* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

WannaCry-killer Marcus Hutchins denies Feds' malware claims

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Facepalm

"You wanted a miracle, I give you F.B.I.!"

Agent Johnson and Special Agent Johnson will see you now.

The usual stuff: someone in the entierly rotten hierarchy is doing a self-promoting Hunt for the Baddie and is misinterpreting or even misrepresenting technical stuff he/she heard to biggen up the catch before the annual performance review.

Gotta laugh hollowly whenever complete idiots come out in articles and comments and claim the FBI is apolitical, transparent, impartial and somehow competent and we should trust what it says about Trump's Russian Ties (especially the red ones), the guys who did 9/11, or how a muslim guy with mental issues that an undercover inciter picked off the street is the biggest terrorist threat ever.

Linux kernel hardeners Grsecurity sue open source's Bruce Perens

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The opposite of "softners"?

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Windows

Re: Seems fine to me

Objection, your honor! The Jesuitism of the plaintiff is exceeding all bounds of rational discourse.

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Windows

I see!

Grsecurity's agreement, the lawsuit states, only applies to future patches, which have yet to be developed.

Is this like Quantitative Easing 7 Wealth Transfer, the negative economic consequences of which only apply to future taxpayers, which have yet to be born?

Capita's smart meter monopoly is owed £42m by industry

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Porsche Cayenne are leaving the premises!

Well, you have to reach NILPOUND before year's end somehow...

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Childcatcher

"Caught by El Reg"

Vulture on your back!

was caught trying to charge £7m to change a single component in its dual-band comms hub by The Register.

Well, I still don't know whether that charge was justified or just a case of a report being afraid of big numbers.

Can we have an update, please?

Trump-backed RAISE Act decoded: Points-based immigration, green cards slashed

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Holmes

"Muh Russia Investigations ... will yield something any time now ... any time!"

It's another White House distraction from the Russia investigations.

It's been about 12 months now. At this point, even Pizzagate has more raw evidence.

Did Hillary Scapegoat Russia to Save Her Campaign?

Yeah, that.

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Trollface

Yes, and?

Americans Shocked to Learn Emma Lazarus "Poem Technically Isn't US Law"

It turns out that the US actually has border, who would have thunk it?

New iPhone details leak: Yes, Apple is still chasing Samsung

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Paris Hilton

Wut?

a frenzy of Steve-Bannon-like onanism

What is this I don't even.

Was an editor absent or too plastered at the downstairs pub?

Anyway this bezel-less phone may be a step in the direction of handhelds that can be assembled during meeting or class into a bigger screen / computer, an idea found in Alastair Reynolds "Pushing Ice" and probably elsewhere. Might be nice.

Amazon admits flouting sanctions by flogging consumer tat to Iran

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Trollface

Wow these Galactic Empire sanctions are really serious!

Also reminder that any operation performed in dollar falls under the purview of US american courts, so you better not trade in dollar anywhere anytime lest you want to look at a travel interdiction, extradition order or light droning ("executing anywhere anytime", a diplomacy push by President Bushbama)

Scary news: Asteroid may pass Earth by just 6,880km in October

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Re: Er, what defences?

"Er, what defences? "

Prayer! Pray really hard!

Chess champ Kasparov, for one, welcomes our new robot overlords

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Nothing beats hands-on experience.

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Terminator

Re: Kasparov ... was creamed by IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1997

Playing a human, a good chess player will think along the lines of "it appears my opponent is trying to develop his queen's bishop, but I can block that if I advance this pawn ..."

Maybe "good" ones but I remember a paper about the "best" and they do not think tactically like that but go for board pattern matching. I don't find it back though. Oh well.

Chess is a game in which you can steamroller any human. In the past. Any other game, humans will be steamrollered. In the future.

What can you do with an apebrain that has ~7 slots free for short term memory? I laugh.

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Headmaster

Oh Jeez not THAT again

Human stewardship of computers will always be required, he said, because while programs are very good at doing the repetitive tasks, they aren’t good at intuitive leaps.

Completely confusing the medium (the program) and its runtime qualities (intuitive leaps or repetitive tasks, both are possible and in the eye of the beholder in any case).

That discussion has started in the 50s or so and people still are confused! WTF!

