* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

GNOME project picks JavaScript as sole app dev language

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Holmes

Re: Gut feeling ...

You are being too negative here.

> My daughter weeps for her generation.

Tell her to cheer up. Away from the shiny, there is still work to do.

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Holmes

Re: To rephrase your question ... (was: How does this affect Unity?)

I guess "it depends" .... on the standards ... and what you mean by these.

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Facepalm

Worst decision after the Gnome 3 pratfall.

Guess this will be like Java, where adequate and usable languages will emerge over time (after much slaving, moans, lost money and time) that compile down to / can still be transformed into the one primary party-decreed big-brotherly language where their proponents can still say "but technically it's still X" without causing Papal writs against heretics to be issued.

If Gnome has still any developers by then.

"Seriously, if someone brings that up in a discussion they can now be thoroughly ignored"

Yes, that's a formula for success. Someone has confused physics and development.

World's 'most green' supercomputer in red-hot battle between Intel, Nvidia

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Devil

Re: Other purposes

You already did. The energy, formerly strong and vigorous, is now all flopsy and tired and needs to be euthanized in office heating.

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Re: Now approaching ludicrous processing speed, Captain!

Well, you would have your FLOPsing done by the vector-processing floating point units around the core CPU anyway, so I would say the CPU area itself should be one which uses least power. ARM cores sound like a good idea, no?

See for example:

New EU based supercomputer to be ARM-based

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Headmaster

Now approaching ludicrous processing speed, Captain!

You are right, but this kind of error has become the "it's/its - you're/your" of HPC it seems.

Ok, so..

NVidia says that its Cuda C programming language for its own chips is now popular in its own right.

What about OpenCL, you proprietary wallowing animals?

“We [Phi] are very competitive in performance,” James Reinders told us.

Okay

“We have higher performance bandwidth."

What does that mean? Performance per second??

"We have the best power efficiency."

How is that even in the realm of the possible with x86 CPUs?

"Because it is x86-based and we book Linux on the cards, you can run whatever you want there.”

NO! Get out of there Stalker! Give me an ARM instruction set!!

Hard drive sales to see double-digit dive this year

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Re: Death of optical

Not to mention that if you have a DVD drive that works reliably, you should cherish it.

Server-mounted optical drive fail when you need them or for some reason refuse to read the disk, I have discovered.

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FAIL

Re: Great!

Maybe. Could also be the electronics flaking out. Could be the R/W head corroding. Could be the PCBs corroding. Maybe the cleaning lady was dusting with ammonia nearby. Or your printed pumped out too much ozone. I'm not sure all the RoHS problems have been fixed yet either. Who knows, maybe the casing metal was slightly radioactive...

I recently opened a WD disk which failed "just like that" (SMART indicated no failures, no reallocated sectors, just the SMART tests failing and the controller regularly reset the disk). I was somewhat amazed how small the read-write heads are nowadays. The interior has also been perfectly pared down compared to stuff of 5-10 years ago. Very cool. Very subject to random problems.

"FAIL" icon, evidently.

Quantum crypto still not proven, claim Cambridge experts

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Trollface

Re: Some dude writes something up. Next: animal entrails, bone casting and the I Ching.

Okay, so.... Suppose this is World Quantum Wrestling Championship and some skinny guy duo in gaily colored dresses enter the ring....

MAD SMACKDOWNS then happen at Scott Aaronson's blog (IMAO well deserved). We read:

First thought: it’s ironic that I’m increasingly seeing eye-to-eye with Lubos Motl—who once called me “the most corrupt piece of moral trash”—in his rantings against the world’s “anti-quantum-mechanical crackpots.” Let me put it this way: David Deutsch, Chris Fuchs, Sheldon Goldstein, and Roger Penrose hold views about quantum mechanics that are diametrically opposed to one another’s. Yet each of these very different physicists has earned my admiration, because each, in his own way, is trying to listen to whatever quantum mechanics is saying about how the world works. However, there are also people all of whose “thoughts” about quantum mechanics are motivated by the urge to plug their ears and shut out whatever quantum mechanics is saying—to show how whatever naïve ideas they had before learning QM might still be right, and how all the experiments of the last century that seem to indicate otherwise might still be wiggled around. Like monarchists or segregationists, these people have been consistently on the losing side of history for generations—so it’s surprising, to someone like me, that they continue to show up totally unfazed and itching for battle, like the knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail with his arms and legs hacked off. (“Bell’s Theorem? Just a flesh wound!”)

