Er... That's exactly what I said: the flight control system sits between the pilot and the action surfaces and prevents him from doing unreasonable things, such as stalling the plane. On a vertically landing/taking off plane, this system would have to make sure the pilot does not change too fast from vertical propulsion to horizontal propulsion.
I perfectly know there's no AI inside such systems, because they don't do any "high level" piloting. Following trajectories, taking-off and landing paths is the job of other units.
Well, what will then be the difference between a x86-64 Sun and a big fat PC from Dell or similar manufacturer?
Perhaps the service.
Or laboratory used to buy Sun workstations and servers. We liked their service contracts. But still.. their hardware is SO expensive! We now buy PCs from Dell!
Let me remind everybody that Alan Mathison Turing had an "accident", or committed suicide as many people believed, after having put through an humiliating process by his country's lack of concern for private life.
Alan Turing was gay. After being robbed by an one-night-stand encounter, he filed a complaint with the police. He was then prosecuted for being gay, and offered the choice between to prison, or undergoing hormone therapy to suppress his sexual instincts (female hormons - I think he got side effects like slightly growing breasts).
Yes, we're not talking of Iran, the Taleban or other theocracies. I'm talking of the United Kingdom, with its tradition of pride of their alleged personal freedoms.
Of course, such laws aren't on the books anymore. Yet anti-sodomy laws are still in the books in several US states; they are seldom, if hardly, applied, but they still do exist and may be the legal basis for discrimination.
Many religious, or non-religious, organizations have agendas to impose upon our personal lives. We should always be watchful.
This story should also remind us that personal freedoms are not a matter of just taking pride in one's country's alleged respects for human rights.
I've read this one after reading the one about the Concorde.
Let me tell you something so that you feel safer: rest assured that the safety-critical systems of airplanes don't run Microsoft Windows (neither do they run Linux).
Wasn't there a model of US warship that stalled because of Windows problems?
All Airbus planes starting from the A320, and the newest Boeings, starting from B777, have a computerized flight control system. This means that the pilot does not actually control the active surfaces, but sends orders to a computer that moves the surfaces.
The computer checks that the pilot does not order something unreasonable that would have the plane go down. It also implements instant reactions for certain emergency situations.
With such a computerized flight system, accidents such as the one you relate just cannot happen. The pilot *cannot* (or is severely discouraged) from doing something like that.
All modern JREs have a JIT compiler, which compiles frequently used functions to native code. It is possible that the JIT compiler in the JRE is better than gcj.
From a more general point of view, it is possible for JIT compilation to optimize better than ordinary compilation. This is because the JIT compiler has access to dynamic profiling information that is not available to the "normal" compiler (though you can feed profile information from benchmarks to some "normal" compilers - but these benchmark profiles may not fit the dynamic load).
The classes of the Java standard library are, by default, thread-safe. This means that all methods that could cause race conditions are synchronized. Unfortunately, unneeded synchronizations are a major performance hit (it depends on the thread implementation).
So, whether you write s1 + s2 + s3 or rewrite this expression using a StringBuffer (which is, anyway, what the compiler does), you incur on most implementations a performance hit because the StringBuffer will be treated as if it could be shared between several threads.
Now, in this case, it would be sufficient to have a StringBuffer_unsynchronized class. In more complex cases, you would like to compile all methods with or without synchronization and have a system automatically switch to unsynchronized methods if it is safe to do so.
Unfortunately, telling whether it is safe to use unsynchronized methods is non trivial. Essentially, you have to know whether your objects may escape to other threads. Of course, as any nontrivial semantic properties, this is undecidable (which means there's no generic algorithm always giving the right answer to the question in finite time). There are whole doctorate theses written on such topics!
A little anecdote: a couple of days ago, I was at a seminar for beginning researchers. We had a lady, a head of an association of science journalists. She explained to us that: - science journalists, as all journalists, work in a hurry ( 2 hours for most articles in daily papers); - consequently, they check facts very fast, maybe calling some researchers or the PR staff at their institute (unsaid: they don't cross-check); - they of course don't have the expertise to judge, since their scientific training is very generic; - they most often than not don't write the title of the article, which is chosen to catch the eye; - they like catchy phrases and analogies; nuances and reservations that scientists like to make are bad, because they cut the sensation; - scientists do not generally read the article before publication.