It took DEF CON hackers minutes to pwn these US voting machines

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Holmes

I don't see why this was downvoted.

“Elections have always been the concern and constitutional responsibility of state and local officials. But when Russia decided to interlope in 2016, it upped the ante,” said Douglas Lute, former US Ambassador to NATO and now principal at Cambridge Global Advisors.

It's the permanent "Saddam has WMD / Iran will have The Bomb next week / Ghaddafi is a threat to (whatever) / Assad killed his own people" side-quote mental hammering that we have had to endure for 20+ years. This goes on until SHTF to everyone's contentement and neocons basically get to fap fap live on TV while people are dying. At least the unsufferably over-compensating micro-mussolini McCain is now riding into the sunset, though not before having been anointed American War Jesus For Liberty & Freedom by the usual presstitutes. Sad!

Well, after the latest House dumbass attack the war with Russia is pretty much official in any case ("Sanctions" you say? Well, you don't that kind of "sanctions" w/o expecting the shooting to start soon somewhere.), Let's have fun, f*ck the EU etc.

Meanwhile, about the "January 6" smoking mushroom assessment:

In a memo to President Trump a group of former U.S. intelligence officers, including NSA specialists, cite new forensic studies to challenge the claim of the key Jan. 6 “assessment” that Russia “hacked” Democratic emails last year. .

And also: NYT Finally Retracts Russia-gate Canard (well, the reinstated it the next day, can't be American Pravda without a bit of chutzpah now, can you?)

Systemd wins top gong for 'lamest vendor' in Pwnie security awards

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Paris Hilton

The Norks did WannaCry? Russia did the Shadow Brokers?

The epic 0wnage award was split between North Korea and Russia for launching the WannaCry ransomware contagion and masterminding the Shadow Brokers, respectively.

Frankly, this spounds like a sponsored politicial message and rather out of place.

The opsec blunders that landed a Russian politician's fraudster son in the clink for 27 years

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> law-abiding Russian equivalent of the FBI

The FBI ... law-abiding?

Say, I have a nice bridge, you may be interested...

All power centers work the same.

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Holmes

Well, what do you think?

"Oh no it's that misbegotten son of you-know-who. Can you drop a hint to persons upstairs that he should stop this bullshit, maybe?"

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Black Helicopters

Ah nuuu Cheeki Breeki!

I'm still working on my first USD 17m. When I arrive, I will need USD 25m for the same purchasing power.

But the following month (i.e. April 2011) the Feds – and Seleznev – suffered a serious setback. The Russian was seriously injured in a terrorist attack while holidaying in Morocco, and spent several months in a coma.

Weird coincidence, that. Who is controlling Moroccoan terrorists?

Gov Uk says:

Attacks could be indiscriminate and could target foreigners. In April 2011, 17 people were killed and 25 injured in a large explosion caused by a bomb in Marrakech at the Argana Restaurant in Djema el-Fna Square.

Twitter's twits turned troll's tech taunt into thought-provoking tonic

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Re: Actually amazing

Change the skillset? Too many people think

Too many people may think but it still takes committment and money. Plus, it's not only the language, but the whole system around: IDE, libraries, principles, architecture, O'Reilly Books.

Plus, quite a few developers cannot even properly write code in the language in which they are supposed to be the master, I have seen things you wouldn't believe.

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Alien

Actually amazing

Where do they get the money and assurance from to change everything including the skillset?

Most companies would suicide themselves downstairs in a wheelchair even attempting to do so.

No redo everything in elm, please.

Astroboffins discover that half of the Milky Way's matter comes from other galaxies

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Re: Solexit

The galactic enrichment will be great, I tell you. Why, quite a lot of stars have extragalactic-sounding names already.

up to one million light years away

That's smaller than the local group by quite a bit: Local Group

It basically includes the "dwarf galaxies" around The Galaxy, and yes these are regularly hoovered up for stray materials if not swallowed whole.

Tired: Java. Desired: Node.js. Retired: The suggestion a JavaScript runtime is bonkers

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Windows

Into the tarpit!

cooperative multithreading was similarly disparaged by purists

Well, those purists noticed that one deep-stack call or one long-running or even never-returning function would mess your system up badly. This low-budget approach was thus rightfully thrown into the river.