Like any physical theory, of course quantum mechanics might someday be superseded by an even deeper theory. If and when that happens, it will rank alongside Newton’s apple, Einstein’s elevator, and the discovery of QM itself among the great turning points in the history of physics. But it’s crucial to understand that that’s not what we’re discussing here. Here we’re discussing the possibility that quantum mechanics is wrong, not for some deep reason, but for a trivial reason that was somehow overlooked since the 1920s—that there’s some simple classical model that would make everyone exclaim, “oh! well, I guess that whole framework of exponentially-large Hilbert space was completely superfluous, then. why did anyone ever imagine it was needed?” And the probability of that is comparable to the probability that the Moon is made of Gruyère. If you’re a Bayesian with a sane prior, stuff like this shouldn’t even register.

.... Iit’s worth noting that, if (for example) you found Michel Dyakonov’s arguments against QC (discussed on this blog a month ago) persuasive, then you shouldn’t find Anderson’s and Brady’s persuasive. Dyakonov agrees that scalable QC will never work, but he ridicules the idea that we’d need to modify quantum mechanics itself to explain why. Anderson and Brady, by contrast, are so eager to modify QM that they don’t mind contradicting a mountain of existing experiments. Indeed, the question occurs to me of whether there’s any pair of quantum computing skeptics whose arguments for why QC can’t work are compatible with one another’s. (Maybe Alicki and Dyakonov?)

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Headmaster

Re: I'm sure I speak for all quantum physicists

It's both in and out of the bag.

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FAIL

Some dude writes something up. Next: animal entrails, bone casting and the I Ching.

“Despite the investment of tremendous funding resources worldwide, we don't have working testbeds; we're still stuck at factoring 15 using a three-qubit algorithm”

This may well be due to engineering problems. Maybe a detailed study of the current state of the art will show that....

[The paper] suggests that current experiments have not yet proven that “local realism” (that is, classical behaviour without the “spooky action at a distance” that so bothered Einstein) is violated.

O'Really?

It's good to know that Helium II does not actually exist. Or the Quantum Hall Effect. Maybe we are imagining that we understand the mathematics at the foundation of QM. Could be that the LHC is just an empty hole in the ground. Who knows.

The paper intro states:

Second, we consider a recent soliton model of the electron, in which the quantum-mechanical wave function is a phase modulation of a carrier wave.

Yes. Models that "explain" quantum mechanics using the tools of classical physics have been a dime a dozen for the last hundred years or so (and there are actually interesting approaches) Most have been written up by people who haven't yet learned about the things the players have already forgotten, who are either very young or very old and not yet/no longer "believe in QM" or maybe who are computer science researchers or auto mechanics who have a cool idea and want to write something up. Okay.

It's a bad sign when someone hasn't yet sussed that the "wavefunction" (What an ancient pre-WWII term, really. Smells of undead cats.) that he wants to replace is not necessarily a "thing in space" but is actually the state of a quantum-mechanical system in general, not necessarily extended in space. So it's pretty pointless to try to replace it by "another thing in space" ("Modulation of a carrier wave"? Really, now. What is this, fixing of radios? Frack off.)

Let's randomly search for a paper with Anton Zeilinger in the author list....

Bell violation with entangled photons, free of the fair-sampling assumption.

