* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Elon Musk's Grasshopper tops 300m, lands safely

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Facepalm

Re: Totally useless "technology" "invention".

Next: Invention of the book considered retarded. Mesopotamians could do it in clay THOUSANDS OF YEARS EARLIER using ONLY A CHISEL.

> "F9-R control algorithms"

Yeah. Details, NOW!

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Booster tubes coming down are not particularly aerodynamic. You can deploy a parachute of course, but that will lose you any good control on the position of touchdown and will most probably lead to a crunch moment anyway.

IT design: You're not data, you're a human being

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FAIL

Re: The first

> they dont want to be bothered with command line fluff

That's exactly the WRONG thinking right there.

That "command line fluff" is the toolbox that you actually need when it turns out the designer, in his godlike retardationforesightedness, was unsuprisingly unable to COPE WITH ALL EDGE CASES using his "row of buttons". Utter failure ensues. And there is no escape. YOUR PRODUCT FLIES OUT OF THE WINDOW.

Get. it?

"Press the button marked robot#2, press send and type the filename into the box and press ok."

ERROR. DRIVE C²:\ CANNOT BE ACCESSED. ILLEGAL CHARACTER. ABORT RETRY FAIL?

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!

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Holmes

Re: Very glad that someone is at least thinking about this

Nicely put

> That won't change, so long as the numerous middle-bell consumers keep consuming.

And there would be no problem with that as long as "the other solution" keeps existing. Plush dwellers, button pushers and juveniles out for a good time can get their functional tool, while tinkerers and professionals get to have an inspectable, modifiable machinery. Unfortunately the creeping monetization of everything (including debt) and the quest of selling everything on which you can affix a price sticker (even if you actually cannot and do not own it in the first place) means that so-called "Intellectual Property" (aka. economic nonsense) will continue be a growing menace to the continued existence of the "the other solution".

Fedora back on track with Schrödinger's cat

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Windows

Re: umlaut

Get used to Unicode, old man.

The only no-no character should be the "/", and any sane person should agree.

If you want the Windows Cancer Of Special Cases, you know where to find it.

Old fart myself, but such "rules" are best thrown back into the face of the guy who comes up with them.

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Black Helicopters

Fedora 19 brings integration with Google Drive and other NSA services

Yes... good... downloading now.

I wonder when Mr. Snowden will tell us where the backdoor-in-plain-sight has been finagled into Linux? Come on Ed, spit it out...

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Re: "Not only is the release just a week away"

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/19/Schedule

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Thumb Up

Re: A new keyboard...

There is nothing wrong with KDE.

Godmother of Unix admins Evi Nemeth presumed lost at sea

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Re: Cue the conspiracy theorists:-

You can also link it into the current NSA leaking, because UNIX = computers, innit?

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Paris Hilton

Re: Briefly pedantic.

Falling angels working for Maxwell??

Cosmic blast mystery solved in neutron star's intense death throes

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Holmes

Re: Magnetic field

Well yes, there is the electromagnetic field tensor ... but it's all the same. Isn't it?

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Re: Magnetic field

> Whereas this scenario is closer to a transformer where the wires stay in the same place

It's only marginally closer though. In this case, the whole spool and battery disappear down an evil finger from the universe's future, leaving a place in place that is not accepting magnetic field lines really quickly. That magnetic field is orphaned!

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Holmes

Re: Magnetic field

For a complete description you will probably have to go to Quantum Field Theory (and even then there will be doubts)... but:

1) The magnetic field has energy associated with it. That must go somewhere. Think of a normal spool-and-battery setup on your tabletop, if you open the circuit you get a solid spark as the magnetic field breaks down and induces a high voltage in the conductor.

2) The magnetic field is definitely a "thing" that can act in and of itself. This is why light exists: A changing magnetic field induces a changing electric field which induces a changing magnetic field etc. No charges are anywhere in this picture. The vacuum is not vacuumish, but actually (superconducting) stuff bearing fields (in a sense it is the gravitational field)

3) It is true that magnetic fields and electric fields can be mutated into each other depending on the observer (i.e. Lorentz transformations allow you to take different viewpoints of the same physical setup). In particular, the magnetic field generated by a current and seen by a moving test charge (a still charge does not see the magnetic field, of course) can be interpreted as the electric field generated by the distribution of the current's charges in the rest frame of said moving test charge after a suitable Lorentz transformation. It's geometrical, like rotating a cube and then describing what what faces you see.

4) Now I won't either understand nor do the calculations but I am pretty certain that the idea that the magnetic field is "expelled" in the rest frame of an observer hovering above the neutron star is as valid as (and completely matches) the view of any other rest frame that sees more (or less) of the magnetic forces and more (or less) of the uneven distribution of charges created by the original currents in the neutron star.

5) Sadly, there don't seem to be any magnetic charges in the vacuum (only in solids), this would make it even clearer that B is as hardcore as E.

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Childcatcher

The subheading 'As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced' clearly goes too far.

