Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Hadoop?!?!

No, my coffee!!

But it's not about the sex scene at all...

It's just about shooting some dough out the door to make shareholders classactioning the company go away, yo!

Ok ... shareholders classactioning the company ... can it get any more retarded? That's like asking for some money at shareholder meeting at gunpoint. Including from yourself. Nice doing, shouldn't such behaviour be criminalized?

"served as a platform for politicians like Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman"

More like, gave the usual populist sociopaths a platform to push their rancid faces into the news, right?

By all means...

....finally there are countries where you can tell people to go if one of their most repeated sentences is "...degrading to women..."

The solution is...

...don't start tallying until the polling stations have closed.

But that would be too hard on the politicians, right?

What I would like to see...

....is plug-in replacement for the archretarded 220V per-server downtransformers, with the replacement feeding off an externally-provided 24V DC feed. That would be win.

Probably someone who has a patent on that though.

That's hardcore!

Hell, I will drink a few on that...

When I go, I hope I will take a few on my enemies' list with me though.

5,56 x 45 mm NATO vs. your battery

"lightning blasters so portable and powerful that they would supersede conventional small arms"

Really?

Punch through a kevlar vest and rip out a liver with one of these, marketing guy?

"We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it."

Absolutly agree. Those jerks doing everything at once do nothing well. Well, that's the Attention-Deficit-Disorder generation for you. Of course, it's shamelessly encouraged by management - "in these days & times you must be able to do several things at once". Yes, like the human cognitive apparatus suddenly grew additional processors in the last 20 years.

As for those who think they actually _can_ do it -- they may want to read a few studies about how self-assessment can be totally off.

FAIL!

Just fail. I actually found it hard to follow the upgrade maze logic. Are they doing lab rat tests on the Windows population to see who keeps following?

Quacks

So the secret sauce of blot tests has been internetized? Though luck. I always like it how "the mind" is considered "ach so complicated" but when it gets to analysis it's suddenly somehow relevant how noise pushed through the visual cortex is interpreted.

@Far Right?

"If you read their manifesto, it looks more like left wing socialism, without the international bit."

You may want to start reading here:

http://books.google.lu/books?id=eTve6XEUbYIC&pg=PA171&lpg=PP1&dq=hayek+road+to+serfdom#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Facepalm

"The RAF makes no secret of its desire to fit the Eurofighter out with homing anti-tank weapons and standoff cruise missiles, allowing it to attack enemy armoured formations on the move, and targets protected by tough air defences."

*Who exactly* still has "armoured formations on the move" twenty years after Desert Storm 1?

Would the enlightened planners maybe foresee "reverse Kosovo", with NATO fighting the Russian Bear down to the last Georgian to de-independentize a few regions or something? Looking for enemies to justify one's paycheck, indeed.

WHAT! No Michael Crichton?

How is that even possible?

Why not take over management of Obamacare while they are it?

So amazon is now also the policeman for Sony, taking it upon itself to piss of its customers for a company for which it does reselling? "Account closure", indeed.

I suspect these "shortages" are a marketing gimmick anyway. Sony will be happy to shift all the boxes it can get, why should anyone care if somebody buys a cartload in the hope of reselling them? Unless Bin Laden kills key personnel of Sony, shortages won't last, the price will drop etc..

A Presidential Pardon has been granted...

...to the software agent that leaked confidential information into a footer of an e-mail sent to the New York Times, giving that paper information that was later used to discredit vocal opponents of the Unitary Presidential Decision to do a nuclear attack on Upper Volta in order to reduce local terrorist influence.

Film at 11 - after this message.

Reprocess the people...

Well, apparently the original article comes from New Scientist, where Alcubierre Drives, Computing beyond the "Turing Barrier" and Space Lifts are always considered a possibly once a few details are resolved.

@adnim

"Anyone want my IP address? It is either full stealth or exposes my honeypot."

Yes, please DO keep working on your security expert credentials. So when is school starting again?

Finally, the real Chair Force uncloaks

>> Anyone ever read Tom Clancy's NETFORCE novels?

I'm avoiding Tom Clancy's fairy world like Disneyworld.

But does the movie have any redeeming feature?

Like a cameo appearance by David Carradine or something.

Definitely not on my to-watch list. Tarantino is already sickening enough for me.

80 million USD? Small fish, really.

>>Citibank promptly mailed her a card with a $25,000 limit.

Nice. They must be desperate to get something back onto their balance sheet. Maybe Citibank should be investigated for reckless behaviour.

Why does that zombie bank still exist anyway, last time I checked they had just blown 10 *BILLION* USD because their MBAs and sundry retards couldn't properly manage the housing bubble money.

@Russian Aicraft carrier

Well, according to the linked Wikipedia article, the Admiral Kuznetsov was being overhauled at the time.

I have never heard of any "aircraft carrier" in operation in the Georgian war. Countries other than the US need less "aircraft carriers" because their targets happen not to be half a world away. And the Russians are not so hot on carriers to begin with; they regard them as sitting ducks in any serious conflict.

Don't muddy the waters

>>Belgian fighter jockeys tried to tackle some UFOs using F-16s

So what's it now? Looneys from the chair force or something in the air for real?

100 billion USD?

What do they think they are - a bank?

Hey, I want to see nuclear-powered fast robots zooming through the solar system with delta-vee to spare and more sensors onboard than a matrixian sentinel. I would say that fits comfortably well within the 80 billion USD - if the manned spaceflight pipedream is dropped and the money is spent fast, fast, fast, i.e. before hyperinflation takes off.

So what about just trying to overturn the patent?

But maybe that is not a possible avenue to explore, as today just managing to find your own arse in a dark room is considered the mark of the American Genius.

"a patent relating to XML custom formatting"

Yes.

I'm probably infringing it.

See me not care.

Well that's only marginally useful....

...I hear that in California, sex offenders may not stay for more than K hours within X miles of a school. I don't know the exact values for (K, X) but I hear that there are a few moving around in home trailers as a result. So this utter retardedness made software is even less useful.

Decline and fall.

Yes, of course. Copyright on court filings. Why not.

Ok, it won't be long until the first patent on some legal defense or attack is being issued.

They are waiting for you, Gordon... in the TEST CHAMBER

Not exactly an NP hard crack, but still useful.

Obvious, no significant advancement of state of the art,...

...and prior art exist with certainty approaching 1 (what was SGML for already? oh, and we have had TeX for, like, forever..)

Ok, what actually _does_ one have to do to USPTO employees to make them stop their neverending stream of totally wortheless patent grants?

New offices in Guantanamo? Schooling in Zimbabwe? Crowbars to their heads? Bullets? Zyklon B??

"Why weren't the passwords changed no more then 5 minutes after his employment ended?"

Read again - it's a charity, not Black Mesa Research Facilities.

The Vampire Economy

>>It's obscene that some companies are offered "incentives" while local businessmen can't enjoy those same low tax rates. Fundamental fairness says the tax rate should be equitable across the board.

Not to mention that LOWER taxes for company A of course mean HIGHER taxes for company B in the long run.

HAHAHA!

Seems like our smalltime Europe-based company has had prior art on this since around at least 2002. Guess the big animals will have even more prior art on this. We may still have the source on this in subversion. Should I give Twitter a call?

@XML bites

Just through computer programming 101, right?

"In the rush to meet deadlines and avoid compatibility problems, most coders ignore the issues."

Yeah, see, that's why we have libraries. If you use libraries instead of hand coded XML parsers, all these problems go away.

Yeah Right 2

"We are already seeing initial anecdotal evidence that people are using 'Bing' as a verb."

We are also seeing green shoots of recovery. The Jury is still out on whether these are not just the next bubble fattening up while everything else goes down the toilet. It's all about interpretation.

In the Real World, using bing leaves one with the hope that it's still currently indexing stuff.

Reg logo because of the green shoots.

So there are "orphans" for which *someone* *may* still claim copyright?

And that is a problem?

This is retarded. Just limit the copyright statutes so that the potential right owners do not get so old that they forget that they own the right to said book in the first place. Like to 25 years from first publication date. No "orphans".

Yeah, yeah the author's rights must be *respected* and whatnot (heartstring ping). Guess what? The rights are not with the authors but with the publishing house, in general.

Why does she sue? She will lose even more money!

...but why let a supersized sense of entitlement get in the way of burning sparse money reserves? Yeah, you could but some books and get into that lifelong learning business instead. Nah.

Reminds me of that guy at my place who was just good enough to generate garishly colored Excel pie charts complaining about his hard time getting a job and his upcoming re-liberation into the labour marketplace. He had the brilliant idea that State should take it on itself to guarantee a job for every dude with an "engineering degree". Why, sure.

"Elderly, benign cripple arrested"?

Weak. I would go down as "Mad Scientist, did horrible experiments on captured politicians, irresponsible civil servants and crooked lawyers in his underground lab."

MALAYSIA STRONG!

Why did I say that? I dunno.

I bet Cylons will be involved

No really, the interior of a basestar is a dead ringer for the original Alien egg storage area. And then, what's a Raider except Alien in metal and without the roving light, right?

That would be fun, but would I watch it? Probably not.

That will pay for a lot of top execs' coke...

You download 30 tracks, then gotta pay $22,500 for each?

How is that justified? Even an upmark of 100% would still mean a $30 fine.

Also, this guy must plan on becoming Congressman or something, coz it's not with a honest salary that you can pay that kind of fine.

Half the Number of the Beast in Euro!

"$299.99 for a brand-new version of Windows 7 Professional."

This translates to € 309,90 (incl. 19% VAT) for a brand-new version of Windows 7 Professional E (whatever that is) on my preferred Internet shop. This means that local retail will have a 10% markup on top of that.

Uh ... no thanks.

When Windows is available for € 30 for a full version, a reduction by an order of magnitude in price, then we will be talking. Hey, an OS is supposed to be a commodity these days, right?

Meanwhile, Windows 2K and Linux is the ticket.

There is something that ails Linux?

"Pick one distro [I guess Ubuntu, probably running on Mac hardware] and drop the others before it's too late."

Note that since the last bubble burst about nine years ago, Linux has just chugged quietly along like a somewhat rickety steam locomotive with a few hundred polished bells and whistles and too many logos on the cab side. It worked so far, do people really need to change the approach and opt for a centralized Microsoft model with a master helmsman laying out five-year plans?

Hell no.

It wouldn't be possible.

And why should stagnation be a good idea?

Well, in our times, if we lost a book...

...we bought a new copy and re-read it and re-made the annotations.

Nevertheless, if this smacks of ambulance-chasing lawyers instrumenting the not-well-accustomed-to-serious-work youth of today, such a lawsuit can only be welcomed. I hope certain memes will be expunged from the minds of certain actors in the electronic text book market before Richard Stallman's "Right to Read" becomes reality.

But why have CentOS?

...just to save the yearly maintenance fee to Red Hat?

No, really, I want to know.

@John Dee

Wow man, my coffee.

Seriously, OF COURSE stuff out there is Internet-facing these days. It's just too useful to use the open network, like using Social Security Numbers for unique id purposes.

To make stuff safe, we have VPNs, firewalls and "separate backends". Also, people who are knowledgeable in writing good code.

@boltar

No You!

"The extra ‘&’ character in the vulnerable code causes the code to write potentially untrusted data, of size cbSize, to the address of the pointer to the array, pbArray, rather than write the data into the array, and the pointer is on the stack. This is a stack-based buffer overrun vulnerability."

Yeah. It's like, why do I have to parse this kind of bullshit when I am not reading about FFT implementations for signal processors? Clearly there is something wrong with the way wrapped assembler code is used in 2010.

Ah, reminds me of the good old times...

...when connecting an _unlicensed_ modem (maxing out at 300 baud, natch) to the AT&T/Bell/PTT landline networks was considered with utmost horror and prohibited by law. After all, the whole switch building could have exploded or worse, a technician might had to be called out.

"The iPhone software is like Job's liver. It needs to be replaced."

It's raining Nannies

Does a sane world _really_ need politicians & career lawyers discussing software design and implementation and threatening to "step in" with some regulation?

If you want to be on the secure side, just don't use the damn thing, or find find an implementation on the (remaining) free market that is well-designed and fulfills your security evaluation criteria. How hard can it be?

"The file-sharing software industry has shown it is unwilling..."

There is a regulation-worthy "industry" in every nice, isn't there, Mr. I-make-work-for-myself?