The violation of a Bell inequality is an experimental observation that forces one to abandon a local realistic worldview, namely, one in which physical properties are (probabilistically) defined prior to and independent of measurement and no physical influence can propagate faster than the speed of light. All such experimental violations require additional assumptions depending on their specific construction making them vulnerable to so-called "loopholes." Here, we use photons and high-efficiency superconducting detectors to violate a Bell inequality closing the fair-sampling loophole, i.e. without assuming that the sample of measured photons accurately represents the entire ensemble. Additionally, we demonstrate that our setup can realize one-sided device-independent quantum key distribution on both sides. This represents a significant advance relevant to both fundamental tests and promising quantum applications.

I must be imagining things. Where is my Ubik vaporiser?

Oracle blocks security hole with quick, hot 'n' premature Java update

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Headmaster

Re: Anyone else get a 'invalid certificate' fail on trying to install this update?

Recommending to uninstall the old versions.

Then log in as admin.

THEN install. Oracle/Sun still haven't fixed the bug from ... 2011 or so whereby installation won't proceed by User Account Control only.

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Headmaster

Herp Derp!

I can only point the commentariat to the Sophos post indicated in the original article before they make the usual noises. It clearly explains what's what. (More so than stuff that appeared in IEEE Computer Mag as I mentioned somewhat earlier.)

Under cap-and-trade, flying is greener than taking the bus

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Re: When they build a 400 seater bus...

At least the bus is running on time.

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Holmes

Re: 1980s?

Implying banks are part of the "market".

They are not.

They have a special status granted by state to waylay you.

The additional fact that people are too confused to suss this out helps.

Sea Launch comsat rocket goes titsup 40 seconds into launch

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Re: Why not launch from altitude ?

> So, we launch from a mountain in the middle of a continent, and if something goes wrong we just rain debris down on the populace below?

Happens all the time in Khazakstan.

That's why people nearby have serious liver trouble. Hydrazine in the environment.

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"You Are Having a Bad Problem And Will Not Go To Space Today"

http://xkcd.com/1133/ right at the bottom

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Re: Elon is only slightly better.

> Soyuz still uses analogue circuits

That's not redundancy (though they might use that too). That's hardening. Slow zone level hardening.

Hmm... why not use a cat's brain in a vat?

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There's even some question whether there was even a LAUNCH, or if there was, that it was actually a ballistic missile test of a completely different platform.

How is that possible? One would think US SPACE COMMAND would monitor the hell out of any rocket plume and object in (sub)orbital trajectory?

Space Shuttle Columbia disaster remembered 10 years on

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Go

Re: so easy sat in an armchair

Ahhh! Motherland!!!

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Coat

Re: Some More Disasters, Old And FRESH

> This isn't the place for a political screed. Downvoted, Mr Monsters.

WHAT! You bastards... bastards!!

And I haven't even started yet on the wrong use of the word "anarchy" in Robert Glass' article "Greece vs. Rome: Two Very Different Software Cultures" in which he compares "tool using" greeks and "people using" romans!

Well, you will never hear it now!

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Big Brother

Re: Bah!

This is exactly the attitude we are talking about.

But .. and in reality ... it wouldn't work anyway ... etc. etc.

Maybe, maybe not. Didn't try. Who knows. Asses covered? Yep.

> And for all the crying and wailing, it is the taxpayers who fund these things and who demand LOW BID win the day.

Bullshit! The taxpayers demands one thing: low, or better no, taxes.

Whether congress wants to do "more with less, faster" (as long as the "less" does not impact the congressman's state), whether the president and the military need mo' money to fight a genocidal romp against gooks in Vietnam, whether state bureaucracies demand "low bids" out of sheer stupidity and inertia (and industrial policy arrangements and quid-pro-quos) is something else entirely.

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Big Brother

Re: Some More Disasters, Old And FRESH

Good story.

> Unfortunately, many of his fellow mechanics would simply rip off the Plombe, do nothing useful and put a new Plombe with a new datecode onto the part in question.