Let's leave out the duplicate "suddenly" and more correctly state:

'As if millions of magnetic field lines cried out in stress and were suddenly expelled'

Those magnetic field test charges around the neutron star sure must feel whoozy as the generator formed by the massive fermionic tower exponentially disappears underneath them. I think the lab equivalent would be to drop the electromagnet into a superconducting liquid.

Dell explores wearable computing as PC base crumbles

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Meh

Re: 'Jury still out'... since when?

It must be some kind of Beaten Wife Syndrome.

Samsung isn't alone: HTC profits take a huge dive

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Headmaster

Don't feed the troll!

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Windows

Re: Remember when?

> XKCD is an instant "avoid" for some

This not be 4chan, dawg!

MoD and tech, arms giants start super-duper cyber fight club

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Re: Lethal Software?

Taxpayer's Money.

Star bosses name asteroid to honor author Iain Banks

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Pint

Luckily the Asteroid was not named "Rasd-Codurersa Diziet Embless Sma da' Marenhide" or there would be headspinning.

Although I always thought of her looking as Maetel... where is there no Asteroid Maetel, huh?

US workforce expands as more job seekers seek jobs

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"delivering some good news: over the past three months, despite government job cuts, private-sector employers added enough jobs to keep pace with population growth"

Really! Government job cuts! Private hirings! Oh miracle. Unfortunately....

America's Jobs Disaster

The impressive Michael Mandel of BusinessWeek recently (October 2009) crunched the numbers for job growth over the last 10 years, and the results, shall we say, don't look good.

He calls it a "lost decade for jobs" in the United States. I call it a disaster. Consider his graph depicting the percent change in private-sector job growth over time. ....

We find a traditional pattern for private-sector job growth that, although volatile (following the business cycle), remains within a 20–30 percent band for the 30-year period starting in 1971. However, this period is followed by an ominous decline in the 2000s, which approaches zero job growth by May of 2009. What's going on?

Mandel doesn't say, although he points out that the real story is somewhat worse than the data suggest. Throughout the 2000s, there was significant growth in public sector jobs, doubling that of the private sector in absolute terms. Mandel adds that, of the private-sector jobs created during this time period, most were in the "HealthEdGov" sector, meaning that these jobs — technically private — would not have existed without government spending.

The situation is troubling, to say the least. From May 1999 to May 2009, private-sector employment increased by only 1.1 percent — the lowest rate of job growth since the 1930s. This reflects structural problems within the US labor force that have increased in severity during this decade....

No it's not gonna be fixed by the end of the year.

HP techies reject latest pay offer, closer to industrial action

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Flame

"Industrial action" announced

Will HP bods actually do their job?

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Trollface

> pay freeze for 3 years

Be lucky that there is no "austerity". Managing to keep pay at bubble levels is actually amazing.

> performance

May I ask how it is measured?

FRBs and variable forces: a big week for astronomy

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Paris Hilton

> Astronomer wins

Why?

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Trollface

Re: The laws of physics do NOT change in different places.

And as it is Friday, for those who want to have fun with numbers: Alpha and Electro-weak Coupling

It is shown that the fine structure constant alpha has the same value that "characterises" a relation, denoted by alpha_137(29*137), between a representation of the cyclic group of order 29*137 and the induced representation for the cyclic subgroup of order 137. The value of this characteristic is alpha_137(29*137) = 0.007297352532... . The complementary characteristic alpha_29(29*137)=0.034280626357... for the cyclic subgroup of order 29 is shown to represent the gauge theory electro-weak coupling quantity g^2/(4 pi). Kinematic aspects of the representation geometry are discussed and a generalized version of the Weinberg electro-weak mixing angle is introduced.

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Pint

Re: The laws of physics do NOT change in different places.

Actually alpha is variable. It depends on the energy of the interaction. This is an experimental fact.

Interestingly, the description of the strong force does not have an equivalent of alpha, I hear. It is "self-contained". That's the way it should be. There may be big holes in the electromagnetic force.

Apple files patent for 'Waze-plus'

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Devil

Re: It probably is novel.

But now they are patenting getting others to work for THEM. That's got to be novel.

Going lo-tech to avoid NSA snooping? Unlucky - they read snailmail too

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Devil

Re: Encrypted email

Aren't they in your Ericsson Switch?

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Facepalm

Quality improvement etc.

And they STILL manage to lose mail, have mail not delivered, bounced, addressed wrongly, disappear up the arse of the Postal Service and whatnot.

Working on the important things, are we?

Whitehall's ball-breaking efficiency tsar quits for a quiet life in Oz

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Sounds impressive.

His last words must have been "I won't be back!"

Patriot hacker 'The Jester' attacks nations offering Snowden help

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Devil

That guy

Smells like an operator team working from the basement of #FedBuilding.

Don't give me the "true-blood-red-state/blue-state-fascist-patri0t-hacker" bullshit.

IT bloke inadvertently broadcasts smut on vast public screen

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Trollface

Re: Well Now

Especially when you are in a bit of a hurry to get that movie on screen.

