to pay back loans made using that fiat currency.
Well, if you look at the frankly exponential curves of government debt of the last few years, and you realize that "pay back" means taxing today's and future generations, thus shutting down economic avenues, then it will suddenly OCCUR TO YOU IN A FLASH that there is no way a western government will pay back its debt, ever. No way. It may pay it back NOMINALLY by issuing fiat money, but that won't help you at all.
People buying government bonds are basically taxing their children (and handing a fat haircut to the bureaucracy) It's a good investment I guess.
the market determining how much a euro or dollar is worth depending on... how many of them people are willing to trade for other currencies... hmm... which can be created (dug up) at will - at a profit
Yes.
[John Cleese pause].
Unfortunately I have yet to see people digging up euros. They are generally carted out of the European Central Bank, amazingly.
Look up "currency manipulation" and the whole mercantilist bull of "fixing the interest rate" and "keeping the EUR/USD/YEN/RMB" low relative to other currencies to "help exports" and other retardations by economists possibly holding the "nobel prize in economics" (a title worth about as much as "MSFT most cherished microserf" but it apparently opens doors to writing inane if not frankly evil articles in the NYT)
Then ask yourself how this is were even possible if the fiat money had any objective value above 0.
You just need to run it on a money that does not consist in "monetized debt" (i.e. pretending you are rich). SHOW ME THE METAL!
That would be DDT to a host of leeches and Wall Street parasites and make wars unaffordable. It would also kill "social security", exposing it for the scam it is, so double plus.
Politics, however, will NEVER become obsolete. It will continue even if the economy runs on spice and water.
Any government has the right ànd the duty to set rules for their banks. It's because most failed to do their job, that we're in this mess to start with.
Maybe you should first learn how money production and bubbles work before pulling random stuff out of your nether regions.
If random IT guy would come up and tell you that his program doesn't work because there is not enough Microsoft licensing in this company, he would rightly have an accident with the tape safe.
Any currency is controlled by a national bank that has the monopoly on issuing coins and notes.
And you know where that is coming from and why it is there.
Taxes. And getting away with inflating the money supply (i.e. getting valuable goods for nothing). Brought to you by the guy with the swordgun. That is what Seigniorage is about: "the difference between the value of money and the cost to produce and distribute it", aka. "stealing". Right up there with first f*ck rights.
If you bring cash that value is set by a third party
No.
This based on the wrong idea that "cash" has some universally defined value. It doesn't. "Cash" is just a moniker for some good that you trade for another good. The valuation is done at the moment of exchange only and valid only for the persons taking part in that exchange,
Hopefully that good is actual money, i.e. some hard metal.
Today, "cash" is cheap paper and symbols in computer memories.
If you are the government, the value of that kind of "cash" is basically zero (the cost of a print run) and you can buy anything at all. If you are the seller-to-government, you will make sure you increase the price before you are being handed that paper and then you will spend it pretty fast (transforming it into money) if you know what is good for you.
"Legal recognition" is bullshit front, back and center as the Weimar hyperinflation nicely showed.
One can argue whether Bitcoins are "money", but....
“Although there are people calling it a ‘currency’, it is not issued by the monetary authority, it does not possess the attributes of a currency such as legal repayment and enforcement abilities”
In the real world: Money: any commodity that can be used for exchange of goods.. Gold, nicely ciseled stones, fishes and bales of hay may be "money". (The Theory Of Money)
"Legal repayment and enforcement abilities" are not attributes of money. They seem to be random interjections thrown out by the guy with the brass knuckles.
Today of course, people are toilet-trained and think that colored pieces of paper (the value of which exponentially going to 0) are money. For those, you may indeed need "enforcement abilities" by the state. Otherwise, who would accept that crap for honest work.
No, he clearly was saying something about "genetic algorithms and the short permanence of temporarily and locally bound acceptable solutions in the moving energy landscape of changing environmental exchange network dynamics", but his words were drowned out by the loud clanking of a large machine, akin to a mass of bronze gears, that he had, for some reason, assembled in his cellar.
Microsoft, NetApp and EMC have all filed written arguments supporting Oracle’s side of the copyright fight
Fatwas demanding stoning of the whole board of the directors and their legal team as well as the families of the same including their offspring -- and this in the most cruel and inhuman way (NONE SHALL BE SPARED! ESPECIALLY THE PARASITIC LEGALS) --- would, I think, not be totally out of place in this case of a rank beggar-my-neighbour manoeuvers ordering up state protection of monopolistic policies.
Yes, I have NO CONFIDENCE WHATSOEVER that the judge will just fart in the general direction of these festering grabbers of IP "rights".
Luckily, twenty years from now these companies will all be dead and gone and "IP protection" will be one of these retarded ideas of dinosaur whitey. Unfortunately we will have have to talk MAJOR ASIAN LANGUAGE instead to have any economic relevance whatsoever.
Intellectual Vultures: "but even the best of [the articles in the bill] need a great deal more refinement"
I foresee that the bill will suddenly be amended in the middle of the night the day before the vote has been tabled, with representatives duly informed by an e-mail to their personal address bearing the informative subject "I AM JORGEY MALKONY FROM NIGERIA AND HAVA OFFER TO MAKE".
The vote will then proceed with no-one (no-one not in on it) noticing the versioning update of the nicely printed and bound dossier on their desk.
To the consternation of all, patent trolling will thus become a cartelized profession for special holders of "troll regulation licenses" only, and will be subsidized to the tune of NO MORE THAN 10'000'000 (TEN MILLION) USD per year per license holder to protect "the innovation".
ANd Larry Niven invented the "Gravity Drag" anyway - potential energy being transformed into heat in a magic device that gives a f*ck about the equivalence principle, thus allowing a spaceship to settle down lightly (which disturbingly would be like making it "massy but not light")
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