* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Leaked paper suggests EM Drive tested by NASA actually works

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Headmaster

So these papers "leak"??

A tall order explaining how "energy" is transformed into *"momentum" while this particular way of Nature's working is not readily apparent all around us, or rips big holes of inconsistency into the fabric of logic itself.

Retiring IETF veteran warns: Stop adding so many damn protocols

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Re: He is right

WE NEED TO BUILD A WALL!

It's the same in the language area, really.

How many manhours and lives are currently burnt on the utterly unsecure and unmanageable WOMBAT and square wheel that is Node.js? We will be carrying the technical debt with us for decades.

Well, we do get flashy mobile-enabled websites with colorful hexagons (these are à la mode for some reason) which will be torn down tomorrow...

CERN also has a particle decelerator – and it’s trying to break physics

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Re: Day of the Acronyms

An ASS ACCUSER, professionally looking for sex scandals?

Hmmm....you might be on to something!

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Trollface

Re: Is it me, or?

"Of COURSE duck tape like the one we use on that device near the water cooler will survive a high-intensity neutron flux for a few hours... why do you ask?"

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Re: Why not Negative Mass

It is difficult to say what exactly a "negative mass" would be.

Possibly, when it comes into contact with normal mass, NOTHING remains (because negative mass implies negative energy, so you don't even get the angry photons of matter/antimatter encounters).

In Newtonian terms, one could make sense of the counterdirectional force vector, but in General Relativity, this is not so clear. Will geodesics through spacetime become hyperbolic?

Was IoT DDoS attack just a dry run for election day hijinks?

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IT Angle

Groan

What a concoction of half-baked rumormongering, "industry" soundbites and dark mutterings.

And then this:

While Trump has encouraged Russian hackers to attack government systems

No he didn't.

Can we now talk about Hillary Clinton's evident link to satanism? 665 Gbps? More like 666 Gbps!

Siri, clone yourself and dive into this Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone

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Paris Hilton

Hmm....

Wasn't Bixby that rather unhinged moustache-wearing charver friend of the main (H injecting) protagonist in "Trainspotting"?

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Holmes

Re: Siri, clone yourself and dive into this Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone

Ah! A Gentleman or Lady well versed in the classics! I daresay, a rare occurrence nowadays.

Browsers nix add-on after Web of Trust is caught selling users' browsing histories

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Paris Hilton

Re: Naming

> National Socialism

But this naming is actually correct!

It is german-nationalistic, plus a fascistic style of socialism. The state looks out for you, from gradle to grave. Not exactly defender of pre-Bismarckian german liberalism.

Yes, these would have had to sit on the left in the Reichstag. Unfortunately that side was occupied by the internationalists and people making eyes at Stalin, which was anathema.

We're going to have to start making changes or the adults will do it for us

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Devil

Hmmm...

Nothing that a little helping of "gun culture" cannot solve...

FBI drops bombshell, and investigation: Clinton still in the clear

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Windows

Re: The smell of Weimar

Black Churches are Parliament Buildings, now?

No, that show was 9/11. It's been some time.

History always repeats as farce. And Hillary is not Hitler but she will wreck things tremendously.

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Re: Job vacancy

> Only, the MSM will just sent it back marked "Not interested."

I am sure the international press will be glad to open the package.

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Thumb Down

Re: Hatch Act, politically motivated violation of.

Are you really suggesting it is "unseemly" for Obama to publicly support Clinton?

Yes I fscking do.

If Michelle O. cries before the mic that she is "shaken to her core" by Trump's boorish behaviour, that's ok. But Mister O. is jetting around on taxpayer dime and his job title commands that he stay a bit aloof.

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Re: Hatch Act, politically motivated violation of.

> Staggering abuse of power from a civil servant at such a sensitive time.

It's not like the President himself could be admired emitting recommendations as to his own successor.

Very unseemly.

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It was written by Pepe the Deplorable Frog!

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Big Brother

Re: Job vacancy

I think he has just sent the message that if that should happen, a fat,disagreeable infodump may hit the MSM.