Talking about alpha-interferon action on the outer membrane of 3-beta cells doesn't cut it - you have to add that it may mean a "cure for cancer". Astronomical discoveries have to be made up into studies about possible extraterrestrial life.
So what you describe is very likely: the researchers make reasonable claims, but PR staff and journalists turns it into some sensationalist stuff.
I may add that I was once interviewed by a journalist, and my quotations were truncated so that they seemed more aggressive. Do not assume that anything quoted is verbatim.
It's interesting how "old style" utility or transportation networks can be the basis for modern high-speed transmission.
For instance, the French train network authority has thousands of kilometers of optic fibers laid along its tracks, the use of which is partially leased to telecommunication companies.
Unless I'm greatly mistaken, the hero does *not* live in Napoleonic France, but in royalist, post-Napoleonic France, for allegedly being a supporter of Napoleon.
As far as I know, the royalist regime following Napoleon's was a far worse one when it came to individual freedoms. The regime began by a "white terror", pursuing alleged revolutionaries and supporters of Napoleon.
Do you realize that you haven't made a single argument as to: - how environmentalism is a path to world socialism; - how environmentalism is a path to world government; - how environmentalism is contradictory with capitalism; - how environmentalism is contradictory with freedom; - how environmentalism amounts to corrupt third world dictators telling the US how to run its economy. (as a side note, the current behavior seems to be the US telling everybody how to run their country)
In short, you're a troll.
Now I think that you should read about the "tragedy of the commons" - that is, the economic problem of having some common resource (here, the air, and more generally the environment) that can be used without limitation or taxation. The problem is that, while the interest of everybody is to abuse those resources (since the slight abuse committed by one person is low on the global scale), bad things happen if everybody abuses those resources.
May I also add that this problem is acknowledged by both "socialist" and "capitalist" economists, though with rather differing solutions proposed?
That's why I mentioned the "return coupon". Nothing like keeping a signed proof that they received a letter.
Now, they could argue that the envelope was empty or did not contain the letter you say it contained. For this reason, certain people use certain letter-envelopes - basically, a piece of paper that you print your text upon, then fold and seal as an envelope. That way, the recipient cannot argue that he did not receive the letter in the envelope.
For all I know, he decision of an US federal appeals court is only binding in its jurisdiction. To have a law be declared unconstitutional with binding precedent in the whole US, it would have to be declared so by all circuit courts, or by the Supreme Court.
When dealing on serious contentious matter (lawsuits, complaints...) with ANY public administration, court, or private business, you should ALWAYS use certified mail, return coupon required.
Pretending that some mail never arrived, or ignoring it, is an old trick of all bureaucracies.
Just a side note: England does *not* have a constitution, but is ruled by custom. I do not think there is anything preventing the British Parliament from passing just about any freedom-threatening law as any other law.
You are right in a sense, but consider the following:
Those "security databases" are used to determine who gets granted or denied security clearances; who gets searched at airports, perhaps missing a flight or undergoing humiliating treatment; who gets refused entry into foreign countries...
In short, you don't want to end up in the list of "usual suspects" just because some police clerk entered the wrong information.
Are you sure that the FBI and other agencies will not rely on such "information" for decisions that affect your job, your ease of travelling etc...?
I'm a bit curious on the following issue: I've been told by people who used to work for MandrakeSoft that the company was having serious financial problem.
In a nutshell, they have not-enormous, but significant, expenses, mostly personnel (programmers etc...) and they don't make that much money - there are not that many people that buy the CDs (as opposed to downloading ISOs or copying the CDs).
If you *add* a random delay J of variance sigma^2, the attacker will take the average of n measurements, which will give him the real timing with a jitter of variance sigma^2/n.
Of course, if sigma is large compared to the necessary timing precision, n would be prohibitely large. On the other hand, we cannot make sigma too large for fear of loss of performance.
We should definitely get the numbers and compute the orders of magnitude.
About the fact that one single paper investigates human interaction: you have to understand how the computer science academic world works.
