Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Hardcore Stalinism

...is always welcome, if cloaked in the zit-eaten fur of "reasonable regulation".

It gives the Security State money and gives Old Ladies the heart-warming feeling that Something is being Done.

Kaspy just made my shit list.

"The AE-35 unit is going to go 100 percent failure within 72 hours"

"When we have all this configuration data we are going to data mine that database. We haven't got enough information to diagnose the problem...if we are allowed to collect that data we can examine it."

So this will be AI-augmented autodiagnostic, right? If the customer actually needs this he doesn't know how his systems work or what's in there in the first place. Maybe he should invest in de-byzantination first. The disbelief in magic is pervasive.

"and could prove that you'd been unaware"

That's the difficult part, right? You can't prove a negative. Prove that you are not a terrorist, paedophile, jew, wifebeater, etc., etc.

I didn't even know such injunctions were possible in the first place. Is that a remainder of Oliver Cromwell et al. ?

A British version of Sibel Edmonds?

More like this please. People like that seem to be the last bulwark of freedom, democracy and all that.

The early Universe...

...was hotter than the Sun at EVERY SINGLE POINT.

So it's probably not that terrible to unleash global nuclear war. If the Universe survived that, we will. I'm also concerned that the models used by the anti-nuclear believers are demonstrably wrong. There are dozens of more pressing problems that humanity has to solve than an almost imperceptible increase in background radiation. And building nukes by deficit spending will kickstart the economy something fierce, I can tell you. GO FOR IT.

"The community would simply fork because the project is licensed under the GPL"

Well, I don't know. There is this self-contradictory "dual licensing" scheme of MySQL whereby you are not supposed to use the GPL-ed version but the paid-for version in case of certain usage patterns (thus evidently contradicting what the license of the GPL-ed version says). Will lawyers have a field day?

Where's the "welcome your lawyer" icon?

Swedish? Say no more!

I would indeed like to see a well-reasoned explanation for why he can't work as a cashier. Would it have been okay if he had worked in a liquor shop? How about a gun shop? Additionally, how exactly did bossman "stumble" upon this discovery?

@AC 14:12 GMT

"As in temporary unpaid work with emphasis on on-the-job training."

Let me guess - you are probably a defender of the minimum wage, too?

With all the authority of the Interwebs

"The dollar was actually invented by the Aztec"

LOLWUT.

"Penny was first coined (excuse the pun) in 1136 in a small town near naples"

Because "penny" rolls off the tongue in Italian.

"... and now back to the story..."

Yes. PLEASE.

How lucky do you feel?

"get a grip... You don't know how lucky you are......"

Nice. That argument can be applied all the way to the "psychiatric rehabilitation" center in the bowels of the Ministry of Love.

I he has a Death Squad

...then he has safe houses and various minions to call upon in time of need. Getting Bin Laden must be easier.

Doubleplusungood usage of "truthiness"

The correct word to use would be the standard "truthfulness"

As the Urban Dictionary states:

truthiness:

"The quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts."

Origin: Stephen Colbert, "The Colbert Report," 2005

The quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.

Origin: Stephen Colbert, "The Colbert Report," 2005

"And that brings us to tonight's word: truthiness.

"Now I'm sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster's, are gonna say, 'Hey, that's not a word.' Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that's my right. I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart."

Ooohhhh

Lawyers invoke State-enforced monopolies to disallow access to State-held information that was created with State-extorted money in the first place?

When is the Gentlemen of Fortune Party coming to the UK?

@Adrian Challinor: No U!

"Maybe the dog just likes the taste of aging Commies"

Maybe you should learn that Boum Boum Chirac is hardcore statist, but not "commie". You <Insert 3-letter american word designating cigarettes in countries that are not like Upper Volta with nukes>!

Ballmer a chrome-dome?

He's a Cylon? I KNEW it!

Windows for Battlestars will be the end of it all.

Leading US experts agree that they should be rightsized

"The UK government already has a "considerable" number of attackers and defenders that make it a "major world power" in cyberwarfare, according to a leading US expert."