Why would they do differently? It was a wartime socialist economy, barely working. Why show pride in workmanship? As long as you don't get caught and shot, you just want to go home. Before it's bombed down or repossessed, that is.

From The Vampire Economy - Doing Business Under Fascism:

"The Labor Front secretary tries to increase his popularity, and I have to pay for it. Last year he compelled me to spend over a hundred thousand marks for a new lunchroom in our factory. This year he wants me to build a new gymnasium and athletic field which will cost about 120,000 marks. Now, I have nothing against sports. But, as a matter of fact, the workers nowadays don't care much for sports or things of that kind. They work ten, eleven or twelve hours daily — at least sixty hours a week — and they complain that they never get enough rest. More often than not they take a nap during their lunch hour. Really, no worker is interested in the gymnasium and athletic field. Yet I shall have to build it in order to satisfy the Labor Front secretary. "I am opposed to mass meetings artificially staged to show how harmonious things are in the 'work community.' Neither do I care for all the demonstrations my workers and I must attend, where we must march for hours, shouting 'Heil Hitler.' I was an officer in the German Army during the World War, and I am in favor of discipline, efficiency and social distinctions. After all, I am supposed to be the 'factory leader.' But at such a demonstration I am likely to be ordered to shout and sing by some Party member who doesn't know the meaning of decent work. I must behave as though I were his orderly. Next morning, however, I am again supposed to be an 'authoritarian leader.' "

> Without pork, no big-time R&D

Only in the socialistic world of the fake-money giganto-state, in which income and sales taxes, excises and dues don't even suffice any longer but where state even needs to print up its own money to pay for the pork, thus essentially transferring wealth from the populace to the well-connected players. Not to mention that the debts from the wars over 50 years ago haven't even been paid off yet.

Most of the pork is waste and duplicated programs which burn and crash and have to be written off, or stuff no-one needs (this is called "industrial policy").

If people want Dreamliners or Reusable Orbital Vehicles, let the economic calculations and the work of investors and, yes, wealth patrons show that this is indeed what is wanted.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Not just the foam strike

Are you perchance related to Diane Vaughan, of excellent book fame??

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Unhappy

Re: In reality nothing could have been done

Is this the feel of losing the IRS dataset on a USB stick in a bus?

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Not much different from an normal airliner event.

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Re: Models

Space Shuttle Challenger.

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You are having a bad problem and are not coming back from space today

Nice write-up.

I remember talking heads rumormongering the rumor that it might have been a hit by Al Qaeda (by on-ground sabotage or presumably hypersonic SAM). Pretty ridiculous stuff.

Didn't Dubya pretty much immediately after EPIC FAIL announce the MANNED TRIP TO MARS which sank unobserved into the gutter in less than a month?

BlackBerry: Aaah, Microsoft, we meet again.. for another deathmatch

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Devil

What does Baron Harkonnen want with Alicia Key's head??

Very bad images spring to mind.

> If you want a lesion in history, look to the decline and fall of Novell, Borland and Palm.

A lesson should do, no need to increase scar tissue mass.

Oh, Sony, you big tease: Mystery PlayStation reveal date set

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WTF?

Re: Prediction

2007-01-26

Google is a great thing. What the fuck, Sony?

And so we arrive at last to the most recent development, the late January PlayStation 3 SDK update. Amongst the newer versions of the various tools included in the SDK lies a new function: the ability for developers to use some of the functionality of the fabled hardware scaler, a scaler many previously doubted existed at all. Interestingly enough, "some" is the key word when describing the unlocked functionality; SCEI only gave access to hardware accelerated horizontal scaling. Horizontal scaling on its own cannot upscale a 720p image into 1080p/i --this would require both horizontal and vertical scaling. Hence, the newly exposed scaler functionality is not enabled in the PS3's user interface directly, but instead will still require developer support to work.

