* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Apple seeks patent on reality

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Jobs Horns

Pretty cool...

I'm feeling like I'm in the early 90's again, watching tech demonstrations of that kind of stuff.

Patentable it is not.

'CRU cherrypicked Russian climate data', says Russian

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Headmaster

"climate sceptic and free-market economist"

It's funny how these two types are correlated. Guess it's something to do with "what must not be true cannot be true". If the edge of the free-market playground comes into sight, how are we gonna play "I buy, you buy, we all buy together - and resources are free and plentiful"

Not that I have anything against freemarketeers, on the contrary.

Google demos image rec 'quantum computer'

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Headmaster

HELL NO!

"If one takes a closer look at such capabilities one realizes that they often require the solution of what mathematicians call hard combinatorial optimization problems. It turns out that solving the hardest of such problems requires server farms so large that they can never be built. A new type of machine, a so-called quantum computer, can help here."

Okaaayyy... if these are the NP-hard problems, it is very unlikely that the a Quantum Algorithm will help. Very, very unlikely.

See also: http://qwiki.stanford.edu/wiki/Petting_Zoo#BQP

Critics aim to sink Titanic ice cubes

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Thumb Up

Funny stuff!

"ice cubes of the Twin Towers to commemorate 9/11"

Fireworks in my martini glass? Why not, as long as the cherry is in Cheney's likeness.

Ladies put off tech careers by sci-fi posters, Coke cans

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Paris Hilton

We are clearly in the 21st century

"The computer geek surrounded by such things as computer games, science fiction memorabilia and junk food," says Sapna Cheryan, a junior trick-cyclist at the university of Washington, America.

"That stereotype doesn't appeal to many women who don't like the portrait of masculinity that it evokes."

Only in the 21st:

1) "Trick-cyclicism" is now a university course.

2) There is a need to specify the landmass in which "Washington" resides

3) An important trait of "masculinity" is being surroundes by games, Sci-Fi memorabilia and junk food

Google contradicts self, confirms own Googlephone

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Thumb Up

Google - hiring teens, playing amusement park.

"Stuck in mass of traffic leaving work post last all hands of 2009. ZOMG we had fireworks and we all got the new Google phone. It's beautiful,"

This tweet somehow captures the essence of a bubble economy.

Felony fugitive found working for DHS for 2 years

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Terminator

She's clearly a Toaster!

What happened to the story of DHS generally being asses on airports and destroying parked planes through excessive "inspections" (like looking into cockpits from outside by lifting themselves up on the pitot tubes etc.)

LHC pulverises previous record: 2.36 TeV surprise collision!

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Big Brother

Yes they have thought about it...

...the good news is I'm sure they have thought about it. That's what they do: putting out papers.

...the bad news is that, unless you have the toolset (mathematics of QM and possibly QFT, be at home in the Standard Model, know how to deal with experimental statistics, have a good intuition about what to look for, have colleagues in astrophysics to query about what they see or do not see happing in the universe at large etc.) you do not even have the wherewithal to ask the correct question.

The real world is not like Star Trek where anything can happen and any question that a writer got from the hole in his wall makes sense. Worrying about Stable Black Holes in the LHC is like worrying about mutant ooze coming out of your fridge at night and strangling you. Rather unlikely to happen.

So. Hurry along now.

Scammers scrape RAM for bank card data

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Flame

What. The. Frack?

"Tell-tale signs they've been installed include the presence of strange rdump files and perl scripts on a hard drive, sudden changes in free disk space and the monitoring of registries and system processes."

That this is even possible in POS systems says a lot about the current practices in this "industry", Are these things put together by flight-by-night basement operations in Somalia? Are the hired engineers more able to play WoW than design a technical system? Is there not enough money left to actually set up a good infrastructure because managers are enjoying prolonged stays on Carribean "conferences"? What is this?

Google chief: Only miscreants worry about net privacy

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Big Brother

Who is your Gauleiter (Gooleiter) now?

"It's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities"

He's right. And Google can't tell you if they get an invitation by FBI to do so.

Obama and Schmidt --- same powergrab.

No more UFO reports please, says MoD

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Pint

We don't comment and even if we have to, we leaft doubt.

"The MOD has no opinion on the existence or otherwise of extra-terrestrial life. However, in over fifty years, no UFO report has revealed any evidence of a potential threat to the United Kingdom."

Talk about a non-denial denial. Get Fox Mulder on the horn!

