* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Elon Musk: I'm gonna turn Mars into a $10bn death-dealing interplanetary gas station

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Thumb Up

Re: 42?

Very nice.

But you have to say "soviets", as "russia" was just a part of the whole soviet republic thing.

Lots of non-russians in that program.

Don't sweat it though, Hillary's fanbase is packing out the hammer & sicle to paint The Other Candidate as a Red Menace, everybody forgets that the Soviet Union has gone away more than 20 years ago.

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Re: Why is it I keep thinkung about this movie I've seen a long time ago?

You should stop thinking about O.J. Simpson. He was just some black guy who killed some white gal in the 90s.

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Re: "...cost of around $200K per passenger."

WELCOME TO LIFE! THERE IS DEAD STUFF EVERYWHERE!

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Re: Musk Eisley Spaceport

Then muttering media types will gather in the cantina ... "A hive of scum and villany. We must issue careful press statements!"

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Looking forward to see Sean Connery on Io.

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Holy Shit!

Yep, that's ... ambitious!

The web is past peak innovation: It's all negative returns from here

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Re: Lynx

Speaking of which, why is there a gigantic and useless picture of a cat-on-keyboard up there?

'Geek gene' denied: If you find computer science hard, it's your fault (or your teacher's)

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Headmaster

Black differently abled gay height challenged single mothers in Computer Science!

In light of this assertion, lack of diversity in technology recruitment becomes more difficult to excuse as a consequence of natural ability.

I know where the author is going with this but lack of any significant pattern in the student population does not justify to force "diversity" on employers for the sake of it - because employers are not hiring in the same population, especially not if that population is reframed by adding more "diversified" people.

Did last night's US presidential debate Wi-Fi rip-off break the law?

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Facepalm

So...

You host a "presidential debate" (of course, lesser party candidates can't even get a debate, tells you about how genetically engineered and hormone-injected this kind of cash-generating bullshit is, not more than a presidential "loft story") and you don't even have an ethically adequate "operating manual", either written by yourself and generally agreed upon or else rammed up your backside to follow under pain of lawsuit?

The land of the free-for-all.

Oh Snap! How intelligent people make themselves stupid for Snapchat

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Windows

That is, until Powerpoint time is over and you actually have to deliver.

I have found out you no longer need to deliver. Riding the shockwave of endless unfulfilled promises stacked on other unfulfilled promises and lubed with paperware is the way forward. Actually the ONLY way forward as we have come to the point where deluded customers expect the moon for the price of a script.

Let everything burn down.

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Re: "You can also send dick pics on it."

You convinced me to vote for Hillary!

Yahoo! Mail! down?! Great! timing! as! more! US! senators! dogpile! hacked! web! giant!

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Trollface

Definitely listing to port

So will this service now be renamed "The Bismarck"?

Turing, Hauser, Sinclair – haunt computing's Cambridge A-team stamping ground

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Re: P&R parking not free

...and probably clamping too?

Dev teaches bot to talk spammers' ears off

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Headmaster

"tacos whatever post-ironic meditation mixtape distillery yolo freegan cleanse"

This is a perfectly valid, grammatically correct Millenial Phrase!

Though maybe a bit on the Long Side

Do AI chat bots need a personality bypass – or will we only trust gabber 'droids with character?

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Re: Why?

we don't want and won't tolerate computers making mistakes

Uh... I have Microsoft products here ...

Smelly toilets, smokers and the Kardashians. Virgin Media staff grill top brass

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Re: Dirty Toilets

Is this for real!

SpaceX: Breach in liquid oxygen tank caused Falcon 9 fireball ... probably

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Re: What about the monkey?

It's another episode of "Obama West - Reanimator"

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Re: What about the monkey?

Kerry has been spotted sound at safe at the UN, so everything's cool.

Sad reality: It's cheaper to get hacked than build strong IT defenses

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Holmes

Re: About that Pinto memo...

The link actually says otherwise.

It also talks about unethical behaviour of "news" emitters that would warrant a few lives of porridge and no messing in my book, but that's another problem.

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Holmes

Re: Capitalism

I will just state that you don't know what a neo-con is.

Protip: It has nothing to do with capitalism. It has, however, a lot to do with Troskyism and Zionism.

