Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Re: WTF?

The fun thing about Syria is that you get deathsquatted by BOTH SIDES. What do?

Fracking Bullshit I call you on!

So I sit here today at my desk and Java (or rather JEE) is a bloated mess of a language with all kinds of crap I dont need, buzzwords, frameworks, annotations, black boxes, conventions, wierd gotchas and general broken-ness. And to cap it all the black hats are now a step or two ahead at all times.

Yeah, Mr "propellorhead". It's your arse that is a bloated mess. Hint train incoming:

1) You can leave JEE out if you just want SE. Do you know what I'm saying? Notze that you will have to pull in Hibernate or write your SQL queries through JDBC when you want persistent storage, which you will want pretty quickly.

2) If you want Spring, Groovy or soem other non-JEE API or framework building on SE, you know where to find it.

3) JEE is not "bloated" in any particular way. It is just what it is: an environment in which to write server-side applications. And it's pretty elegant, too. Compare with J2EE which was the wrong approach.

4) wierd gotchas and general broken-ness ... care to be precise?

"Black boxes"? What? "Annotations"? Do you prefer XML markup in side-dish files? "Conventions"? Yeah, these are bad, right?

Are you actually sure about what you are talking about? Because you sure don't sound like it.

gb2 your pseudo-assembler fail.

Re: As per Raiders of the Lost Ark...

It will pupate and emerge as Lynch's version of Dune.

This will not ameliorate things a lot.

I will be listening to the soundtrack by Toto, thanks. And the thought of using Dick Cheney as Baron Harkonnen comes up...

True but irrelevant as you just need the mark's phone number and his old SIM.

In President Klingon's days....

Back in the sad, and portent-laden fading days of the Republic (the "Bubble in Time"), the following went to the printers:

Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design

by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Statements of note:

We noticed an increasing number of situations in which highly talented and respected people from the U.S. Government were making statements about how long it takes to crack DES. In all cases, these statements were at odds with our own estimates and those of the cryptographic research community. A less polite way to say it is that these government officials were lying, incompetent, or both. They were stating that cracking DES is much more expensive and time-consuming than we believed it to be. A very credible research paper had predicted that a machine could be built for $1.5 million, including development costs, that would crack DES in 3-1/2 hours. Yet we were hearing estimates of thousands of computers and weeks to years to crack a single message.

". . . And we do not have the computers, we do not have the technology to get either real-time access to that information or any kind of timely access. If we hooked together thousands of computers and worked together over 4 months we might, as was recently demonstrated decrypt one message bit. That is not going to make a difference in a kidnapping case, it is not going to make a difference in a national security case. We don't have the technology or the brute force capability to get to this information."

Re: Sharepoint isn't the only thing they use

> There's also an information sharing system called A-Space etc. etc.

More acronyms and kewl buzz than Calvin can come up in an afternoon of dwelling in the house of club GROSS ("Get Rid of Slimy Girls").

You guys really need to have the keys taken away.

Re: "Cower" is the word

If he had the courage of his supposed convictions, he'd emulate Manning and face judgment for what he's done.

Snowden made the right call when he fled the U.S.

After the New York Times had been enjoined from publishing the Pentagon Papers — on June 15, 1971, the first prior restraint on a newspaper in U.S. history — and I had given another copy to The Post (which would also be enjoined), I went underground with my wife, Patricia, for 13 days. My purpose (quite like Snowden’s in flying to Hong Kong) was to elude surveillance while I was arranging — with the crucial help of a number of others, still unknown to the FBI — to distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other newspapers, in the face of two more injunctions. The last three days of that period was in defiance of an arrest order: I was, like Snowden now, a “fugitive from justice.”

I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

Re: Let's be honest

Is this the Upstanding Citizen Message of the week?

Have a thumbs up. I always vote Blockleiter.

Re: Transparency?!

Of course, there is no reason at all not to trust Google. Oh, wait ..

Way to miss the point entirely.

Re: Not a chance

Luckily we can't agree. I can still have my ethanol at 15% VAT (a nice tax on the little man, that).

Re: More Obama and his meaningless bullshit.

> But by 2017 100% of Americans will be employed in surveillance of other Americans

Truly, A Scanner Darkly. You can watch yourself on camera, via high-speed Internet.

Dear fandom...

Finally a good link

Unfortunately it is marred somewhat by the second link to WiseGeek where the author is terminally confused about the Northern Basin and Vallis Marineris not being the same thing at all. Not-so-WiseGeek also says "Moon-sized object nearly hit Mars, but instead scraped a deep scar in the planet".

NO! The MIT article says

"We knew there must be impacts between these size ranges," Zuber says. "But nobody had identified one." Analysis in the theoretical papers accompanying this one show that the impacting object that produced the huge basin on Mars must have been about 2,000 km across - larger than Pluto -- and struck at an angle of about 45 degrees, creating the oval shape of the basin.

I would say that's a "full absorbtion impact". Masses of that size do not behave like billard balls. They behave like very liquid droplets.

Must have been a slow-motion impact though so that the southern half of Mars is even retaining any trace of the before-impact era.

Re: Turing is a national hero ... but I don't agree

"a return to such repressive days"

What RETURN are you talking about?

"Together, we are working to ensure that the industry imbeds persistent technology that is effective, ubiquitous and free to consumers in every smartphone introduced to the market by next year"

Of course they are. Retards.

Why are they even dealing with this in the first place? What they should do is make sure that one can install such a switch without going through "app store" shenanigans or that network operators get off their fat arse and offer a blocking service.

Re: snigger

In truth you would have to build everything from scratch to be sure.

Ermm.... call our engineering department in Vietnam, sir?