Conferences (at least the quality ones) and journals publish refereed papers. This means that the papers have to be reviewed by peers who try to gauge their soundness, interest and novelty.
Needless to say, papers about human interaction are difficult to evalute. Many of them are just lists of "pious principles". Few of them are actually backed by real-life studies (those are difficult to conduct well). You would have to take representative sample sets of users and ask them to use various systems and watch their behavior and ask their opinion.
Also, that kind of "soft" science that verges on social studies is traditionnally ill-considered in certain academic circles, which suspects it of being lots of talk and little scientific content.
All this makes it unsurprising that few papers get into such security conferences.
You've just discovered that lobbies (in this
case, the lobby of movie theaters) may make
the government take decisions that piss off
a lot of people.
Congratulations.
I read the actual text of the decree.
The decree is actually a patch upon regulations that impose a certain delay that is imposed between the moment a film is shown in theaters and the moment it can be sold or rented in videocassettes, video discs, DVDs and so.
The decree makes it explicit that this delay
holds whatever linguistic version is concerned.
These regulations were originally imposed
by the movie theater lobbies. Similarly,
most TV channels cannot broadcast real movies
on Saturday evening, because it was thought
that TV may kill movie theaters.
I find such things a bit ridiculous (I myself
think theaters would have more clients if they
were cheaper... but they are coming to it,
with cheap monthly "all you can see" passes),
but France is, as the US and many other countries,
partially run by lobbies.
Many movies are shown in France a certain time
after they were shown in the US; for instance,
Chicken Run, shown last summer in
the US, is shown now in France. This is not
a legal disposition; this is merely a
choice of the big movie companies.
Sometimes, Zone 1 DVDs (in original version)
were imported when the film was shown at
theaters.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you have to have a graphic board at least to boot and set up the system, and all current boards are AGP, thus the AGP slot.
Er... That's exactly what I said: the flight control system sits between the pilot and the action surfaces and prevents him from doing unreasonable things, such as stalling the plane. On a vertically landing/taking off plane, this system would have to make sure the pilot does not change too fast from vertical propulsion to horizontal propulsion.
I perfectly know there's no AI inside such systems, because they don't do any "high level" piloting. Following trajectories, taking-off and landing paths is the job of other units.
Well, what will then be the difference between a x86-64 Sun and a big fat PC from Dell or similar manufacturer?
Perhaps the service.
Or laboratory used to buy Sun workstations and servers. We liked their service contracts. But still.. their hardware is SO expensive! We now buy PCs from Dell!
This is slightly off-topic...
Let me remind everybody that Alan Mathison Turing had an "accident", or committed suicide as many people believed, after having put through an humiliating process by his country's lack of concern for private life.
Alan Turing was gay. After being robbed by an one-night-stand encounter, he filed a complaint with the police. He was then prosecuted for being gay, and offered the choice between to prison, or undergoing hormone therapy to suppress his sexual instincts (female hormons - I think he got side effects like slightly growing breasts).
Yes, we're not talking of Iran, the Taleban or other theocracies. I'm talking of the United Kingdom, with its tradition of pride of their alleged personal freedoms.
Of course, such laws aren't on the books anymore. Yet anti-sodomy laws are still in the books in several US states; they are seldom, if hardly, applied, but they still do exist and may be the legal basis for discrimination.
Many religious, or non-religious, organizations have agendas to impose upon our personal lives. We should always be watchful.
This story should also remind us that personal freedoms are not a matter of just taking pride in one's country's alleged respects for human rights.
Thanks for your attention.
I've read this one after reading the one about the Concorde.
Let me tell you something so that you feel safer: rest assured that the safety-critical systems of airplanes don't run Microsoft Windows (neither do they run Linux).
Wasn't there a model of US warship that stalled because of Windows problems?
All Airbus planes starting from the A320, and the newest Boeings, starting from B777, have a computerized flight control system. This means that the pilot does not actually control the active surfaces, but sends orders to a computer that moves the surfaces.
The computer checks that the pilot does not order something unreasonable that would have the plane go down. It also implements instant reactions for certain emergency situations.