That rushing sound you hear are Alpha-Level sentient von Neumann machines visiting through GCHQ's "donut" blueside portal. Prepare to be rightsized.

Hacker scalps NASA-run websites

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Flame

HAH!

Looking forward to a dump of e-mail messages saying that telemetry from Apollo et al. is "dodgy" and needs "fixing". Then all the deniers can come together under the same banner.

Lots of young adults still sexting shock

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Big Brother

"long-term risks of naked photographs"

Are they using radioactive emulsion or something?

Big Brother because .... beware of accidentally child-porning yourself.

'Doctor Dark Energy': The Ultimate LHC eccentric?

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Gates Horns

It's a sad miss then that the Higgs hasn't been named the "Christ Particle"...

...but of course the Higgs being its own antiparticle, this idea falls flat.

I also see that Mr. Gorelik, is a hollow-earth proponent. I would probably pay for a movie in case he had scripted a good part of it and added some String Scientists of Renown. Should be more entertaining than Dan Brown stuff.

Pig plague alert: Avoid missionary position

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Headmaster

In b4 antivaxers...

I'm sure this is only going to remotely work if you wear armour, too. Additionally, it is NOT fun doing it with 38.7 and a tremendous headache. Any MD wanna comment?

Cell phones don't fry brains, boffins say

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Headmaster

"The study doesn’t answer the question of what happens after 50 years."

PHONES CAUSE ALZHEIMER! PEOPLE OF 80 AND OVER FACE HIGH RISK AFTER DECADES OF EXPOSURE! We will interview Neurotic Lady after this message....

MS honeypot research sheds light on brute-force hacks

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Go

No title is required

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Read number of characters to output from command line

$num = $ARGV[0]*1;

@chars = qw(0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z);

# We select chars from "@chars", thus one selection corresponds to:

{

my $bits = log(@chars)/log(2)*$num;

my $byte = $bits/8;

print "Outputting $num chars, which corresponds to $byte byte\n";

}

# Open /dev/random and read stuff

open(RAND,"</dev/random") or die "Could not open /dev/random for reading: $!";

$max = @chars;

{

use bytes;

for ($i=0;$i<$num;) {

my $read = sysread(RAND,$raw,1);

if ($read != 1) {

die "Got stop\n"

}

else {

$x = ord($raw);

if (0<=$x && $x<$max) {

print "$chars[$x]";

$i++;

}

}

}

}

print "\n";

Nokia sues LCD makers over price-fixing

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Unhappy

Yeah well...

....can I get back part of the money I paid Nokia for the mobile which must have included the price for the apparently overly expensive LCD?

Cartoon smut law to make life sucky for Olympic organisers

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Thumb Up

Hmmm... thoughtcrime .... children....

A cake so appealing that few lawmakers have the mental ability to resist. I doubt whether any consequences will come out of really shite and sinfully expensive official rorschach blobs for chest-beating "panis et circenses" programs that a nearly bankrupt government can ill afford. Laws apply to YOU.

Now excuse me while I fap to anime porn while I still can.

That hand logo should do.

McKinnon family 'devastated' by Home Sec's latest knock-back

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Big Brother

Come on Gary...

Don't be a spoilsport and accept extradition to a country that is kind enough to maybe offer free tours [even if your underage!] of Syrian basements with some electric fun play, luxurious 8-year-long stays in cuban isolation cells complete with daily beatings, interrogation by american prison goons with full-fat Nazi attitudes like in the movies, persistent legal limbo and to top it all off, a show trial in front of an indoctrinated jury that would make Stalin smile.

It's only for your politicians' good. You wouldn't want to make them feel HURT, now, would you?

IBM shows off Power7 HPC monster

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Terminator

Wrong question....

"but will it run Cat Brain" is the correct one

McNealy's inflatable 'blimp' pleasure-dome angers neighbours

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Welcome

Excited cries echoing across the "forested, typically serene neighbourhood"

"Yes, Legolas... YES!"

Now picturing McNealy in an elf costume....

I really have to get my mind out of the gutter.

9/11 pager messages released on Wikileaks

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Grenade

In b4 climate change deniers...

...or 9/11 truthers.

But seriously, did telecoms srub their disks to get all the pager messages back or did the NSA shark the aether even then? It may be a good thing that telecom snoop immunity is retroactive.

US senators tell EC: Butt out of Oracle-Sun

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Grenade

Better to build some concrete walls around the US embassies...

...otherwise a "popular revolution" might emerge from them next.