The FBI is not Hoover's child for naught.

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Gimp

I'm feeling like Alex in "A Clockwork Orange"

I'm watching this election trainwreck while listening to Beethoven.

GARY JOHNSOOONNNNN!!

Teen in the dock on terror apologist charge for naming Wi-Fi network 'Daesh 21'

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Holmes

Re: Je suis Charlie

Well, the BDS movement has been declared "hate speech" in La France.

... so, um, err... YES!!!

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Re: Odd thing

> "those who sow dissention"

So, neocons?

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Go all Jeanne Darc on him and boute les anglais hors de France!

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Big Brother

If you have run out of things to do, go all Robespierre on SSIDs

If this is true, the European Court of Human Rights might have to say something about this.

If SSID naming is now considered "terrorism", then so will be farting in the street if one of the Pig Disgusting French Politicians is nearby, very soon.

(Of some interest: Why you might have heard some French politicians calling Isis 'Daesh')

Any questions? No, not you again at the back, please God no

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Re: Annoying questions

Send him to Stackoverflow!

(Where he will be told to use jQuery)

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Windows

Dat Shutterstock photo!

Classroom attendants are perfectly groomed (do they impose a mandatory coiffeur visit before the office entry turnstyle can be, er, turned?), youthful, somewhat smug, all the males metrosexual with a ridiculous early-21s-centuryt beard and clearly everyone genetically enhanced and purified.

Oh Brave New World!

I imagine the photo was taken just as a question was being asked about the historical significance of his fordship, Mustapha Mond.

Microsoft ends OEM sales of Windows 7 Pro and Windows 8.1

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Windows

Re: What Is Linux

So you are a leech on society who survives only because money printing (aka stealth wealth transfer) is in overdrive and who has no redeeming skills whatsoever?

My only satisfaction is that you will be left to fend for yourself in the wilderness where armed survivors from inner cities roam when the zombie apocalypse comes.

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Yes, but actually no.

Welcome to "digital"

Twitter trolls are destroying democracy, warn eggheads

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Mushroom

I hope nobody is paying for this "research"!

"On Twitter, candidates can listen to citizens' feedback directly, while they also have the opportunity to respond using a platform whose laconic conversational structure allows for short and concise messages that enable strategic ambiguity and reduce the danger of loss of content control. Interactive use has been shown to have benefits for both sides, with politicians standing to especially benefit by being generally seen more positively when they interact with the public than when they don't."

Is this some kind of Sokal-style hoax? Can ANYONE tell me what is being said here? How is Twitter a magic sauce for interacting with citizens? It's an utterly confusing sub-200 character messaging tool for the hyperactivity disorder generation (it may be useful to post one's score in some game or something or list the ingredients of the latest pizẑa one had, om nom nom!). If one wants to communicate one can actually take the time to write an argumentative piece. Possibly with diagrams, timelines, properly aligned links to further information etc. It helps to think things through. Moreover, the person the receiving end may also get a chance to find out that the position is not rational at all but just carried along by ideology, incomprehension of human action and "Hope!". Structured communication is important, especially in the age of new laws and directives based on stress-inducing medja output by reporters barely able to think, read or write but ready to suck up to persons of influence to become "insiders".

tl;dr for the citizen? Well, WE HAVE A PROBLEM. Maybe things should slow down, maybe a lot of crap should be thrown overboard, maybe one should stop pining for "democracy" and look into having a working "republic" (On this, Waking Up in Hillary Clinton’s America: Wall Street in the Saddle is a good read although the author totally doesn't understand the wreckage that Keynesian policies, so beloved by left and right alike, are the real problem), maybe a whole lot of civil servants and politicians should be thrown out into the cold world to fend for themselves, God knows the top-heavy system is just about to collapse in on itself.

Twitter is not for engaging the citizen, it's for virtue-signaling, posturing and publicly stating one's herd position: "Against Racism" / "Against Global Warming" / "Against Rape On Campus" / "Against BDS" / "For More Free Money" / "For Women's Rights in Lybia" / "Against Global Warming" / "X Lives Matter" / and similar bullshit.