At the time of publication, the reasons why SCEI didn’t give developers access to both horizontal and vertical scaling are still unknown, as are the reasons they didn’t grant developers access to horizontal scaling until now. The video scaler itself remains shrouded in mystery, as strange as it may seem, but at least now we can say with confidence that it does indeed exist. There are multiple reasons for this continuing secrecy, and insiders are reluctant to discuss them even off the record, nevermind for publication. Nonetheless, the reasons behind SCEI's choices are not our subject today. While a great deal could (and will) be said about the nature of this scaler in the future, today's article will focus on the recently exposed functionality; the details of its hardware and the way that it is integrated into the PlayStation 3’s architecture will be reserved for a later article.

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Devil

If everybody is gaming like crazy, overpopulation should be a manageable problem.

Oracle loses appeal in HP row over Itanium

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Angel

Re: Destroyed All Braincell's rant

Huh?

You seem to know more about me by analysis of a simple posting than a truth teller, who has practiced clairvoyance in the Mexican highlands with only Peyotl and a book by Castaneda as company for ten years, could find out in half an hour facetime. But anyway.

Picture this....

"Yes, young Jedi. It is a trap. Soon all the CPUs that you love and cherish will be destroyed by this fully operational Matt Brainstation. Good. I can see the anger rising within you...."

"Eh? Listen old man, I don't really care. Do they have good coffee around here?"

Seriously, why all the hate and trollololling? I can only picture you as a potty-mouthed arm-waving red-faced garden gnome reaching apoplexy in front of his screen as he tries to claim some sort of high ground for HP for reasons which still elude me.

> Maybe you should get an adult to help you.

May you should *be* an adult, Matt. Not that I would want any help from the sort of you.

P.S. I think AS/400 looks far better than anything HP could come up with ever.

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Coffee/keyboard

Re: pm

> If you made a mobile call in the last ten years then it's likely the charge for it was billed using an hp Itanium server.

You owe me a new keyboard.

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Paris Hilton

Seriously Matt, what do you want to say?

That Itanium will yet prevail and is just currently resting?

That Xeon is the best thing since the Hitachi Massage Device?

That you hate Sun and even more SPARC?

That you hate IBM and Power?

That you have a huge stash of HP shares going nowhere?

Maybe that HP was stupid when they dumped PA RISC as they currently seems to singlehandedly finance another manufaturer's processor line into the sunset?

What??

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Facepalm

Re: What hp should really ask for.

> Slowaris

Yup, it's Matt

Microsoft Dell deal would restore PC makers' confidence

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Coat

"...such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Zynga are the ones listing"

If modernity is characterized by a loss of the sense of the real, this fact is connected to what has happened to money in the twentieth century. Everything threatens to become unreal once money ceases to be real. I said that a strong sense of counterfeit reality prevails in "Disorder and Early Sorrow." That fact is ultimately to be traced to the biggest counterfeiter of them all - the government and its printing presses. Hyperinflation occurs when a government starts printing all the money it wants, that is to say, when the government becomes a counterfeiter. Inflation is that moment when as a result of government action the distinction between real money and fake money begins to dissolve. That is why inflation has such a corrosive effect on society. Money is one of the primary measures of value in any society, perhaps the primary one, the principal repository of value. As such, money is a central source of stability, continuity, and coherence in any community. Hence to tamper with the basic money supply is to tamper with a community's sense of value. By making money worthless, inflation threatens to undermine and dissolve all sense of value in a society. ...

Those who know how to exploit an inflationary situation can gain as much as others lose. As a result, inflation creates a topsy-turvy world. The fact that people are losing and making fortunes overnight is responsible for all the social confusions in "Disorder and Early Sorrow," such a s Cornelius's inability to tell his son from his servant. In a world in which all distinct categories begin to dissolve, a pervasive sense of relativism develops. Cornelius's convictions begin to weaken and he feels unable to take a stand against the opinions of the younger generation. In a frightening anticipation of today's tyranny of political correctness, the history professor retreats into a n academic skepticism when faced with the fanaticism of youth, trying to make his lack of conviction masquerade as a form of broadmindedness ...

"Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics", Paul A. Cantor, in: "The Review of Austrian Economics" Vo1.7, No. 1 (1994), p 3-29

Axed staffers hijack HMV Twitter account: 'We're tweeting LIVE from HR'

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Re: control of information

Alternatively, stay as long as possible and give running commentary as they break down the door.

UK cookies cop changes own policy to ‘implied consent’

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FAIL

"We felt this was appropriate at the time, considering that many people didn’t know much about cookies and what they were used for."

Yeah, because it was just about ten years after the first cookie scare.

Can Commissioner Reding now get off her high horse and ...

What's that I hear ... "Privacy by Design" she's yelling. Oookkay. Get ready for another wave.

Great Firewall architects fingered for GitHub attack

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Paris Hilton

Re: The future of SSL

> There would then be no indication of a MITM attack

I don't see this. The browser checks the chain that the remote server presents. And if you want an SSL connection, that chain has to check out.

Italian 'Eurora' supercomputer pushes the green envelope

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Pint

Ok, what can one throw away to use less energy then?

I know that "3-8-12 NEVAR FORGET" (i.e. if you erase bits in a classical machine, you must transform a minimum of energy into heat, see here) but there is still some way until we reach that limit. So... asynchronous logic? Supercooled circuits? Josephson junctions/Quiterons? Optical interconnects? Definitely new industries are needed.

'Gaia' Lovelock: Wind turbines 'may become like Easter Island statues'

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Headmaster

Yes you! You behind the windmill! Stand still, lassy!

Dear Sarah,

I do not think that having caught Windfarm Religion should excuse you from writing proper english.

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Facepalm

Re: Nuclear always costs more than it's supposed to

"Finally, it would be fascinating to hear how wind, solar, thermal, et cetera will not succumb to inflation driven by economic speculation."

"Economic speculation" does not drive inflation of resources. First, "inflation" means "inflation of the monetary mass", resulting in what is commonly called "inflation" by politicians and unwashed plebeians, which is nominal price increases. This is driven by money printing via central banks and subsequent pyramiding via fractional reserve banking. No big mystery or dark forces.

If anything, "economic speculation" will drive costs DOWN as capital will pour in to finally get some work done. Notice what happened with all the computational gear?

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Trollface

Re: Easter Island

> European diseases and enslavement, the same as everywhere else in the Americas and the Pacific.

Eco-guilt replaced by white guilt? I can live with that.

> So the Parthenon in Greece is the monument of a failed civilisation?

Yes. Some writing are left. The rest ... well, look at what's up. PIIGSified utterly.

How to destroy a brand-new Samsung laptop: Boot Linux on it

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FAIL

@Anontard

"I'm sorry, please explain to me why Samsung now have to fix a buggy Linux kernel driver."

Dear Anon,

Given the level of your technical understanding so evident in your question, nobody has to explain tits to you as you wouldn't understand it anyway.

Yours sincerely,

etc., etc., etc.

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Gimp

Re: @DiBosco

One "relies on a strong partner" when in jail.

Not earlier.

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Windows

EFI crap...

Manufacters haven't managed to issue adequate BIOS code for over 20 years (bad, slow, crap, user-unfriendly and unfit for purpose are just some adjectives)

They decide to up the complexity.

Guess what happens...

This is just the beginning!

'Silent but deadly' Java security update breaks legacy apps - dev

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Headmaster

Re: Java

Would the ACs please refrain from shitposting?

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Trollface

No comment

No comment

Microsoft dev tools to add Linux-style source code versioning

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Pint

Re: explanation for commenter "dgharmon"

> It can be the other way round

Of course, but there is some of the "where there is smoke, there is fire" in there. Same as when you see a physics paper written in Word instead of TeX ... not a good sign.