"Oracle + Xe do Europe." Something different than South American ultrakill for sure.

UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files

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Troll

Citizen, you are lawfully encouraged to board this train to Auschwitz

With various people evidently fully in accord with the hallowed principles of "nanograms of RDX means we have to protect the children", "if it's the law, there must be a good reason for it" and "all suspects are guilty otherwise they wouldn't be suspects", I do wonder whether State Spin Control has managed to detect this forum.

Record company exec cuffed for failure to twitter

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Flame

Boffins create electromagnetic black hole in lab!

Cops create common sense black hole between ears!

IE bug leaks private details from 50m PDF files

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Flame

"We can confirm that this is not a vulnerability"

OKAY!

O/S bloat: What's the cure?

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Paris Hilton

So the wheel turns...

...and we are back to somewhat shinier and more isolated versions of chrooted processes (possibly sandboxed virtual machines or something...).

It's like showbiz.

Murdoch puffs Microsoft over Google

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Pint

And nothing of value was lost

Nyar nyar nyar.

Apple voids warranties over cigarette smoke, users say

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Troll

People want to save Chinese living in industrial waste but it's ok to smoke, right?

"The anti-smoking types are a bunch of overly smug, self satisfied, pompous, sad little fucktards with their heads so far up their arses that they can see their own teeth and absolutely no life whatsoever."

Wheezing troll detected.

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Thumb Up

Nicotine is a contact poison...

....i.e. it goes through your skin. That is why nicotine patches exist.

In other words, if you repair a smoker's machine, ffs. wear gloves and don't cut yourself on the heat sink. Apple can refuse to touch this crud in the same way as it can refuse a machine liberally sprinkled with arsenic, americium or dioxine. Even the most libertarian customer should be able to agree with THAT.

>>Err, excuse me, but aren't hard drives hermeticaclly sealed? How could a hard drive clog up due to cigarette smoke?

No they are not. There is a breathing hole in the cover. Now, we need some photos, if need be, using a microsope...

Check these out, searching for "smoke":

http://www.thecomputerwizard.biz/photos.htm

Triumph in Geneva! LHC beams up and running again

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Boffin

Re: Re collisions in space probability

"I don't pretend to know the physics, but regarding this question about direct collisions in space happening and us not getting big bangs."

Yes, but consider: we know that White Dwarfs and Neutron Stars exist. These balls of compressed matter absorb cosmic rays; if anything untoward would happen with reasonable probability, these stellar objects would quickly transform into Strange Stars or Black Holes, the more so as a microscopic Black Hole would have a hard time _not_ finding material in its immediate vicinity to hoover up; it could not traverse the star like a bird traverses a cloud. This is not being observed.

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Big Brother

"Weir activated the drive. He's sending us to the Other Place."

"This could end up opening a portal to a new dimension, allowing beings through that mortals were not meant to meet. Yog Soggoth, Cthulu, formless Tsathoggua and the worse than formless star spawn associated with that semientity."

Sorry, these entities are already in Parliaments, Senates, ministerial pigpens and Prime Minister Control Seats. It's too late.

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Pint

I want pictures of Alyx Vance ... no, NOT Ashlee Vance!

"Just like stuff in the LHC cosmic rays are particles that travel close to the speed of light. But cosmic ray head to head collisions are extremely rare. I question the reassurances."

You might then want to peruse this: http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3381 No, I don't understand the math either.

Note that cosmic rays may have far more energy than particles found in the LHC beam pipe and that "black holes in LHC" (N.B: non-stable ones; to all intent and purposes, it's just short-lived particles at that point) comes from people looking for extra dimensions to stuff stringy branes into, which sounds just slightly more plausible than purple cotton elephants dancing on your front porch when your are not looking.

But it's fun speculating: http://www-atlas.lbl.gov/physics/Sven_Black_Holes_with_ATLAS.ppt

"And whats all this about getting no radiation from a black hole when there are many beautiful pictures of great arcs of colour that are explained as X-rays from a black hole causing fluorescence"

That's not Hawking Radiation. That is radiation and accelerated stuff coming from the black hole's accretion disk, i.e. matter being seriously compressed until it squeaks. Only black holes of very small mass (primordial Black Holes evaporating to nothing in front of the camera right about now) yield a detectable gamma-ray burst of known signature. None seen so far.

But it's PUB CONTINUATION TIME now!

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Dead Vulture

Just No!

"producing sub-subatomic particulate prangs of such violence as to mangle the very fabric of time and space"

NO!