All right.

So when's the cyber-warfare equivalent of the Suez Canal "last imperial gasp for the UK" going to happen?

"the ultimate commodification of women"

What does that even mean? That they get comfortable on a couch?

Ohn "short selling" is "fraud" now, is it?

Hell no. It's called "estimating the likelihood of the company going titsup", then acting on that estimation. Anyone who wants to "ban this forever" should maybe learn what speculation is all about, (Or be consistent and ban "long selling" too).

Apparently, said estimation was pretty correct, too.

If the share price on the open market goes down a notch or two, this should have _no impact_ on ongoing business.

A different kind of Shawshank redemption

Now we just need to add Mr Bean and a laugh track.

That's pretty cool (oh my god, a pun...)

...but I suspect the first use will be running uploaded cat's brains controlling Predator Drones to blow away fleshy enemies of democracy and freedom fries. Oh well. We do what we must because we can.

It took me fully 20 seconds...

....staring in incomprehension at the screen until I got the joke.

AM I GETTING OLD? AM I??

And the key is not even "stolen"...

Just post it under the header of "this is is the factorization of X" on a blog and stick it to the Texas Retards.

A new kind of "hire and fire"

Yeah, this is excellent.

Then we can blow away all the terrorists that are actually the same as the policemen we just trained.

I can't wait for this Long War faggotry-cum-pork-dispenser to end.

It's State-enforced monopolies

...that cause this kind of discussions. Can't compete? Get a patent. Then try to "monetize" it. If this means harm and destruction to a large part of the marketplace while lawyers are being fattened and the actual innovation goes down the toilet, so be it.

Finally...

A new kind of lolcat!

Well, I'm happy that I don't watch these ADHD-inducing things...

I suspect the FCC, controller of naughty words, will now ask for some monies?

Wait until...

...the constitution-defending anti-dildo officials of Alabama hear about this.

The DHS actually doing something for once?

"Our engineers are working on a self-limiting, high-temperature superconductor technology which would stop and prevent power surges generated anywhere in the system from spreading to other substations."

The DHS has engineers? Working on fancy technology?? No doubt in an underground basis in Antarctica. And here I was thinking of them as time-serving paperpushers. Nice.

Ok, so what about doing correct design IN THE FIRST PLACE. Give this to the private sector, tell them to clean the sh*t up and throw out all the California "cancerigenic high-power-lines" NIMBYs.

Analysis of power grids goes back to Vannevar Bush for God's sake, there is nothing magic about it.

"Being the target of American propaganda is as threatening as being savaged by a lamb."

Tell that to the people who were first targeted by propaganda, then by death squads coached/financed from within various US embassies. Ah yes, Reagan was a Great Communicator.

Nice lamb. Wait.. is there a wolf underneath??

Nobody cares...

...except hypochondriacs and crystal-toting people afraid of the "electromagnetic waves" (hurr!).

After a lifetime spent in the industrially hazardous environment that is the city & workplace and having partaken of the fat-accumulating-chemicals bandwagon of the foodchain, I'm just worried that my cancer will be a long, lingering one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah...

That Higher Authority sounds like a perfect dumping ground for worthy individuals that need to get a sinecure job until retirement. With a pay rise of course.

So, any counterbalancing discussion of limiting copyright statutes? Didn't think so.

The puzzling logic of puzzled politicians

The PM claimed that "as a result of taking action I can tell you over 200,000 businesses employing hundreds of thousands of people have been able to keep people in work". He promised £5bn in spending on jobs.

...These five billion coming from taxation, which is money not going into investment, i.e. durable job creation.

What do you, he just PRINTS them?

Polly Toynbee at the Graun thinks different

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/14/vetting-child-protection-baby-p

"It's more fun to have a good populist rant about the death of childhood, the evils of the nanny state and the infringement of civil liberties. Commentators bask in a glowing light as protectors of eternal freedom from officialdom for parents and children. Frankly, it's a bit boring to say this is a matter of good administration. Registering will be a minor nuisance to many people, but it's not a milestone on the road to dictatorship."

