* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

SCADA worm a 'nation state search-and-destroy weapon'

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Dead Vulture

That's actually an act of terrorism.

Disrupting a perfectly bog-standard civilian nuclear power plant under IAEA inspection is NOT friendly. Then again, the Land Of The Chosen Ones is not above copying passports for some wetwork or braining people in belgian hotels when they feel like it.

This also has nothing to do with Iranian "nukes" as El Reg subtitles - as every fule knows, these don't exist. Does Tony Blair have the remote control of the editor's vibrator by any chance?

Stallman storms in on Oz software patent conflab

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Jobs Horns

"There's no problem that requires a solution with anything like software patents."

But there are:

1) Fatcat lawyers hard hit by the recession and unable to afford a third Lamborghini. Ditto for "IP consultants" and other riffraff.

2) Large corporations that want to have a state-guaranteed monopoly on Idea Space and that also want to have a cheap way to preventively kill off any scurrying competitors.

3) State looking for arbitrary extensions of power to pull in the taxpayer dough and gurarantee the pensions of another batch of people that "need work". In lucky cases, the antitrust division can be activated to look into problems created as per point 2)

They are not problems that have anything to do with "driving innovation", but they _are_ problems.

Bill would let feds block pirate websites worldwide

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Big Brother

The geezer duo is at it again?

These two never find a bill to enlarge federal powers that they don't like. Except if they didn't table it.

Of course, one knows where that is going. After all the certain actors certainly have copyright claims to documents found on, say, Wikileaks.

Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act.

"COCOA", I'm sure.

Steve Jobs in iPhone bitchslap to creationists, Tea Party

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Coat

But monkeys luuuve porn!

And thus so do I.

Harrow flicks pirate thrown in slammer

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WTF?

"has the effect of depriving the film industry of revenue"

...and we can't have that, can we?

The only other institution that has a similar delusion of being entitled to hoover change from your purse must be State.

Facebook fone? Feh, says Facebook

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Badgers

A phone with an "integrated Facebook experience"?

What the...? What the hell does this mean? A LOT of unmentionable thoughts come to mind. This will roll around my mind for the next few hours.

Twitter airport bomb joker loses second job

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FAIL

Consider.

"only about him writing something on Twitter that someone thinks is a threat"

Consider the implication of your phrase starting with "only" and ending with "somebody thinks".

Consider that you are an utter moron.

Microsoft takes Oracle side in Google Java-phone attack

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Welcome

Serial rapist and drug dealer seen pushing his crap wares in pimp avenue

Film at 11.

South African police hunt Twittering speedcam spy

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Thumb Down

"It's also not always safe to drive at the posted limit for a road"

I don't know what you need then.

Custom superchippery pulls 3D from 2D images like humans

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Terminator

What's there to solve?

This is like "solving" the problem of putting 250 hyped horses into an engine block. Bound to be done eventually. "False dawns" only occur if someone gets physics envy and claims to have solved intelligent behaviour in one bold stroke. This only impresses philosophers and the Common Man.

Parents back legal ban of violent vidgames sales to kids

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Headmaster

That's so, so....

REACTIONARY!

Be progressive. Create another law!

Yahoo! economist rebuilds ad empire with 'Magic Formula'

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Coffee/keyboard

That's full-fat-fail then.

"Economists go to Washington just so they can stop Washington from doing the silly things it would otherwise do."

(On the other hand, Greenspan was a showman/clown, nowhere near an economist and what came after ain't better either.)

Police spent tens of thousands on failed BitTorrent probe

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Big Brother

I hear that more prosecution of Internet-based copyright-infringement...

...currently in the pipes is estimated to rake in about 200 million GBP per year for the "creative industries" (How did State come up with that number? Don't ask.).

I suppose it will additionally cost the taxpayer 400 million GBP (see I can make numbers up, too).

Hmm... that's 600 million net revenue, then.

Critical Flash vuln under active attack, Adobe warns

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Headmaster

Hell yeah!

You fracking "I want my colorful interface" know-nothing

"Flash enables graphics on PCs"? Right.

Software re-sale restricted by US Court of Appeals

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Big Brother

Don't get all huffy

Consider banks. The legal system is pandering to rich bank companies by allowing them to counterfeit money (i.e. hand out more money than they actually own) leading to all sorts of ill effects, including economic crashes.