Fail by a dozen orders of magnitude. Planck scale is that way ---------------->

We think.

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FAIL

@luis sancho

"Fermi was launched to detect radiating black holes in the cosmos, but it failed to find any. "

FRACK NO!

Hawking Radiation cannot be detected from here.

"manufacturing superfluid condensates, similar to those CERN will make with quark"

HOLY FRACK NO! FAIL FAIL FAIL!

Where do people _get_ those things? Drawing all day long on a hookah filled with heavy Afghan Resin while listening to Half Life's Professor Kleiner's explanations about bouncing people off Xen while watching BBC Science Program just CANNOT BE sufficient.

US forces developing 'miniature weapons' for killer robots

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Flame

I don't know why people are complaining...

...about the constitution being used as toilet paper but have no problem cracking one off about newfangled COIN insurgency toolups.

To make my position 100% clear: These things won't only be used to blow Ahmed's and his Panzerfaust donkey's ass to smithereens. They will be used to plaster your innards against the living room ceiling and open your kid's braincases.

Enjoy your regime change.

US monster-truck roboguns to blast enemies autonomously

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Grenade

"While simultaneously shooting rockets out of the air"

Am I the only one who speed-read this as "ass"?

Apart from that, the soldiers in those machines won't stay battle-ready for long. After a few rounds they will be donut-munching rear-echelon mofos or reservist lowlifers.

Fedora 12 - it's a horse, not a camel

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Thumb Up

Torrenting now

...that is all

Arkansas cop tasers 10-year-old girl

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Flame

Some parents just shouldn't do parenting

DON'T TELL THE POLICE TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR FAMILY PROBLEMS! They are not there for that and you might well get recycled Iraq veterans in blue for visitors.

Daughter/Granny/Gramps might well end up with a couple of caps in the arse / in custody in the same room with Bubba Violent / in excited delirium and coroner material after a light tasering.

US data firm blows s**t out of server

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Grenade

There goes the Zion mainframe

They are working without earplugs and backstop?

Badass.

IBM lab builds computerized cat brain

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Terminator

Ok, so where is PETA?

Apart from the fact that we all know where those "cat brains" are gonna end up (Pretador E drones and the "Schrödinger" mimetic ground-based killbots), the full simulation of a cat brain _is_ fully equivalent to a real cat brain (behind-the-curve weirdos clutching at Descartian straws like Searle, Penrose and Dreyfus notwithstanding). A cat brain in a vat that is. That simulated cat brain must not be too happy to be a disembodied piece of neural activity; that's worse than buried alive. I predict protests by irate animal liberation outfits any moment now.

LHC starts beaming Saturday: Collisions Dec 3

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Coffee/keyboard

This phrase needs completion...

I think they should wait until 2012 to fire the beams together, and then get Obama there to push the button, along with contingencies from the WHO and UN while people are queuing up to get vaccinated against avian flu.

New Zealand rated least corrupt country

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Headmaster

I heard Gordon Brown is optimistic...

...that waggling the headmaster's finger at the second-in-league will make him mend his ways.

"You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddy!"

Hacktivists ransack Hitler defender's email

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Grenade

Hurr!! Durrr!!!!

Political Vigilantes.

Thanks for reminding me why I don't like them. They are the same without fail, from whatever side they come.

Appeal Court: Mod chips infringe game copyright after all

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FAIL

"Mod chips are created to allow breach of copyright. End of story."

And this is bad how?

Apart from the fact that it breaches some arbitrary law from a state criminal enough to be rogered by various lobbies.

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Headmaster

More Jesuitism...

...from the school of "I want to sell it to you .... but not really. Sign over your sould and future behaviour first.".

Thinking about the semantics of the pause button FFS.

IGF censors for China

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Boffin

fete de complete?

Did you main "fait accompli"?

Goggles icon, evidently.

US boffins build, test working 2-qubit quantum processor

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Boffin

"But the qubit system can solve exponentially complex problems"

No. The complexity class you are referring to is Bounded-Error Quantum Polynomial-Time (BQP). This complexity class is a letdown as it is only somewhat more powerful than P:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP

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Boffin

Nice. But what does "programmable" man...

...as this is the most analog computer possible - there are no possible discontinuities and everything is smooth, linear transformations.

"a qubit can be 1, 0 or some of both just as a metaphorical cat in a box may be dead, alive or in a mysterious semi-undead waveform zombie condition."

You are looking for the word "Bloch Sphere": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere