Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Bitcoin ban row latest: 'Unstable, loved by criminals' Yup, that's the US dollar – Colorado rep

Re: It's actually quite hilarious

The value of fiat money is derived from the relationship between supply and demand rather than the value of the material that the money is made of

Not really.

As the printing presses run and promises are being made that future taxpayers can be milked enough (under threat of violence) to pay back the current promissory notes held by the corrupt owners of "government bonds", this becomes more and more of a situation where everyone is grabbing the balls of person next to him and everyone hopes that no-one sneezes.

Which bring us the idea whether Ghaddafi went from "friend" to "fiend" in 50 seconds because he wanted to set up a gold-backed North-African currency.

Re: History is on Bitcoins side

". . . it was the backing of the Federal Government that stabilized the currency and made it 'safe'."

LOLNO.

Of course, as you imply, "safety" is a sardonic measure here. Very much so, indeed ....

"The most interventionary of the Civil War actions was in the vital field of money and banking. The approach toward hard money and free banking that had been achieved during the 1840s and 1850s was swept away by two pernicious inflationist measures of the wartime Republican administration. One was fiat money greenbacks, which depreciated by half by the middle of the Civil War, and were finally replaced by the gold standard after urgent pressure by hard-money Democrats, but not until 1879, some 14 full years after the end of the war. A second, and more lasting, intervention was the National Banking Acts of 1863, 1864, and 1865, which destroyed the issue of bank notes by state-chartered (or “state”) banks by a prohibitory tax, and then monopolized the issue of bank notes in the hands of a few large, federally chartered “national banks,” mainly centered on Wall Street. In a typical cartelization, national banks were compelled by law to accept each other’s notes and demand deposits at par, negating the process by which the free market had previously been discounting the notes and deposits of shaky and inflationary banks. In this way, the Wall Street–federal government establishment was able to control the banking system, and inflate the supply of notes and deposits in a coordinated manner."

And this just went into the overdrive of destruction once the gold standard was kicked to the kerb.

Seriously, the above book is worth reading as antidote to the caricature of history served up cold in schoolrooms as well as "mainstream" journals of "left" and "right". You will start to just laugh in the face of people holding views that look like they were made in bad Hollywood movies.

Blighty teen boffin builds nuclear reactor INSIDE CLASSROOM

Yeah, right

MUH NUCLEAR FUSION!!!111!

So, can have the diagrams of:

1) Helium production

2) Neutron emission

pretty pretty please.

Also, where did the get the tritium and deuterium wrong. That shit doesn't grow on trees you know, and if you want to do pure proton-proton fusion, you better hire Gandalf first otherwise you are in for a LONG wait.

German freemail firms defend AdBlock-nobbling campaign

Feel the anger rising within you!

The interested reader is redirected to THIS DISCUSSION on stackexchange.

Blimey! ANOTHER Bitcoin bleed brouhaha

Frack

It's like the good old times of Pakistani Hacking Sprees that butthurted "Internet Explorer Optimized" sites of all kinds back in the olden bubble times.

NASA robot plans mid-2020s trip: Europa. Wet, radioactive life forms (hopefully). Bliss

Re: I'm not sure if I'm missing something here

Unfortunately that kind of dosh has gone into dacha pads, not launching pads.

Re: $$$ Millions for Europa

The fact that the amounts involved are counted in MILLIONS instead of BILLIONS (or, god forbid, TRILLIONS) should be a dead giveaway that we are NOT talking about Yurop but some bold scientific endeavour in outer space.

Steve Ballmer: Thanks to me, Microsoft screwed up a decade in phones

Microsoft: Can Do No Wrong, Makes Jesus Jelly.

Lying liar is rewriting history harder than an FDR hagiographer:

"One trick is we really invented the modern PC with Windows and Office. And then the second thing we did was really bring microprocessor technology in to the data center," Ballmer said, adding that he'd like credit for "half a trick" with Xbox.

Yes. Next he invented the Internet, and brought Secure and Trustworthy Computing to the masses. Not to mention the Tiling Revolution..

GNU security library GnuTLS fails on cert checks: Patch now

Re: GnuTLS considered harmful ..

"The programmer put down his pen and looked at his last words in resignation.

In the quiet night, a shot rang out, covered only by the lonely mooing of a gnu."

Re: Goto considered harmful

I've found that the gosub type routine tends to cause far more harm, as lousy coders then don't return from the subroutine properly and leave garbage in the stack to accumulate.

KNOCK KNOCK!

Who's there?

IT'S THE TEES!

The Tees who?

THE SEVEN TEES!

Damn that's some ... unbeautiful ... code.

Missing braces, simultaneous assignments, jumpan 'round like a Russian fold dancer ....

It's time dev teams apply some metrication and use the cattle prod when the results are that side of acceptable. Even if all the goodwill of the world went into the coding.

Learn about Microsoft Cloud OS

Many organisations are under pressure to manage the cost of maintaining their ageing legacy systems whilst trying to respond to new business needs.

You wanna know why?

Just check our pricing!

Dell charges £16 TO INSTALL FIREFOX on PCs – Mozilla is miffed

I hope all these people get cancer!

At least for GBP 16 you get something useful, in a sort of protection racket kind of way.

Microsoft asks me EUR 420 (VAT inclusive) so that I get the privilege to:

Download, burn to CD, install, create recovery CDs, probably fight with the activation procedure, basically use up time that would cost around EUR 500 if properly billed of:

a) A branded so-called "Operating System" that is now a 5 year old piece of crap in danger of getting the imminent support shaft

b) A warmed-over piece of design fail called "Office", which is basically a trashbag of features that you don't need, want nor appreciate but that Shall Be Monetized, all lovingly barfed out by programming prima donnas that recently upskilled from serving large fries. You notice because there is a greasy, fatty feel to everything.

c) All in the Not Preferred Language

Dark matter killed the dinosaurs, boffins suggest

Re: And thus Nemisis is reborn...

And possibly, dark matter doesn't even exist - other than normal matter at very low temperatures.

No, that idea is dead as disco.

Only a special mix of non-clumping non-baryonic "dark matter" can explain the large-scale observed structure of the universe.

Atoms: 4.6%, Dark Matter (pulls): 24%, Dark Energy (pushes): 71.4%

Re: If Sol is orbiting the galactic core ....

Yes and no.

Depending on what IT is supposed to be be, there may be large clumps, streams or filaments hanging around or occupying different orbits etc, much like interstellar gas which solar system enters from time to time, and which reduces the solar flux reaching earth.

There was even the idea of dark matter that could clump like normal baryonic matter but just interact with this side gravitationally, so you could have Dark Suns and Dark Planets interacting with the solar system pretty much the same way nearby stars may pass really nearby from time to time.

I was always partial to...

Volcanogenic Dark Matter and Mass Extinctions

The passage of the Earth through dense clumps of dark matter, the presence of which are predicted by certain cosmologies, would produce large quantities of heat in the interior of this planet through the capture and subsequent annihilation of dark matter particles. This heat can cause large-scale volcanism which could in turn have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and other mass extinctions. The periodicity of such volcanic outbursts agrees with the frequency of palaeontological mass extinctions as well as the observed periodicity in the occurrence of the largest flood basalt provinces on the globe.

Of course, if Dark Matter is just sterile neutrinos chilling in the galactic halo, none of that fun can be had.

Aargh! My EYEBALLS are MELLLTING! Curse this DEVIL LAPTOP

This will then be the "Alex Laptop"

But besides referencing Clockwork Orange, wasn't it in Neuromancer that there was a guy whose retinas had "permanent scanline burn-in"?

Thanks a lot, Facebook: Microsoft turns Office 365 into social network

Re: icing a turd

pissing on your corporate clients is something altogether different.

It's just another golden shower.

Re: Who wants this?

makes very extensive use of SharePoint

Yep. Because everyone needs a roach motel for word documents.

And now - Socialization.

NO FLESH SHALL BE SPARED!

SYSTEM ERROR DOWN: Twitter twits silenced by hack attack 'false alarm'

Re: The down side...

Main screen turn on!

Security researchers uncover three-year-old 'RUSSIAN SPYware'

Re: Don't be daft!@ All names Taken

TUNE OUT THE WAR PARTY

Putin’s actions, though unsettling, are not irrational.

After he won the competition for Ukraine to join his customs union, by bumping a timid EU out of the game with $15 billion cash offer plus subsidized oil and gas to Kiev, he saw his victory stolen.

Crowds formed in Maidan Square, set up barricades, battled police with clubs and Molotov cocktails, forced the elected president Viktor Yanukovych into one capitulation after another, and then overthrew him, ran him out of the country, impeached him, seized parliament, downgraded the Russian language, and declared Ukraine part of Europe.

To Americans this may look like democracy in action. To Moscow it has the aspect of a successful Beer Hall Putsch, with even Western journalists conceding there were neo-Nazis in Maidan Square.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

From the report:

Another interesting notion: The exact spelling, Uroburos, can even be found in a webcomic called Homestuck. In this interactive webcomic, the reader/player needs two codes to receive virtual magic objects (called juju). Those two codes are in fact uROBuROS and UrobUros. We can notice that the uppercase and lowercase character order matches the string found within the malware code.

"Not bad. Some pretty good stuff you got there!"

Re: When did Eset become German?

It was The Other Annexion ... that John Kerry DIDN'T yap loudly about.

Data Centre World: It's hard work cooling off those hot racks

Re: What no bio fuel?

If the investment throws off the ROI, why not.

If it's marginal, why would you?

Twitter sags beneath weight of Oscar selfie

"MILLION-RETWEET goss and glamour"

Pretty sure my vocabulary is progressively retreating out the hipster influence sphericule, but I still do think that should be "gloss", not "goss".

I do think that should be "Bieber", or do you mean "BuhBye-ber"?

Traditional RAID is outdated and dying on its feet

Re: Meh!

"To date Cleversafe has been awarded over 100 patents"

Certainly a formula for success.

Re: broken RAID

Blaming Dell is covered by a patent, too?

Boffins say dark matter found with X-ray

That's not how it works.

Here we have a sterile neutrino population (definitely not interacting via electromagnetism and apparently not via weak force either) generally just sitting there like a heavy gas around galaxy cluster, but now slowly (i.e. with half-life times >> current age of the universe) decaying into a photon (the detected signal) and a standard neutrino (undetectable again).

It's only the decay signal you can observe. More clearly:

How can we see if this is the right model? Dark matter that has no interactions with the visible matter seems hopeless. Fortunately, sterile neutrino dark matter is expected to decay and produce a smoking-gun signal in the form of a monochromatic photon line. This is because, in order to be produced in the early universe, the sterile neutrino should mix slightly with the active ones. In that case, oscillations of the active neutrinos into sterile ones in the primordial plasma can populate the number density of sterile neutrinos, and by this mechanism it is possible to explain the observed relic density of dark matter. But the same mixing will make the sterile neutrino decay, as shown in the diagrams here. If the sterile neutrino is light enough and/or the mixing is small enough then its lifetime can be much longer than the age of the universe, and then it remains a viable dark matter candidate. The tree-level decay into 3 ordinary neutrinos is undetectable, but the 2-body loop decay into a photon and and a neutrino results in production of photons with the energy E=mDM/2. Such a monochromatic photon line can potentially be observed. In fact, in the simplest models sterile neutrino dark matter heavier than ~50 keV would produce a too large photon flux and is excluded. Thus the favored mass range for dark matter is between 1 and 50 keV. Then the photon line is predicted to fall into the X-ray domain that can be studied using X-ray satellites like XMM-Newton, Chandra, or Suzaku.

Also note that dark matter detectors assume that dark matter should interact at least via the weak force (they are "Weakly Interacting Massive Particles"). Same with the neutrino detectors. The electromagnetic force does not enter here.

Fanbois sent into FITS of RAGE by fake Steve Jobs statue competition

Doing a slavic job on Steve Jobs?

And why is Steve always late?

Roll on, Dragan!

Brit colo outfit Alphadex offline all weekend after attack

Hosted in Crimea.

Time for the light brigade?

RSA booked TV's Stephen Colbert to give the final speech. This is what happened next

Re: Ah yes, Colbert. Another unfunny guy.

"Trust me, that was funny."

Snort. It's only funny when you are less than 15 and haven't ever heard of Monty Python's Kissinger song. I have probably more books mentioning Kissinger on my immediate right than you have books on programming on C++.

I couldn't care less about Kissinger at this point in time. Taking out old skeletons to cover up the present? Standard progressive debating tactic.

What concerns me currently is the other war criminal (also an economic nincompoop and a political know-nothing relative to Kissinger) with a peace prize. He's currently droning from the White House.

Or, to KEEP IT SHORT AND SIMPLE

Five years later, Obama’s commandants need a rewrite. Here’s what they should now look like and, barring surprises in the next three years, these, as written, will both be the virtual law of the land and constitute the Obama legacy.

- Thou shalt not torture (but thou shalt leave the door open to the future use of torture).

- Thou shalt detain forever.

- Thou shalt live by limitless secrecy.

- Thou shalt wage war everywhere and forever.

- Thou shalt not punish those who have done bad things in the name of the national security state.

Ah yes, Colbert. Another unfunny guy.

Always trying to run the fine line of "it's not fascism when my progressive president does it".

The guy's practically a war criminal - I don't understand how they could put him up for the same prize they once gave to Henry Kissinger

or his rather more endearing darling Obama for that matter.

