Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Re: Why is there even a password?

I don't know what kind of asinine jerk downvotes this.

The sad truth is that if companies do use certificates, they use self-signed certificates ... it's abysmal.

Re: Well this is certainly....

> This was starting off to be a slow news year

Don't know whether you have been buried under the Jehovah Stone recently, but so far in this year:

If the slowness continues this way, we will all be pwned, enslaved by aliens from Zarkor IV (cunningly disguised as sexually appealing females of the genus homo sapiens sapiens) or communist before the end of the year.

> if Fedora isn't even letting them do that

You sure will be able to, from an RPM or directly from source.

After all you can install the Oracle JDK too, and get patent-encumbered codecs, even libdvdcss from the "nonfree" repositories at will.

This isn't Applosoft control freak territory.

Re: [Pul / Qua] sar

We are talking DISTANCE, man. So it's bound to be a Quasar.

Also:

1) Pull up Google in the browser

2) "PKS 1830-211"

3) ????

4) http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0201551 : PKS 1830-211: A Face-On Spiral Galaxy Lens

We present new Hubble Space Telescope images of the gravitational lens PKS 1830-211, which allow us to characterize the lens galaxy and update the determination of the Hubble constant from this system. The I-band image shows that the lens galaxy is a face-on spiral galaxy with clearly delineated spiral arms. The southwestern image of the background quasar passes through one of the spiral arms, explaining the previous detections of large quantities of molecular gas and dust in front of this image. The lens galaxy photometry is consistent with the Tully-Fisher relation, suggesting the lens galaxy is a typical spiral galaxy for its redshift. The lens galaxy position, which was the main source of uncertainty in previous attempts to determine H_0, is now known precisely. Given the current time delay measurement and assuming the lens galaxy has an isothermal mass distribution, we compute H_0 = 44 +/- 9 km/s/Mpc for an Omega_m = 0.3 flat cosmological model. We describe some possible systematic errors and how to reduce them. We also discuss the possibility raised by Courbin et al. (2002), that what we have identified as a single lens galaxy is actually a foreground star and two separate galaxies.

Your Face When it's actually a gravitational lens.

Re: So the heat-death of the Universe is ~8.19 billion years from now?

Not the heat-death of the univers.

It's just the temperature of the background radiation that drops (actually should be doing that exponentially I reckon).

You still have a hundred billion years or so until the last galaxy disappears over the horizon and the universe looks just like a big empty room from any vantage point. And then you have to wait even longer until everything has decayed and finds itself on the light cone (if that ever happens). In these strange aeons, even time will die... because there aren't any clocks any longer. An interesting fate.

Re: It may or may not work...

> The fact is that the laws were made for brick-and-mortar businesses

No the laws were made for civil servants, pork barrels and wars.

There's one in Mali now, small fried compared to the war from 1914-1945 and the subsequent ones, but still...

Re: Workers...

You could consider that they are working off the watchful eye of the Great Taxator and so should be hammered for their impudence.

I heard that the tax authorities went to amazon.fr for some protection money. Amazon told them to piss off because their revenues were basically transferred to the "mother company" in Luxembourg (a medium-sized office, I reckon), so the french tax authority couldn't put a bypass on the money flow. French tax authorities then went digging for data protection violations in the amazon.fr datastore, because, had they discovered them, the french CNIL would become involved and there is a law that in that case, the tax authorities get to have full control of the revenues. Don't know what became of that.

Re: I'm impressed

Le gâteau est un mensonge!

If you tax it, it can no longer be found.

Re: Microsoft's Intel-powered Surface Pro to launch [what?] in February

You don't understand!

There are many people, and especially technical people, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural re-engineering, like marketing and political easing, can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to the development of a new hermeutics of language. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such re-engineering. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties can be described by ``meaningful'' grammatical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of the inherent meaning of a phrase by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) textual (and contextual) analysis.

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western communicative practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``grammatics'' and ``morphology''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that grammatical ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of sentence structure are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the community of linguistic "enforcement", for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced, inter alia, quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in subliminal televised messages; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the sciences of communication in general and marketing in particular.

Re: How can Microsoft get this stuff so wrong

> the kind of apps which need 8GB are not the kind of thing you should be running on a tablet.

But then why bother with an Intel processor?

Re: I put my foot through my cornflakes

Whatever happens, don't mention the war

"Will you stop talking about the war?"

"Me?! You started it!"

"We did not start it!"

"Yes you did, you invaded Poland!"