Same here. Special interest groups get special interest. Yes, software would be cheaper if resale were permitted, but that would just be in the little sucker's interest. So no.

'Hyperbolic map' of the internet will save it from COLLAPSE

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Paris Hilton

People who think "hyperbolic" is a new word...

...have no right to yawn and should start learning basic geometry.

I'm actually looking forward to the times when "the West" becomes the dumping ground for toxic Chinese and Indian industrial waste and moneyless pensioners heat gobs of grey goo over open fires to recuperate the metals while telling jokes from 30-year old sitcoms they used to watch instead of hitting the books.

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Paris Hilton

No U!

Thje Internet can "grow and grow"?

<-- Cargo Cult Science is that way

What Adobe could learn from The Flying Wallendas

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Alert

Well, actually...

The "self-modifying code idea" is not so hot, but these days you have lots of "evals" (think, LISP evaling an s-expression that was just built on the fly) and Virtual Machine Code patching (Aspect-Oriented Programming and other Code Injection ideas come to mind). These ain't coming nearthe no-execution bit because the only thing that executes are the VMs, The rest, bytecode or syntax trees, stays data to be processed.

Opensourcers get personal over Ellison's Google fight

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Headmaster

Most important point...

...Java came at the right time. A simple, safe language just when the Internet was discovered by the mainstream and lots of developers suddenly needed to start coding something more complex and than a filter in C.

All the Java advantages you wanted could be had in in non-"spiky" (i.e. languages with a syntax sporting { } ) languages long before that. At university.

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Thumb Down

You are wise beyond your age.

Unless you are 15.

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FAIL

Confusing Copyright, Patents and various "re-use licensing terms", are we?

"The FSF has a vested interest in seeing the action defeated, as it was the group's GPL license that Sun Microsystems used to released Java under in 2006. A victory for Oracle, or some kind of closed-doors settlement with Google, could potentially leave Java open to further suits elsewhere while opening the door to trolling activities against the GPL."

"trolling activities against the GPL" is some novel concept I haven't heard about yet.

As Google did a re-implementation and doesn't use the existing GPL-ed code, the Oracle suit is only relevant insofar as "patent violations" may occur. "Restrictions on use" and other retarded stuff may or may not be relevant, though I don't see how they can be if Google built their stuff from zero.

The GPL says that patents covering GPLed implementations "must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all", so one could suppose that the "ideas" whose implementation was GPL-ed earlier by Sun should be off-limits...

...but with such a national-socialist idea as patents, all bets are off.

Assange asks for new lawyer

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Paris Hilton

This is Sweden, where saying saying hello is molestation.

http://aktivarum.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/the-entire-assange-case-from-swedish-perspective-analysis-by-aktivarum/

“Welcome to Sweden, Mr Assange. You should know that paying for sex is illegal here, and if you don’t pay, you’ll be accused of rape and molestation.”

Eric Schmidt warns Berliners: 'We know where you are'

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Big Brother

The Google Server Farm

....will be hosted at Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8.

Currently there is a large free area just hosting a museum about some wall and administrative operations of some weirdo outfit sporting lots of photos of people in black uniforms. I mean, who is interested in that?

USB stick with anti-terror training found outside police station

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Coat

Go to Owl and sell it

Everybody is committing a crime all the time anyway.

So who cares.

Wikileaks founder blasts reopening of rape probe

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Unhappy

You don't say...

Soon there will be allegations of kiddie porn and bestiality. "All options are on the table" as the chief psychos' saying goes.

Meanwhile Tony is raking it in with some unapologetic pap and pushing war with Iran. Nice.

.XXX domain deal stripped bare

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Go

Better than...

...anally retentive gun-fearing interventionist cruise missile liberal with a warfare/welfare State Worship Complex, I would reckon.

If all the Ameritards were like him, the world would be a better place.

Sony Oz mod chip dongle ban hearing delayed

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Big Brother

Post your own message

"If you do this, then company X has a right under law to take you to court for breach of those terms of use. How do you reconcile this with companies supposedly owning the law?"

That's exactly what "owning the law" is about. A special interest group gets State to defend - on their behalf - some monopoly on ideas or products or can have State arbitrarily kick the ass of consumers who step out of some arbitrarily defined line.