With such a computerized flight system, accidents such as the one you relate just cannot happen. The pilot *cannot* (or is severely discouraged) from doing something like that.
This is no news to me. I remember reading that AMD was delaying their 64-bit processors until next fall, the reason was apparently that they wanted to have a version of Windows to run on it.
It is therefore no surprise that Microsoft announces an appropriate version of Windows in the same time frame!
"interpreted code outperformed compiled"
All modern JREs have a JIT compiler, which compiles frequently used functions to native code. It is possible that the JIT compiler in the JRE is better than gcj.
From a more general point of view, it is possible for JIT compilation to optimize better than ordinary compilation. This is because the JIT compiler has access to dynamic profiling information that is not available to the "normal" compiler (though you can feed profile information from benchmarks to some "normal" compilers - but these benchmark profiles may not fit the dynamic load).
The classes of the Java standard library are, by default, thread-safe. This means that all methods that could cause race conditions are synchronized. Unfortunately, unneeded synchronizations are a major performance hit (it depends on the thread implementation).
So, whether you write s1 + s2 + s3 or rewrite this expression using a StringBuffer (which is, anyway, what the compiler does), you incur on most implementations a performance hit because the StringBuffer will be treated as if it could be shared between several threads.
Now, in this case, it would be sufficient to have a StringBuffer_unsynchronized class. In more complex cases, you would like to compile all methods with or without synchronization and have a system automatically switch to unsynchronized methods if it is safe to do so.
Unfortunately, telling whether it is safe to use unsynchronized methods is non trivial. Essentially, you have to know whether your objects may escape to other threads. Of course, as any nontrivial semantic properties, this is undecidable (which means there's no generic algorithm always giving the right answer to the question in finite time). There are whole doctorate theses written on such topics!
Some years ago, a photograph was shown in a French TV show about the "rise of radical Islam in poor neighbourhoods populated by Arabs".
The problem was that they had added beards on a photograph of idling youngsters to make them seem like radical islamists!
A little anecdote: a couple of days ago, I was at a seminar for beginning researchers. We had a lady, a head of an association of science journalists. She explained to us that:
- science journalists, as all journalists, work in a hurry ( 2 hours for most articles in daily papers);
- consequently, they check facts very fast, maybe calling some researchers or the PR staff at their institute (unsaid: they don't cross-check);
- they of course don't have the expertise to judge, since their scientific training is very generic;
- they most often than not don't write the title of the article, which is chosen to catch the eye;
- they like catchy phrases and analogies; nuances and reservations that scientists like to make are bad, because they cut the sensation;
- scientists do not generally read the article before publication.
Talking about alpha-interferon action on the outer membrane of 3-beta cells doesn't cut it - you have to add that it may mean a "cure for cancer". Astronomical discoveries have to be made up into studies about possible extraterrestrial life.
So what you describe is very likely: the researchers make reasonable claims, but PR staff and journalists turns it into some sensationalist stuff.
I may add that I was once interviewed by a journalist, and my quotations were truncated so that they seemed more aggressive. Do not assume that anything quoted is verbatim.
It's interesting how "old style" utility or transportation networks can be the basis for modern high-speed transmission.
For instance, the French train network authority has thousands of kilometers of optic fibers laid along its tracks, the use of which is partially leased to telecommunication companies.
Unless I'm greatly mistaken, the hero does *not* live in Napoleonic France, but in royalist, post-Napoleonic France, for allegedly being a supporter of Napoleon.
As far as I know, the royalist regime following Napoleon's was a far worse one when it came to individual freedoms. The regime began by a "white terror", pursuing alleged revolutionaries and supporters of Napoleon.
Do you realize that you haven't made a single argument as to:
- how environmentalism is a path to world socialism;
- how environmentalism is a path to world government;
- how environmentalism is contradictory with capitalism;
- how environmentalism is contradictory with freedom;
- how environmentalism amounts to corrupt third world dictators telling the US how to run its economy. (as a side note, the current behavior seems to be the US telling everybody how to run their country)
In short, you're a troll.
Now I think that you should read about the "tragedy of the commons" - that is, the economic problem of having some common resource (here, the air, and more generally the environment) that can be used without limitation or taxation. The problem is that, while the interest of everybody is to abuse those resources (since the slight abuse committed by one person is low on the global scale), bad things happen if everybody abuses those resources.