Hey, IT department! Sick of vendor shaftings? Why not DO IT, yourself

For those interested in IEEE Software's take on this (Jan-Feb 2014 issue):

Bespoke Infrastructures (PDF)

"In the 1920s, the Ford Motor Company embarked on an ill-fated attempt to establish an industrial town in an Amazon rainforest as a way to secure a cultivated rubber supply for its cars’ wheels. At the time, it already owned ore mines, forests, and a steel foundry to produce the raw materials for its cars; today, it buys from external suppliers, even for its cars’ electronic control units. How do these two phases of the automotive industry’s history relate to the way we currently develop and adopt infrastructure in our profession?"

Re: Filed under hobbies and interests ..

I, for one, welcome our latex-clad reg writers.

There is no such thing as a free lunch

Three months of IT involvement into the project the strategy document was handed to the business sponsor of the project for sign off upon which he was told “Don’t bother, one of the grads put it together weeks ago”.

And you know exactly that horrendous amounts of bitchmoan will land on CIO's desk about "it isn't working / it's a catastrophe / where is the source code / arrrgh the results are all wrong" until the hotwired piece of junk from the bright light just out of uni is replaced with something a bit more production-ready. Sure he/she did what he/she could, but let's be realistic here.

Suffering and entropy are what this universe is about. That and progressive automation. And self-delusion.

Re: Not sure where you work...

That and automated test cases made by a separate team of test fiends wired to a "programmer, you are fired" light once a settable number of failures occur in the daily test run.

Microsoft: NSA snooping? Code backdoors? Our hands are clean!

I need a reference on this.

How a Facebook post by blabbermouth daughter cost her parents $80,000

what's the guy supposed to do, not tell even his family why there's another 80 grand in the bank?

SUCK IT!

Re: Not sure what to think

you can't show the outside world the cost of treating employees unfairly

Unfortunately, NOTHING says that anyone was being treated unfairly in the first place.

We just know the school weighted the odds and thought that defending the case would cost probably more than 80K.

These 80K are coming from where and and who would not be getting adequate educaschion because of this, btw?

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger's DARKEST FEARS revealed

put in it's 10-K?

No!

Fukushima radioactivity a complete non-issue on West Coast: Also for Fukushima locals, in fact

Re: Perfectly safe?

Reactors 3 housed about 40 MOX tubes (Mixsture of oxides of U-238 and Pu-239). There was some concern about how this metallurgic material would be behave in case of a meltdown and whether things might become hot enough to release Pu vapors. Nothing happened though.

an image about the gamma aerial surveying of the Pacific and Arctic oceans, such as I had pointed to

I do not think that such an image exists, or would make much sense.

Re: ha ha ha

This is actually true.

Re: Lewis Page: Active spreading of ignorance

You are not helping, Mister Peler.

Re: Perfectly safe?

AFAIK, the plutonium and uranium are still more or less where they were in the first place.

Only the volatile elements resulting from nucleus splittings went AWOL.

Yeah, I live within a few hours of the mess should the #4 building collapse (which is still possible and which is still packed with nuclear fuel rods).

So what would the effects be, exactly?

Metal rods falling all over themselves??

Re: Facts-

> It's not fear mongering, it's insurance companies covering their a$$.

Riiight.

> Panicked group of "concerned citizens" take to the bullhorn.

> They declare being somehow mortally endangered by orgones/coffeine/aspartame/morgellons/toothpaste detergent/wifi hotspot/radioactive cesium/aether waves/HAARP/fluorine in the water/aspirine/chemtrails/microwaves/hot coffee (The latest things is apparently these super-magnetic toy balls which are "harmful to children", the producer is being shut down via governmental lawfare)

> Parliamentarians sheep up and declare to be "take their concerns seriously"

> Labeling legislation is passed

> "It's the insurance companies"

Well done on the privacy lawsuit. Now NSA will keep your phone records INDEFINITELY

Clearly we are in a movie, and Terry Gilliam is directing it.

And we are not even at the intermission yet.

UK spies on MILLIONS of Yahoo! webcams, ogles sex vids - report

Jeeceeaitchcue: "We do what we must because we can!"

Hopefully they got an eyeful of more scat session than they bargained for.

Although Yahoo!'s instant messaging service uses SSL to encrypt passwords when logging in, it does not prevent network eavesdroppers from intercepting, decoding and storing text messages and live webcam feeds between contacts.

Well, this lack of security is, well, completely unexpected from the likes of wazoo. SSL is a pretty new invention, you can't expect rollout to happen overnight, can you?

Microsoft shunts top exec Julie Larson-Green sideways to make way for Stephen Elop

Stilwell in Burma!