OS got processes and even threads which were scheduled by the CPU, so every code could play in its garden, safely. The world breathed in relief.

Now we are back where we started because someone made the decision to throw away task switching and replace it with the illusion of optimizing aways context switching overhead. Of course context switching overhead does not magically go away at all, you have just moved it from the OS to your runtime like a first-semester student.

As Vagg described, Node developed out of creator Ryan Dahl's observation that most programming is biased toward blocking-style code, where operations happen in a linear order. Node favors non-blocking, asynchronous programming, which turns out to be a much better way to deal with data that may or may not be immediately available when requested. Blocking code stops while it waits for data; non-blocking code can deal with other tasks.

Protip: "stops while it waits for data" means the CPU is given to other tasks in a thread/process-oriented way, "non-blocking code can deal with other tasks" means you have to do the context switch yourself and schlep the mess of the callback handler around too. Enjoy not using an OS for what it is meant for.

"Asynchronous programming is much more like we interact with the world," said Vagg.

Are these people just completely confused or are they actually so intelligent that they are just dumb again?

"Node.js is emerging as a universal development framework for digital transformation with a broad diversity of applications"

It's not unlike a bog then. I wonder how many billions went down the drain in this particularly horrible IT fad driven by Google and other more-money-than-sense outfits? The fact that "developers" are ready to use this language for a "diversity of applications" also speaks volumes about the commen sense levels in this "industry". It's like digging one's own grave in the swamp of technical debt.

US spies hacked our phones over the air, claim pipeline protesters

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There is not even a need to "hack the phones" as everything passes through switches tapped by TLAs.

This "transcribing" business sounds schizophrenic.

Reminds me of the antiwar protests of 2010 or so where "micro-drones" the size of dragonflys were spotted. No use explaining to the "seers" over the 'net that technology for this is about 20 years away or so, They were probably dragonflys if they existed at all.

Apollo center fundraiser: That's one small check from man, one giant leap for our peace of mind

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Re: Park Service cutbacks?

> And no billionaires with some pocket cash to spare?

One could even ask Obama The Droner Prez. He's currently raking in promised kickbacksspeaking fees and not even spending anything. (Plus a ghostwritten "book deal" at 65 million, the mind boggle)

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Windows

Re: Back Lot

I have this quote which I wanted to post:

"We reached the Onion Singularity years ago; kind of like the Turing Test, it’s when the average reader can no longer reliability differentiate between “serious journalism” and satire"

(This was written in cotext with Congratulations to the Red Cross for Beating Donald Trump at His Own Game: Racism, but it applies here.

China crams spyware on phones in Muslim-majority province

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Windows

In China, "draconian" means burning down cities to shut up revolting citizens of dubious ethnicity.

But I'm not gonna get worked up about enforced surveillance of the Muslim Far West of the PRC. Actually, I let the NGOs take care of that.

Find your happy place: Fedora 26 has landed

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Windows

Re: Happy place

Grin and bear it.

It's like the New Deal: A total catasrophe implemented by crazies bringing nothing but pain & destruction that everyone will laud as the best idea ever after some time.

And truth be told, I am starting to appreciate it as it simpklifies life a lot in certain cases. It is the right direction to take. Not sure whether it is the right way to take it.

Let's do this. Installing KDE spin now...

Sweden leaked every car owners' details last year, then tried to hush it up

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"I blanda'd up"

Hoorrorific if true.

But why is all that information even IN a single database?

And what happens now? Free credit monitoring??

China censors drop the soap operas, sitcoms

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Mushroom

Re: It's disgusting that regimes like this still exist in this modern world.

more money than God

Everyone has more money than God.

Unfortunately that's the sort of "money" that is falling off the printing presses like dog turd.

If the West (or the "Western Elites") would stop their pretend-rich Keynesianism and would stop borrowing from the future (at "zero interest", hah!) it would quickly become clear that people are selling their house for cheap tat from Shenzen.

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Re: re: BBC article on New Silk Road

Also here

Pepe Escobar in: "The New Silk Road Will Go Through Syria"

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Most interesting

Anyone know wheter the person in charge of information management is a young and eager lion ready to prove his chops? (Not likely to be a she, right?)

If so it is likely that he will be told to stop having dumbass attacks soon.

Information management is best when applied sparingly. Become crass and people will be pushed to the tipping point and start to complain about it.