"Companies have every right to limit how products are used by consumers"

In the same vein, Death's Head squads have every right to shift undesirable minorities onto eastbound trains.

IT engineer fights spider with improvised flamethrower

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Paris Hilton

Hopefully...

...he's only doing that newfangled Game Programming Engineer stuff.

Microsoft wins wants right to appeal Word patent ruling

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FAIL

You tire me with tirades

Implying "custom XML editing" is a patentable idea instead of something that programmers find in the bog every second day.

Colonel who slammed Afghan HQ PowerPoint culture is fired

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Paris Hilton

Brought to you by from the ministry of the blindingly obvious!

"IJC exists primarily to provide some general a three-star command"

In other news, sky is blue, water is wet and the recession is not over and no-one cares about dead people in faraway lands.

Paris wonders where that Agfanisthan can be found on the map.

RIM, Juniper, and VMware on Oracle's Borg 14 list

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Paris Hilton

Yeah...

A thing of the past like the internal combustion engine.

Which is why everyone is driving with those fancy batteries today.

DARPA funds Mr Spock on a Chip

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Terminator

I guess they are implementing the "Bayesian Network Tree"

These are more complex than NNs and also more expensive to compute, at least on symbolic machines, as you have to repeatedly roll the probabilities up and down the tree and this involves some heavy floating-point multiplication and division.

Of course it might be something else entirely.

Google dubs Oracle suit 'attack on Java community'

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Troll

Singalong

"Trolls will be trolls.

They are in need of care and attention."

Ellison wrestles Google to strangle 'unofficial' Java

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Yup yup

Gotta agree. I was amazed that I could crash a whole phone by adding an entry too many into a menu.

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Flame

Facepalm.jpg

Looks at watch.

Nearly 2010.

Java irrelevant? Sure. Also, the recession is over etc.

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Gates Horns

Submarine patent on starboard bow!

"Microsoft has to license everyone on a non-discriminatory basis in order to have it's intelectual property included in a standard."

That crack pipe must be really good.

Microsoft patent victor targets Apple, Cisco...

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Big Brother

Just a shakedown

>> patent offices for being blind, deaf and (probably also) lazy

_WHO_ do you think works in those hallowed offices?

Yep, warm-blooded civil servants.

These people are not exactly Einsteins (yes, I know about Einstein's background) and their "business case" does not rest on refusing patents. Actually it seems to rest on providing State Services You Don't Need But That Bring In Taxes And Provide Cushy Jobs in favor of special interest groups (Lawyers and Big Industrial Players) packaged so that the small fry think it's done in their interest. Not unlike war.

Shareholders sue HP over Hurd's sex scandal probe

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Thumb Up

In which case the shareholders, as proprietors of the company, would sue...

...like now.

15K Wikileaks docs 'potentially more explosive,' US frets

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Welcome

A little copy & paste goes a long way

From http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2010/08/on-wikileaks-vii-take-up-wikileaks.html:

Three interconnected criticisms of Wikileaks, and of the recently released Afghanistan material, merit consideration. These particular criticisms can be summarized as follows:

"These materials don't tell us anything new, or anything we didn't already know."

"While the materials may contain points of interest, they certainly aren't the Pentagon Papers!" (The exclamation point is always implied at a minimum.)

"Perhaps Wikileaks is to be commended in certain respects. Sad to say, though, this won't stop the war."

All three points were announced within a day of the latest Wikileaks story breaking in the news; sometimes, they were put forth within hours. This was true of both mainstream media and of the overwhelming majority of blog posts.

Not one of the criticisms is valid. They are all either woefully inaccurate or largely beside the point. Taken together -- and the first two are almost always offered in combination, with the third frequently added as a further reason to set this story aside as another non-event -- the arguments render each other incoherent. If one appreciates the issues involved and knows the actual history that is referenced, the arguments explode one another. (...)

And especially relevant for Mr Orlowski:

"What calls for further close and detailed study is the fact, much commented on, that the Pentagon papers revealed little significant news that was not available to the average reader of dailies and weeklies; nor are there any arguments, pro or con, in the "History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy" that have not been debated publicly for years in magazines, television shows, and radio broadcasts."

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Grenade

Military Waahambulance hasn't arrived yet?!??

"US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has characterized it as an irresponsible act that potentially puts soldiers and Afghan sources in grave danger."