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Really? A calendar as per your example? What's on the calendar?

Still an inconvenience. Your interpretations may differ from somebody else's interpretation.

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Facepalm

Re: Sadly very true

Company officers actually have a legal duty to operate the company in a financially responsible manner.

Oh really? And this is written where exactly?

The only one to complain will be the shareholder in any case...

Besides, the "financially responsible manner" is open to interpretation and risk management.

Cosmology is safe and the Universe is one giant version of the Barbican

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Re: On small scales, the universe appears clumpy.

Possible. But not likely.

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Yeah, but the "5-sigma" does not really apply here. You need it when you pretend to have found a new unicorn and run repeated experiments to make sure that the unicorn does indeed appear in your setup.

Here, you just check whether the unique greyness is indeed rather uniformly grey. Then you can state "yep, it's uniformly grey" with pretty good assurance.

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Re: Wait a sec

It's like cold curry in that respect.

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Re: Pedant alert

Raising the pedantry level a bit, there are also entropic explosives (like TATP) which release little if any energy when they go bang. It's the massive increase in entropy that drives the explosion.

I don't understand this.

The above statement applies to little kids but rather less to TATP. If you blow tops off buses, there sure is energy being released.

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"...come back around on yourself?"

The standard FLRW solution for a matter-gas filled isotropic expanding Einstein Gravity universe says:

... yes if it's "closed" (akin to a sphere surface everywhere)

... no if it's "open" (aking to the centre of a saddle surface everywhere), then you just keep going

But it may have more complicated shapes, too. You may even hit a "domain wall" if it's divided into various areas of distinct physics (or not, you will probably never reach the wall due to worsening expansion)

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Re: Pedant alert

I remeber. It was FIRE EVERYWHERE AT EVERY POINT IN SPACE.

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Pint

The Universe:

"The simplest solution that there is" .... but in which solution space?

It's Friday – and that means one thing: Yup, Microsoft's TypeScript 2.0 is out

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Windows

This link works: A Large Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in Github

Nice study, though as the authors say, it's difficult to conclude much.

OTOH, would you eschew static type checking if there is a certain risk of missing a devastating security or safety bug? In some domains, you may not care. In some domains, you may care very much. Saying that "typing doesn't seem to add much value" may be true. But it depends on the application domain. Remember the Ariane 5 failure? To me that sounds like a costly typing problem. Bertrand Meyer considered it a problem solvable by "contracts" but these are just types in disguise, really.

Insurers are not going to give you the green light if you want to develop a safety-relevant system using a language where the compiler can't ascertain basic constraints on program correctness (today sometimes going so far as to prove that requirements are indeed being fulfilled using a theorem prover, there was an article on this at Quanta Magazine).

So there is that.

This brings us far away from the fun of writing JavaScript interfaces though. Anyway, I like my types as well as my runtime "asserts", they make me feel lees like doing a balancing act without a safety net.

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Well, IEEE Xplore is bit on the fritz right now. "Something went wrong in getting results, please try again later."

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Re: Strong typing at the poit of use is vital

This is called message-passing with type-casting at point-of-use (which may or may not fail)

Why not.

Actually, you could dynamically select the function able to process your object based on the type of the object, aka "polymorphism".

But this is not what typing is entirely about.

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Windows

So are there any studies or metrics that back up this assertion that strongly typed languages produce better apps, or is it just "common sense"?

There must be tons.

A quick shufti to the IEEE Xplore Library shows this beyond the Dread Big Paywall:

▶ "A controlled experiment to assess the benefits of procedure argument type checking"

Published in: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering ( Volume: 24, Issue: 4, Apr 1998 )

Abstract: Type checking is considered an important mechanism for detecting programming errors, especially interface errors. This report describes an experiment to assess the defect-detection capabilities of static, intermodule type checking. The experiment uses ANSI C and Kernighan & Ritchie (K&R) C. The relevant difference is that the ANSI C compiler checks module interfaces (i.e., the parameter lists calls to external functions), whereas K&R C does not. The experiment employs a counterbalanced design in which each of the 40 subjects, most of them CS PhD students, writes two nontrivial programs that interface with a complex library (Motif). Each subject writes one program in ANSI C and one in K&R C. The input to each compiler run is saved and manually analyzed for defects. Results indicate that delivered ANSI C programs contain significantly fewer interface defects than delivered K&R C programs. Furthermore, after subjects have gained some familiarity with the interface they are using, ANSI C programmers remove defects faster and are more productive (measured in both delivery time and functionality implemented).

I will see if my search-fu is good enough to find more before the 10 minutes are up.

Malware figures out it's running on VMs and refuses to execute

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Re: Hide, hide, hide ...

That "Red Pill" thing is pretty hypothetical. Like a "black oil" payload, it excites the Fox Mulders mainly.

Half! a! billion! Yahoo! email! accounts! raided! by! 'state! hackers!'

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Paris Hilton

What is this I don't even

Hackers strongly believed to be state-sponsored

What does that even mean!

I strongly believe Hillary will take the mic soon, having strongly detected an unholy alliance of Pepe the Sadfrog and the ever elusive all-powerful P.U.T.I.N. organization to ravage the purple yodeling cowboy, a strong symbol of Yankee Americanism, so as to have his star-spangled arse transformed into Cordon Bleu.

This comes after a miscreant calling themselves Peace was touting copies of the Yahoo! account database this summer.

Did you mean "corpses of the Yahoo! account database"?

Zombie Moore's Law shows hardware is eating software

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Windows

Re: Nothing wrong with the chips.

The great thing is you actually forget about the most important thing:

A language adapted to the problem sapce.

> since at least the 70s

Yeah no oldsy. Try debugging today's applications in 64 KB mainframe RAM.

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Windows

Lots of handwaving and metaphoring in this article

Implementing functions using dedicated circuits means the functions can be computed polynomially faster than if they were done by a state machine: TRUE.

Implementing dedicated state machines in hardware means the state machine can run polynomially faster than if a software-defined state machine were implemented by a generic hardware-defined state machine: TRUE

These optimizations can now be done as tools and component libraries reach maturity and small fabrication runs become economically viable for a bespoke solution: TRUE.

Go for it!

(I remember having lots of fun doing a multiplier and various other circuits on an FPGA using a user-friendly graphical editor back in 1992 on a small host system for exercises. That was also when the first series of articles about "software-defined hardware" appeared. A prime number generator on a chip was being talked about in BYTE as I remember...)

Larry Ellison today said really nice things about rival Amazon's cloud

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So they are based in Stockholm?

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Ellison stating that people shopping at a competitor need to get their chequebook out ... Good one, Larry!

She cannae take it, Captain Kirk! USS Zumwalt breaks down

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Re: Displaced, by gad.

That's Northrob Gruntman for you.

If that engineering would only bring us closer to starships. It only brings us closer to captainships...

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Re: That's what happen when you have a Kirk...

But then when he's back aboard and she's under steam ....

Cough Cough!

SUDDENLY CHESTBUSTER!

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Don't sweat it, it's not a ship, just a wealth-transfer device. Should have been been named USS Pork Barrel.

cemented US naval dominance well into the 21st Century

Fighting the wars of the 1900s is never too late!!!

Asian hornets are HERE... those honey bee murdering BASTARDS

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Re: Be Warned

And who are "the people round here".

As for deaths ... there is only one listed.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Be Warned

Why very dangerous? As mentioned Frelon Asiatique is not more dangerous than a standard bee.

Also, it's actually a wasp..

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Re: Bah!

In this case, Beexit.

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Headmaster

Re: Stings like a bullet

with holes that look like you've been shot with a rifle

I somehow doubt you have ever seen people that have been "shot with a rifle".

Unless this hornet is 2 foot in size and has explodo-venom loaded.

Lethal 4-hour-erection-causing spiders spill out of bunch of ASDA bananas

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Re: Did someone ID the spider

Yes, that sounds fishy..

Quantum comms succeed over metro-scale fibre networks

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Re: Beam me up, Scotty

Not at all.

The only way to transport something realistically in this uinverse seems to be to actually transport from point A to B. There is no use going through the hassle of beaming the whole E=mc² energy bunch...

Apple seeks patent for paper bag - you read that right, a paper bag

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Re: Now if only...

So crazy glue is made from fast horses?

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Coffee/keyboard

Re: I wonder

Actually, special relativity...