Why you'll never make really big money as an AI dev

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Holmes

Re: "Backward chaining is appearing as a “new” technique"

Yes, that struck me too.

Plus backchaining and forward chaining is now merging in LPS.

It's about time.

Yes, I know, a very primitive version of this existed in PLANNER in the 60's as Carl "I invented everything, but earlier" Hewitt keeps saying.

Also, "Blackboard Architectures". These are VERY 80s. Basically a device useful when you don't really know how to attack a problem and the solution is "throw specialized agents at it that shall communicate via a common database know as a blackboard". How exactly the inter-agent communication should be formalized was never really spelled out. I still have the Addison-Wesley Fat Book "Blackboard Systems", maybe I should have it scanned and put online. I would imagine that today problems would be more often solved by additional fat injections of appropriate mathematics in search and optimization so that one knows what one is computing and can even get performance stats.

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Thumb Up

Re: Prolog IPA

PROLOG'S LIVE MATTERS!

May I interest the Gentleman in Mercury (Haskell as Prolog), Answer Set Programming, Lambda Prolog (see also: Uniform Proofs as a Foundation for Logic Programming or even the experimental Bedwyr?

DeepMind says it's given AI an imagination. Let's take a closer look at that

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Windows

Old school stuff?

I remember an article from 1996 in NewScientist:

The creativity machine

(paywalled! and I have no longer a subscription!)

AFAIR, it was based on neural networks being rejigged at random to "generate creative ideas".

The "Creativity Machine®" is actually a registered trademark of Imagination Engines Inc. There are also patents and stuff: IEI's Patented Creativity Machine® Paradigm

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Windows

While El Reg editors analyze my post for Badthink tendencies regarding Trump etc.

IEI's Patented Creativity Machine® Paradigm

"The simple, elegant, and inevitable path to human level machine intelligence and beyond, the Creativity Machine Paradigm, US Patent 5,659,666 and all subsequent foreign and divisional filings."

It is a depressing thought that the "simple, elegant, and inevitable path to human level machine intelligence" can actually be patented.

Judge uses 1st Amendment on Pokemon Go park ban. It's super effective!

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Judge is 100% retarded

This doesn't even pass the smell test. Any smell test.

Plus, there seem to be laws demanding that people protesting do so in declared "free speech zones" (directly behind the dumpster, down that alley). Apparently these are ok?

I hope this black robe donner gets corrected.

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Thumb Down

Re: Amend this!

They are not laws, they are changes to the constitution, and, being in effect, articles of the Constitution.

Read it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_amendment#United_States

Shut up and take my money! AI luminaries go gooey for Graphcore's smart chip tech

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Terminator

Doctor Miles Kenneth Dyson, I presume?

Hassabis said: "Building systems capable of general artificial intelligence means developing algorithms that can learn from raw data and generalise this learning across a wide range of tasks.

I do think that reaching General Artificial Intelligence as opposed to task-targeted Artificial Intelligence (whoich immediately is relabeled "automation" once it hits the real world) is a rather extreme goal. Also, farther away than a few funding rounds.

Unless there really is hardware from the future in the vault...

Uber, Twitter's legal eagles gather to wring claws about bro culture

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Trollface

Muh diversity cargo cult

Twitter General Counsel Vijaya Gadde said that lack of diversity is a vicious cycle and discourages women from advancing in their fields.

“They’re withdrawing from the process, because they’ll walk into the room and the interview panel is all men,” she said.

But what of they are culturally diverse men and members of the LGBT "community"? Would that help?

$30 million below Parity: Ethereum wallet bug fingered in mass heist

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"Maybe not best practice"

Probably not a problem.

We're all saved. From the killer AI. We can live. Thanks to the IEEE

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Windows

Bonanza

Havens said the IEEE P7000 Standards aim to allow organizations to demonstrate that their products conform to a high level of ethics.

This excursion into nonfunctional requirements will lead to rampant "badgering" (from "Fairtrade AI" to "This city is ETHICAL AI managed"), irate mobs of dumbs proclaiming "Someone's Lives Matter", lawsuits by no-win no-fee attorneys, special patrolling by auditors / state outfits / profiting not-for-profit organizations, and from the religious corner and extremist political spectrum fatwas and other assorted declarations if not burning of factories or people.