What an ar*sewipe. How about running an aggressive war and blowing up civiies by the hour or executing them by putting nervous kids from the midwest with guns on their streets?

Apparently not an irresponsible act.

The whole militaristic upper crust needs a good decapitation strike A.S.A.P.

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"public for a while now"

Oh yeah?

Oracle sues Google over Java in Android

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Unhappy

Well, you can use Clojure then...

> Calls for stopping to use Java

> Proclaims that C# is a marginally better language than Java

My face on the left

Microsoft's dynamic languages on forced diet

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Pint

Well no

"Though to be honest I personally believe that the biggest benefit of most of these 'dynamic' languages is that they're interpreted."

That's an irrelevant distinction.

You are missing the dynamic aspects, of which there are: high flexibility, rapid writing with little syntactic baggage, weak and/or duck typing, compact, polymorphic and often implied code, easy-to-use reflection as compared to the "traditional" enterprise languages. Not to mention closures, a strong trend to functional programmiong and facilities to patch up stuff at runtime.

Course, runtime errors are more likely, so you better use asserts liberally.

Google, boffins crack Rubik's Cube mystery

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Thumb Up

Quite so...

Well, you can brute-force this problem instance, so it's definitely known now, in the same ways as the four-colour theorem.

I remember at least two papers by Douglas Hofstaedter on Rubik's cube. They are probably only available on the Dark Internet, but if not, links would be appreciated.

HP boffin claims million-dollar maths prize

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Paris Hilton

http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf

"Even many computer scientists do not seem to appreciate how different the world would be if

we could solve NP-complete problems efficiently. I have heard it said, with a straight face, that a

proof of P = NP would be important because it would let airlines schedule their flights better, or

shipping companies pack more boxes in their trucks! One person who did understand was Gö̈del. In his celebrated 1956 letter to von Neumann (see [69]), in which he first raised the P versus NP question, Gödel says that a linear or quadratic-time procedure for what we now call NP-complete problems would have “consequences of the greatest magnitude.” For such an procedure “would clearly indicate that, despite the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem, the mental effort of the mathematician in the case of yes-or-no questions could be completely replaced by machines.” But it would indicate even more. If such a procedure existed, then we could quickly find the smallest Boolean circuits that output (say) a table of historical stock market data, or the human genome, or the complete works of Shakespeare. It seems entirely conceivable that, by analyzing these circuits, we could make an easy fortune on Wall Street, or retrace evolution, or even generate Shakespeare’s 38th play. For broadly speaking, that which we can compress we can understand, and that which we can understand we can predict. Indeed, in a recent book [12], Eric Baum argues that much of what we call ‘insight’ or ‘intelligence’ simply means finding succinct representations for our sense data. On his view, the human mind is largely a bundle of hacks and heuristics for this succinct-representation problem, cobbled together over a billion years of evolution. So if we could solve the general case—if knowing something was tantamount to knowing the shortest efficient description of it—then we would be almost like gods. The NP Hardness Assumption is the belief that such power will be forever beyond our reach."

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Alien

As Scott said...

...the answer is rather unlikely to be "yes" (otherwise there would be semi-godlike powers within our reach) but proving it may be as impossible to prove that the highest speed in this universe is exactly "c". It may just be a natural constraint: "Thou shalt not have an easy was to find a solution for problems that are easy to verify."

New 'Tolpuddle Martyrs' demand £50 a day

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Troll

www.monster.com

Problem, officer?

Ellison blasts HP 'idiots' for Hurd's exit

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Paris Hilton

What is this?

Girl had no sex, but was harrassed but is still saddened by Hurt's parachuting and wanted to claim privately?

The modern times!

Moon actually dryer than dem dry bones, say boffins

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Troll

Keynes' General Theory of Moon Conquest

But you could put banks (central and otherwise) up there, fully roboticized. They could churn out a new currency, the "lunar", made by cooking moondust into small platelets using abundant solar energy. The conversion rate could be set to dollar parity.

Having all these inaccessible dollars lying around on the moon would make moon expeditions instantly interesting as world and dog would try to lay claim on the newly created riches!

I think I'm on to something. Anybody know the phone number of Peaceprez O' and Bernanke?

Hot babes discriminated against by some employers

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WTF?

Silly season.

In other news, blind people have difficulties being hired as bus drivers. Film at 11!