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Windows

I think Oh is written without the "h". I have done ... hmmm... .extensive research.

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Trollface

> They're going to throw the book at him.

Probably the Kama Sutra?

Decade to 2010 was hottest, wettest: WMO

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Graphics without error bars?

Dammit guys!

Rest your head against a train window, hear VOICES in your SKULL

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Trollface

A classic on advertising:

The Tunnel Under The World -- By FREDERIK POHL

Took me some time to find it...

No, not the usual commercials, Burckhardt realized. He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn't merely that the brands were mostly unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.

There were jingles with an insistent, bouncy rhythm, about soft drinks he had never tasted. There was a rapid patter dialogue between what sounded like two ten-year-old boys about a candy bar, followed by an authoritative bass rumble: "Go right out and get a DELICIOUS Choco-Bite and eat your TANGY Choco-Bite all up. That's Choco-Bite!" There was a sobbing female whine: "I wish I had a Feckle Freezer! I'd do anything for a Feckle Freezer!" Burckhardt reached his floor and left the elevator in the middle of the last one. It left him a little uneasy. The commercials were not for familiar brands; there was no feeling of use and custom to them.

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Holmes

Re: Wow! is that an animated gif?

Not been on the Internets lately, right?

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Alien

Re: hax0r...

I think there was an X-Files episode about that.

Pretty good too.

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Tell me your secrets, window.

"Your iPhone just told me the stuff you usually buy at Tesco is now ONLY 2.99 BUT FOR A LIMITED TIME! Go and GET IT! Or do you want me to tell your iWatch to bug you every 15 minutes? Faggot!"

US states: Google making ad money on illegal YouTube vids

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Re: First amendment?

Yes.

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Facepalm

Re: What they SHOULD be doing??

"Is getting the Chocolate Factory to give them the names of the users that..."

PAPIER! SCHNELL!

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Thumb Down

Faking drivers' licenses? Illegal.

Snooping, Killing, Maiming, Lying, Economy Destroyin'? Legal if the Prez does it.

Frack off, Nanny Statists. I think people can decide by themselves if they want your "illegal" drugs or dodge an unconsttutional "surprise overwatch road checkpoint" by faked id.

3-2-1... BOOM: Russian rocket launches, explodes into TOXIC FIREBALL

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Holmes

Re: OOps

The early rocket designs in "Across the Space Frontier" were huge flying tanks of Hydrazine and Nitric Acid. I wouldn't want to have been near the launch site...

Also:

Space launches make kids sick: Hydrazine fingered in leaked study

A short, sharp tool kit to get you to the top in financial IT

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Re: Great stuff

On the other hand, if you play at agreeing, there won't be any progress!

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/vomit-chan

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> third gripping hand,

It's just a "gripping hand", unless you are a mutant motie with 5 arms.

Innovative solution to modern art found: Shoot it into space

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Childcatcher

Re: New artist takes modern art to a new level

Why can't I upvote this?

Why is the new interface such a mess?

Did you LOOK at the text and box diarrhea when posting a new comment, El Reg? It's like a Mondrian paiting with less colour and more random text and exhortations.

Get Dominique Connor on the case!

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> The exhibit was produced by taking a meteorite, making a mould of its shape, then melting the multibillion-year-old space rock down and pouring it into the mould to create a replica of itself, made of itself.

WHY!

You just hermeneutically transform an original, raw originary meteorite into an Ersatz piece which exhibits no longer the proto-natural crystallographic structure of its long gestation but instead expresses its human origin through the feministically inspired retravail of the roundish, but pitted form.

It is pointless.

Apple adds Yves Saint Laurent CEO to executive team

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Apple: Leaving tech relevance faster than a neutrino leaves CMS.

Microsoft's murder most foul: TechNet is dead

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FAIL

Re: This is good, but not for MS

> Students can get MS stuff for free / very cheap anyway.

Students should not get MS stuff at all. At least the ones studying engineering.

D-Wave IS QUANTUM, insist USC scientists

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Holmes

Re: Errrr...

Simples. You encode the problem in an analog formulation involving a "start" hamiltonian which is slowly and linearly replaced during the computation by a "target" hamiltonian so that at the end of the computation, as the system settles into its lowest energy state, the bits encode the solution you want. The thing gets problematic as the D-Wave machine is not using full entanglement across all its bits (so it's not actually matching the mathematical idea), there is noise, it does some proprietary magic and actually finding the solution may take exponentially long in the end as the lowest energy point lies in a very flat landscape. Or something.

Maybe this will help: An introduction to quantum annealing

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Paris Hilton

Re: Everything is quantum!

So why do you hate it? Just to be edgy? This is El Reg, not Physical Review B.

The point of the expression is of course to distinguish the capabilities of a new physical device from a "classical" one, which should be obvious to any El Reg reader. A short hand to say "quantum mechanical effects indeed shown to be used by D-Wave's quasi-quantum-annealing thing". Be glad that you don't get a LOHAN or PARIS crammed into the headline.