MEPs do not do very much, and have very little power, although they are very well paid. The real power in Europe lies in an unelected soviet of 27 European Commissioners. None of these people are fascists, but they're not democrats either.
I live in that BNP MEP's region. Of course I voted against him, and it is a shame that he won his seat, but I am far more angry that people here are still voting for Labour, in spite of everything.
Codec downloads are bad; users will go elsewhere rather than expend extra effort downloading something that *might* be a trojan, *might* not work on their machine, and *will* require the administrator rights that they don't have at work.
Video sites really struggled before the Youtube era because codecs had to be downloaded and no solution worked properly on every platform. Everyone remembers Windows Media, the pisspoor Realplayer and the unspeakably dire Quicktime. Youtube bypassed that cruft, which is why it succeeded where the earlier sites failed.
Theora could really take off if a Flash-based decoder could be made for it, so that no codec download was required, and any video site could use it transparently. But how much of the video decoding for Youtube is actually written in Flash, and how much is done by a H264 accelerator in the Flash virtual machine?
Maybe I am all of those things! But I do work in this field, and I am not convinced that the system used by the EU to allocate research funding is actually conducive to good research based on the projects that I work on or know of.
In particular, I think the system is quite poor at distinguishing between good science and junk science. The system is easily tricked into allocating funding by writing a grant proposal that is filled with fashionable buzzwords and finding a few industrial sponsors, all of whom will have different ideas about what is important. This does not always lead to good research, because you will have to satisfy your project objectives before you can get on with the real work. Therefore, good research is a side effect of the system rather than a direct product of it. I don't have a better idea but that doesn't stop me criticising the current arrangement.
What I am saying is that this isn't such an exciting event. Tanenbaum will have been involved in many research projects of this sort during his career; every year or so, he will start another one. And each time he will say that he hopes to achieve something new, and give examples of what that might be. So it's business as usual.
On bureaucracy: in order to get EU funding, you have to agree to be part of a wider project with research goals that don't necessarily match up with your own, and so you end up doing lots of donkey work simply to satisfy the EU. This is why I complain of bureaucracy, since the pseudo-research that is produced has negative value, wasting time that could be spent on real research. This may vary from project to project, but it can be very demoralising to work on projects (I work on two!) where most of the official work is just tedious box-ticking and the real research is not strictly part of the project. This is why I am whining about it on the Internet.
The aim is not to produce a better operating system, the aim is to secure funding. This is what academics actually do; good research is (at best) a byproduct. This is business as usual for a research group. The real research will be a low priority, because the group will need to satisfy the EU bureaucracy that they are doing something worthwhile. Consequently, most of their time will be spent writing reports.
Bear in mind that ideas like "self healing software" are buzzwords that you put on research proposals in order to get them accepted. See also: "cyber-physical systems", "multicore paradigms" and "sensor networks".
Well, who wouldn't want to wait months for an operation, even after alleged "improvements", while risking death in a poorly-run hospital? Poorly-run because bureaucracies are inefficient, and in the public sector, there is no motive for improvement.
I wonder why so many people buy private healthcare insurance in Britain, paying twice for healthcare, if NHS provision is so good?
Could it be that the NHS isn't actually that great, and people only believe that it is because they are lied to by the Government and the media? Both of which tell them that (1) the NHS is value for money and (2) the alternative would be worse.
The British imagine that poor people were dying in the streets and becoming destitute to pay for operations, until the NHS was brought in to fix everything. It doesn't occur to them that without the tax burden, even the poorest people were free to make their own arrangements for healthcare, and that's exactly what happened. Friendly societies and charity hospitals used to be commonplace until the NHS replaced them with something "better". And now, the tax burden is so high that even people who live below the poverty line are paying income tax in Britain.
Thankyou; that's exactly right. Your post is the least deserving of a Troll mod that I have ever seen.
The British economy is completely fucked because these cretins took our tax money and squandered it on their social engineering projects. This is another one of them. Here's an idea - instead of spending £250m of our money on broadband, why not lower some taxes? Then, we would be able to spend our own money on the things that are important to us, instead of it being spent for us. Maybe that would be broadband, maybe not.
Even the poorest working people in Britain have to pay income tax. The Government obsession with surveillance is only the most well known of the many things that are wrong here. Petition for Gordon Brown to resign.
Oligarchy, then. Britain has all the trappings of democracy. They serve to keep the people satisfied in the belief that they have a political voice. There is an "opposition" in the form of David Cameron, and there is a "free press", but you will find that the "opposition" agrees with New Labour on every important matter, and the "free press" does not challenge them when a challenge is needed. This is a sign of a non-free state. For further signs you need only look at New Labour's law-making record over the past decade. Things are pretty bad, and thanks to the "independent" media, you may only be aware of the very tip of the iceberg.