Look out, SpaceX et al – China's Long March-5 rocket blasts off

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Ambitious China is Ambitious!

...but there is bound to be a few failures.

Accessories to crime: Facial recog defeated by wacky paper glasses

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Windows

Re: Pixels or Values?

It seems the pixel patterns just kick the neural network in exactly the right way (Fist of the North Star style -- Disclaimer: Extreme Violence) so that it ends up in another classification region with no particular reason instead of the correct region into which the other features of the image would lead it according to how it has been "trained". NNs are stupid like that.

See also Is AlphaGo Really Such a Big Deal? (formerly titled Why AlphaGo is Really Such a Big Deal), where we read (in the vicinity of the shaggy dog example image):

In actual fact, our existing understanding of neural networks is very poor in important ways. For example, a 2014 paper described certain “adversarial examples” which can be used to fool neural networks. The authors began their work with a neural network that was extremely good at recognizing images. It seemed like a classic triumph of using neural networks to capture pattern-recognition ability. But what they showed is that it’s possible to fool the network by changing images in tiny ways. For instance, with the images below, the network classified the image on the left correctly, but when researchers added to it the tiny perturbations seen in the center image, the network misclassified the apparently indistinguishable resulting image on the right.

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Windows

Re: The ugliest t-shirt in the world...

Woah I forgot all about that. Zero Histoy was an acceptably good read. 7 years ago, already.

A Google Shufty reveals Ugliest T-Shirt is now a designer thing

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Big Brother

Dystopian 70s == Pedestrian Tenners

We ARE in John Brunner's and J.G. Ballard's Worlds, and none of PKDs esoteric exit doors to another reality exist.

Completely tangentially, here is a pretty good review of "Elysium".

Maybe I will grab that movie off the 'Net.

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Windows

Re: If this ever becomes a "thing"

I'm not from America, but I do think that baggy pants do merit a good stop-and.frisk.

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Re: It's your civic duty.

Unfortunately this trick only works for the particular network trained by the researchers. Or does it?

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Alien

Re: Mr Potatohead

If humans have similar blind spots then .....

"Instructions for hiding in plain sight on Planet of the Simian Freakshow III"

(WARNING: only works in certain regions where we have engineered ingrained psychological responses, other regions remain problematic when using described procedure)

1) Print out the following frames to encircle you anterior and lateral eye sets

2) WEAR AT ALL TIMES

3) Inhabitants will mistake you for a what they call a "flaming drag queen" and behave nonchalantly

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Re: "ways to trick the system inconspicuously"

"Conspicious" is throwing a satchel charge into the elevator shaft of the datacenter where this runs.

James Dyson's new startup: A university for engineers that doesn't suck

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Thumb Down

Re: Sorry to be a doubter...

> the skills that employers want

Employers want skills that either don't exist, that they are unable and unwilling to pay for or that are too specialized to be taught at uni.

As an example, we are looking for "developers" that according to the "must have" feature list demands someone who has worked with practically everything since the eighties and who has more qualifications than his boss.

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Thumb Up

Re: It may not suck

I'm a fan of this idea!

New MH370 handshake and wing debris analysis suggests rapid descent

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Holmes

Re: Any change in policy?

Not much to do with cheapskateness than with long roll-out times for relevant standards and appropriately certified gear.

ACARS exists and has been used in this precise case. I understand the main unit was switched off (burnt out? sabotaged?). A secondary unit was on but was just doing "pings". These pings are the signals we are talking about here.

I am not sure whether ACARS would carry on-board GPS information but it definitely carries telemetry.

There is also FAMS which is coming online.

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Re: Conspiracy ..

Space Aliens!