May I also add that this problem is acknowledged by both "socialist" and "capitalist" economists, though with rather differing solutions proposed?
That's why I mentioned the "return coupon". Nothing like keeping a signed proof that they received a letter.
Now, they could argue that the envelope was empty or did not contain the letter you say it contained. For this reason, certain people use certain letter-envelopes - basically, a piece of paper that you print your text upon, then fold and seal as an envelope. That way, the recipient cannot argue that he did not receive the letter in the envelope.
For all I know, he decision of an US federal appeals court is only binding in its jurisdiction. To have a law be declared unconstitutional with binding precedent in the whole US, it would have to be declared so by all circuit courts, or by the Supreme Court.
When dealing on serious contentious matter (lawsuits, complaints...) with ANY public administration, court, or private business, you should ALWAYS use certified mail, return coupon required.
Pretending that some mail never arrived, or ignoring it, is an old trick of all bureaucracies.
Just a side note: England does *not* have a constitution, but is ruled by custom. I do not think there is anything preventing the British Parliament from passing just about any freedom-threatening law as any other law.
You are right in a sense, but consider the following:
Those "security databases" are used to determine who gets granted or denied security clearances; who gets searched at airports, perhaps missing a flight or undergoing humiliating treatment; who gets refused entry into foreign countries...
In short, you don't want to end up in the list of "usual suspects" just because some police clerk entered the wrong information.
Are you sure that the FBI and other agencies will not rely on such "information" for decisions that affect your job, your ease of travelling etc...?
I'm a bit curious on the following issue: I've been told by people who used to work for MandrakeSoft that the company was having serious financial problem.
In a nutshell, they have not-enormous, but significant, expenses, mostly personnel (programmers etc...) and they don't make that much money - there are not that many people that buy the CDs (as opposed to downloading ISOs or copying the CDs).
Can anyone confirm?
Very true.
If you *add* a random delay J of variance sigma^2, the attacker will take the average of n measurements, which will give him the real timing with a jitter of variance sigma^2/n.
Of course, if sigma is large compared to the necessary timing precision, n would be prohibitely large. On the other hand, we cannot make sigma too large for fear of loss of performance.
We should definitely get the numbers and compute the orders of magnitude.
About the fact that one single paper investigates human interaction: you have to understand how the computer science academic world works.
Conferences (at least the quality ones) and journals publish refereed papers. This means that the papers have to be reviewed by peers who try to gauge their soundness, interest and novelty.
Needless to say, papers about human interaction are difficult to evalute. Many of them are just lists of "pious principles". Few of them are actually backed by real-life studies (those are difficult to conduct well). You would have to take representative sample sets of users and ask them to use various systems and watch their behavior and ask their opinion.
Also, that kind of "soft" science that verges on social studies is traditionnally ill-considered in certain academic circles, which suspects it of being lots of talk and little scientific content.
All this makes it unsurprising that few papers get into such security conferences.
ACM has an online archive for its own publications (ACM members only).
You've just discovered that lobbies (in this case, the lobby of movie theaters) may make the government take decisions that piss off a lot of people. Congratulations.
I read the actual text of the decree. The decree is actually a patch upon regulations that impose a certain delay that is imposed between the moment a film is shown in theaters and the moment it can be sold or rented in videocassettes, video discs, DVDs and so. The decree makes it explicit that this delay holds whatever linguistic version is concerned.
These regulations were originally imposed by the movie theater lobbies. Similarly, most TV channels cannot broadcast real movies on Saturday evening, because it was thought that TV may kill movie theaters. I find such things a bit ridiculous (I myself think theaters would have more clients if they were cheaper... but they are coming to it, with cheap monthly "all you can see" passes), but France is, as the US and many other countries, partially run by lobbies.
Many movies are shown in France a certain time after they were shown in the US; for instance, Chicken Run, shown last summer in the US, is shown now in France. This is not a legal disposition; this is merely a choice of the big movie companies. Sometimes, Zone 1 DVDs (in original version) were imported when the film was shown at theaters.