Oh I agree with you. All these people are paranoid nuts because there's definitely nothing wrong with Britain or it's government. I wouldn't even bother considering the matter any further because everything is 100% ok, no problems here.
We are not living in a dictatorship. It must be true, I saw it on the BBC and I read about it in The Guardian. Surely the state controlled media would not be biased in any way? After all, we are not living in a dictatorship. It must be true, I saw it on the BBC and I read about it in The Guardian. There are no gulags yet, and detention without trial is only applied to terrorists, and then only for 42 days. And obviously the definition of "terrorist" is only ever applied to Bin Laden types. Everything is fine. I read about it in The Guardian. If you disagree with me, you are a crazy paranoid person. Everything is fine. The travel database and the ID cards are for our protection against terror. The state controlled media would not lie to me, this is not a dictatorship. British politicians are the best in the world. It must be true, I saw it on the BBC.
Data retention is optional in mainland Europe but mandatory in Britain. The UK Government are using the EU to implement the laws they want, and then blaming those laws on Brussels. Our taxes, hard at work - when we're not paying for their second homes, we're paying for surveillance and the PR that sells the need for it to the main stream media. And through all this, they still have the brass balls to tell us that talk of a police state is daft. Where does it end? All you US'ians who have complained about Obama or Bush - consider how much worse it would be if you lived over here.
Abuses like this are always tolerated by the Apple geeks. No matter what Apple does, there an apologist who is ready to explain why it's necessary and important. It's like listening to early 20th century intellectuals apologising for the Soviet Union. No matter what happened in the USSR, the intellectuals were ready to explain why Stalin was a great guy. They were talking ideologically-inspired bollocks. Similarly, the Apple you believe in, and the Apple that really exists, are very different.
So stop it. Stop this stupid "Apple is good" groupthink, because Apple aren't good. If they ever were, then this incident and the TV out incident should tell you that things have changed. Apple is Microsoft, but in fashionable and more expensive clothes, and it's time we all admitted that.
No2ID has been running for several years now without doing anything to discredit itself and its members, such as aligning itself with the far right, carrying out violent protests, or endorsing a particular party. Those are the sort of wrecking tactics that we might expect the Government to use if it secretly controlled them.
However, its main problem is that it is an unfashionable issue. The main stream media is to blame for this. Instead of warning people about the ID register, they have encouraged complacency and the "doesn't bother me, I have nothing to hide" attitude which is so dangerous in an effective democracy.
No surprise, then, that No2ID rarely gets a mention. To their credit, the BBC do link to the No2ID site when it's relevant, and they do get quotes from the No2ID people, but they tend only to include these as a token "opposing viewpoint" and not a real argument.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister considers introducing a special law to deal with one (very unpopular) retired banker with a huge pension that was approved by his Government. How democratic.
As a UK subject I cannot wait to vote these fuckwits out.
That would avoid the two "vfat" patents, but the third patent is 6256642. This could apply to Linux's general strategy for managing Flash memory, no matter which filesystem is used. http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat6256642.html
I wonder if we will end up with Linux distributions with "vfat" support disabled..
Why not a cop watching ten cameras, one on each corner? Less expense, same results. Or perhaps better results, depending on the cops. A cop watching video screens cannot shoot first and ask questions later.
Less expense, yes. Same results, no. The physical presence of cops deters crime. They can respond to problems immediately, and problems are less likely to occur. This is not true if they are stuck in a control centre on the other side of the city.
We've had this CCTV debate in Britain. Common sense lost, and now we have far more cameras than cops, and crime is still increasing. As a crime prevention measure, CCTV only ever succeeds in displacing crime away from the cameras, and it is nowhere near as good at doing that as having more cops.
Isn't the point that the admin could use IE as a malware vector? For example, force the player's computer to open http://www.malware.com/ieexploit.html, which then uses one of the many IE bugs to install a trojan? This also applies to the MOTD feature. Because Mani is a server-side feature, you are forced to trust the admin not to do this.
Even if you can trust the admin (and trusting him not to crack your computer is not the same as trusting him not to cheat), you can't necessarily be sure that the server is secure. It might be cracked; the cracker might replace the MOTD with a redirect to a malware site. This has happened to big advertising networks. Keylogging used to be about credit card numbers, now it's about WoW usernames and passwords. Steam users have never been more at risk. Arbitrary web page rendering is an extremely ill-considered feature.
if ( __name__ == "__main__" ):
out = []
r = file('/dev/random', 'rb')
for i in xrange(8):
ch = 62
while (( ch >= 62 ) or (( i == 0 ) and ( ch >= 52 ))):
ch = ord(r.read(1)) % 64
It's better because (1) the password generated can be easily mouse-pasted between websites, terminals and documents, as it won't contain characters that break single-click selection such as @, (2) because it won't do a "short read" of/dev/random if there are less than 200 bytes of entropy available, and (3) because it only reads as many/dev/random bytes as it needs, preserving entropy.