More Undocumented Immigration

Those who believe in one theory usually believe in others. The theories typically view large organizations as tightly united in secret evil, as unitary globs of malevolence, a bit like the evil spirits of primitive societies, and able to keep dark secrets even though though large numbers, often of ordinary employees, would have to know of the plot. For example, one version of the attack on the Pentagon holds that a missile (type unspecified) was fired by a Navy ship (ship unspecified). This means that the entire crew, several hundred ordinary sailors–not CIA operatives or Thirty-Third Degree Masons–as well as higher-ups would quickly know that they had just blown up the Pentagon. Yet it never leaked out.

This is true of almost all conspiracy theories: We must regard substantial populations of unruly individuals, all thinking different things, liberals, conservatives, rebels, herd-followers, Christians, Jews, agnostics, atheists, moral, immoral, amoral, thoughtful, thoughtless, sophisticated, or rubes–as reliably being willing to hush up such things as mass murder. This is the stuff of dreams.

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Re: Conspiracy or Cover up

But the North Pole is a big hole into Inner Earth, how will you find anything there?

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Holmes

Re: No Soft Ditching

Actually an amazing streak of "luck" that the satellite handshake happened during the descent phase.

Oh no, what's that noise? Here come conspirationeers!

(Of course, I like a good conspiracy theory because let's face it - there are really are big, fat conspiracies. But they are hidden in plain sight and pulled off leisurly, not engineered by extreme cunning at enormous risk and with hundreds of people having to clam up.)

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Re: Sad part is

That would be "none"

DRAMA ON MARS: Curiosity bot fires laser at alien metal object

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Trollface

"As NASA warns rover's instruments are failing"

How convenient!

It's like we are in that Ridley Scott movie.

Dark matter? More like diet matter: Super-light axions may solve universe's mass riddle

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Dude!

The vacuum is basically a solid, layered material of various "fields" (in particular, the gravitational and electromagnetic fields), and a superconductor for the color force. On top of that it carries the stupendously large "quantum reality", at least at "small amount of bits". Ain't nothing fun about that.

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Re: another potentially stupid question

Actually it is expressed in eV/c² but the /c² is generally elided (and c chosen to be "1")

According to E = m * c² giving E and diving by c² yields the mass.

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Re: stupid question

That's a macro law, essentially saying that random walks are bound to end up in state spaces that are large rather than small (spontaneous disassembly is more likely than spontaneous assembly)

Here we are talking micro law: is the set of allowed subatomic interactions going forward the same as the set of allowed subatomic interactions going backward? Amazingly, it's "no". Amazingly, this "no" should occur more evidently than it does. Hence, Axions to bulldozer this particular problem.

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Angel

Re: stupid question

Frank Wilczek, who likes Axions, on Axions:

Time’s (Almost) Reversible Arrow

The laws of physics work both forward and backward in time. So why does time seem to move in only one direction? One potential answer may also reveal the secrets of the universe’s missing mass.

The though occurs that with that kind of mass, axion particles are REALLY hard to localize, slipping away under the Heisenberg uncertainty principle...

(Holy Particle Icon Seems Appropriate)

Five-a-day energy drink habit turned chap's eyes yellow, urine dark, caused anorexia

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Re: and the blitzkrieg was fuelled by amphetamines...

Yeah, but the Army guys buy their stuff at the local Army Walmart, helicoptered into the Saudi desert directly from 'Murrica courtesy of Halliburton or whomever.

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Windows

According to the excellent book "Generation Kill" (also watch the HBO Miniseries, it's that good!), US Army Ranger PFYs operating Hummvees partake of Ripped Fuel, then get the shakes on the wheel. I don't know whether the formula of that shit has changed since Dubya's War, it has been some time (Man ... I remember Rummy on CNN ...)

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Windows

Re: What's wrong with coffee

I'M ACTUALLY TRYING TO REPRODUCE THE MIND_ENHANCING EFFECTS OF THE SPICE!!

I don't think scientific evident has proven anything about coffee killing you nastily.

The usual sinus wave of coffee good / coffee bad in the churnstream medja is of course expected...

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Windows

What's wrong with coffee

Five-a-mug per day keeps you going (just barelay)

It's probably going to hit the liver a bit at some point though.