Further afield, the IEEE missed the occasion to call these the "H9000 Standards".

Targeted, custom ransomware menace rears its ugly head

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Re: Sigh...

Even air-gapped systems can fall prey to targeted attacks.

Well, you know, there are targeted attacks and then there are Targeted Attacks which demand a large investment up-front that even cybermobster are unlikely to deploy.

Luxembourg passes first EU space mining law. One can possess the Spice

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Pint

Re: LMAO!

Well, it might be, but it will hopefully be hardcore germanic with a strong link to Russia and plugged directly into the New Silk Road.

And, you know. Not ethnomasochistic.

AI bots will kill us all! Or at least may seriously inconvenience humans

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Facepalm

I have no problems and I must scream!

"I have exposure to the most cutting edge AI and I think people should be really concerned about it,"

Stop talking to Eliza, dude.

Meanwhile actually content-holding discussion:

Human-Level AI Is Right Around the Corner—or Hundreds of Years Away

Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, and others weigh in on the future of artificial intelligence

Rodney Brooks (Chairman and CTO, Rethink Robotics) says (and that's a guy who REALLY sees cutting-edge AI):

"When will we have computers as capable as the brain?"

Rodney Brooks’s revised question: When will we have computers/robots recognizably as intelligent and as conscious as humans?

Not in our lifetimes, not even in Ray Kurzweil’s lifetime, and despite his fervent wishes, just like the rest of us, he will die within just a few decades. It will be well over 100 years before we see this level in our machines. Maybe many hundred years.

"As intelligent and as conscious as dogs?"

Maybe in 50 to 100 years. But they won’t have noses anywhere near as good as the real thing. They will be olfactorily challenged dogs.

"How will brainlike computers change the world?"

Since we won’t have intelligent computers like humans for well over 100 years, we cannot make any sensible projections about how they will change the world, as we don’t understand what the world will be like at all in 100 years. (For example, imagine reading Turing’s paper on computable numbers in 1936 and trying to pro­ject out how computers would change the world in just 70 or 80 years.) So an equivalent well-grounded question would have to be something simpler, like “How will computers/robots continue to change the world?” Answer: Within 20 years most baby boomers are going to have robotic devices in their homes, helping them maintain their independence as they age in place. This will include Ray Kurzweil, who will still not be immortal.

"Do you have any qualms about a future in which computers have human-level (or greater) intelligence?"

No qualms at all, as the world will have evolved so much in the next 100+ years that we cannot possibly imagine what it will be like, so there is no point in qualming. Qualming in the face of zero facts or understanding is a fun parlor game but generally not useful. And yes, this includes Nick Bostrom.

Jesus walks away after 7,000lb pipe van incident

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Holmes

Re: Of course he had to survive miraculously

Yeah about that,

Self-loathing Murricans butthurt that Mexico lost its territory:

Will Mexico Get Half of Its Territory Back?

Mexico is now a victim ripe for reparations.

Hey, maybe the UK can get some pieces back, too?

I always though that WWII transformed Japan into crazy self-punishing animeland, but apparently this can be bettered.

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Re: Jesus!

> Naming your kid Jesus is not cool, think of going through school being called Jesus and the constant "Jesus" jokes as an adult.

I think that would be borderline anti-semitic.

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Re: The funny side is a bit morbid here

I had to overtake it at 90mph+ with a "lead foot" praying that nothing else flies out of the top of the skip during the 15 or so seconds to do so

Captain Wedge Antilles, I presume?

Set your alarms for 2.40am UTC – so you can watch Unix time hit 1,500,000,000

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Re: Signed Integer

Using a signed time_t allows you to use time_t for both datetime, and for a duration. This is useful in procedural languages like C, however most OO languages use a separate DateTime and Duration types.

That has nothing to do with OO vs. procedural.

It's just what you want your bit pattern to MEAN.

DARPA's robot sat-fixing program survives sueball strike

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Trollface

So is Orbital ATK suddenly so into "govnm't expenditure watch"

I suppose there is no ulterior motive and its motivations are as pure as driven snow?

I hope they will take up the Afghan "surge" next (laughably, 5000 dudes and dudettes to be shipped over to check whether the local IED industry is still top notch)