Hurr Durr! So be good citizens and register. Welcome to City 17. It is safe here.

Ok, so how are they going to check...

...those time-limit clauses in the EULAs?

Send over the BSA for a quick look or something?

"Yes, we keep track of all our VM shifts on the dossiers kept in this big safe. If you would like to enter and take a look..."

I'm sure the flyboy...

...will now be named "Husker". That's gotta hurt.

By that standard, I should own a good part of lower Manhattan

"display a month's calendar as a grid and then translate the date into an appointment date form"

358 million dollar? Shifted the decimal point by 8 order of magnitude, right?

The strange, unsubstantiated comment begins earlier...

Right here:

"without patent protection, the incentives to innovate in the field of software are significantly reduced"

If that were true, there would have been significantly reduced innovation in software before 1994 and most innovations afterwards would be accompanied by a few patents. Riiight.

What??

"support for custom-XML constituted 90 per cent of the value to using XML and that custom-XML was 'the most important effort [it] did on XML in Office since ever"

What the hell are they talking about?

If i4i can be destroyed if someone else does its frankly-not-patentable idea, they have had a problem from the get-go. Cry me a river.

Required by law?

Private companies are required by law to enter detailed employee information into some weirdo carpool system operated by a Quango??

The California Socialist Collective is at it again (in spite of being bankrupt).

Well, well, well, well...

We know the perception that Microsoft wants to create regarding Linux.

What we also want to know is the perception regarding Mac. A depliant about this meant for professional salespeople MUST exist. Oh wait, you mean they have lawyers on call?

Windows has its advantages. Where do you get treated to an arcade game of "you may be in trouble/upgrade now/download XYZ/consider upgrading for a fee/agree to this-and-that EULA" popups and sundry retarded and mutually inconsistent dialog boxes for hours on end _for free_ the first time you switch on a newly bought machine?

...And then you still get to install Vista SP2 manually. The win cannot be topped.

Microsoft - about as ethical as a guy testing spells from the Necronomicon.

Apart from that

"The cost to defend a patent action ranges from $3.5 to $5bn"

wouldn't that be "millions"? Or are banks now owned by "Intellectual Property" lawyers?

"respecting copyright rules to ensure fair remuneration for authors"

Good idea. What about non-renewable five years and that's it?

What's that? The copyright holder hasn't gotten enough remuneration after five years? He wasn't paid up-front by a publisher for his work in the first place? He needs a license to print money, moving the externalities of enforcement and endless media control off to the taxpayer? Great idea, I'm sure.

"billions of pounds worth of economic losses and thousands of jobs lost annually"

Well, the converse of the statement is that there are billions of pounds worth spent on consumer goods other than plastic discs, or god forbid, actually saved, possibly creating thousands of jobs for Blight annually-

PIRACY MAY ACTUALLY BE GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY!

For God's sake, stop writing from the Reg's favorite pub!

I can't disagree with the articles's contents, but the article needs some editorial eyeballing:

"If they don't do that, they are throwing away AND opportunity."

"The meeting - and the statement - are BOTHER under a non-disclosure agreement "

"despite Sun OPEN-SOURCE Java a few years back "

"designed by committee rather THEN OF BEING genuine use "

"the process that BREAD it"

"the inclusion of new and untested features that risked introducing BREAKING CHANGES"

Doesn't this fall under some "extreme porn" law?

...just wondering...

Is Europe not enough client state for the US?

Please, DO let's have more rift before we get dragged in wars against Iran and for Georgia.

Give it to Israel to produce Tools for Fags (tm)

"Scratch one tank, pickup truck, building or whatever."

"Whatever" including:

Wedding parties, UN compounds, non-US embassies, hospitals, goat herders with goats, schools, areas marked for settlement, village elder meetings and housing blocks around which a turbaned figure giving matching criterium > 0.90 was detected.

Great job.

Not a first

Georg Adamski had been on Venus a long time ago.