This is the second generation of password-generating programs that I have written for my own use; the earlier generation had disadvantage number 1. This program prints one of 2^47.6 possible 8 character passwords, all of which are equally likely if/dev/random is assumed to be a truly random source.
Trotsky and Marx are where all this crap is coming from.
I agree that all sorts of nasty authoritarian ideas have come out of the US in the last decade, but there is a reason why the UK government thinks that ID cards and the National Identity Register are a really fantastically great idea. It has nothing to do with terrorists or US foreign policy, and everything to do with the revolutionary "heroes" that our Government worshipped when they were younger, people who saw nothing wrong with abolishing freedom in order to achieve "social equality".
Maybe it has something to do with Kurzweil's assertion that, if all else fails, the AI can be built by the brute force strategy of replicating everything that the human brain does. We would expect such a machine to inherit our flaws as well as our features. In fact it rather seems like we would have a thinking machine but no understanding of how it actually thinks.
Unless the AI believes it has a soul, that is. Perhaps these AIs will be too intelligent to believe in such things. Or perhaps they'll be too intelligent to reject them, particularly when death is the cost of doing so.
Seriously, if you want a really lean-and-mean setup, just regard your window manager as a way to launch as many shells as you want. Then run your programs from the command line. I continue to use windowmaker for this very purpose. No shiny file managers or flashy dialogs, but all the shell-opening action one could ever desire.
The disadvantage is that your PC will be so efficient that you won't bother upgrading it for ten years, and one day you will find out that everybody on the web expects you to use Javascript now. Sites that were once fast have slowed to a crawl thanks to their "Web 2.0" features, and Flash continues to be as awful as it ever was. Finally, you gnaw through your Ethernet cable and decide never to venture online again.
Thing is, their hands were forced. What would you do in their place? Imagine how it would look in the police files if they didn't blindly press on with the prosecution.
Type of offence: Possesion/Manufacture of Child Porn Number of suspects: 6 Action taken: None
Look at that. No action, against SIX suspected pedophiles! A whole pedophile ring! There's only one possible answer - the investigating officers are corrupt! They've turned a blind eye to these monsters. Obviously, the police are child rapists too.
Seriously, this is why there is a court system. The police don't want to be accountable for ignoring a "child porn" offense, but the courts can be, when all the facts are heard and the defense lawyers have spoken. The case will probably be thrown out. Nobody will get a criminal record, and the careers of the policemen and prosecutors will also be safe, because they stuck to procedure instead of taking the risk of applying common sense.
Stuff like this goes on all the time in England, where police are even more afraid of using their common sense. It's Cover Your Ass, all the time. But because of the courts, silly accusations don't normally lead to convictions. Just lots of wasted time.
Good point. Indeed, I do mean the compiler. This is something that the automatic optimiser could do. Although I would want to be able to give the compiler a hint about how things should be done for extremely rare cases where (1) the automatic system doesn't work and (2) performance really matters.
It is also useful to hear about the MTRRs and PATs. The Slashdot approach to research: if you don't know how to do something, just post that "it can't be done" and wait for a correction:).
Slashdot Mirror
MEPs do not do very much, and have very little power, although they are very well paid. The real power in Europe lies in an unelected soviet of 27 European Commissioners. None of these people are fascists, but they're not democrats either.
I live in that BNP MEP's region. Of course I voted against him, and it is a shame that he won his seat, but I am far more angry that people here are still voting for Labour, in spite of everything.
How do I use this "super search" service, and how much does it cost?
Codec downloads are bad; users will go elsewhere rather than expend extra effort downloading something that *might* be a trojan, *might* not work on their machine, and *will* require the administrator rights that they don't have at work.
Video sites really struggled before the Youtube era because codecs had to be downloaded and no solution worked properly on every platform. Everyone remembers Windows Media, the pisspoor Realplayer and the unspeakably dire Quicktime. Youtube bypassed that cruft, which is why it succeeded where the earlier sites failed.
Theora could really take off if a Flash-based decoder could be made for it, so that no codec download was required, and any video site could use it transparently. But how much of the video decoding for Youtube is actually written in Flash, and how much is done by a H264 accelerator in the Flash virtual machine?
Only if David Dawes of XFree86 fame shows up and demands a credit clause.
Maybe I am all of those things! But I do work in this field, and I am not convinced that the system used by the EU to allocate research funding is actually conducive to good research based on the projects that I work on or know of.
In particular, I think the system is quite poor at distinguishing between good science and junk science. The system is easily tricked into allocating funding by writing a grant proposal that is filled with fashionable buzzwords and finding a few industrial sponsors, all of whom will have different ideas about what is important. This does not always lead to good research, because you will have to satisfy your project objectives before you can get on with the real work. Therefore, good research is a side effect of the system rather than a direct product of it. I don't have a better idea but that doesn't stop me criticising the current arrangement.
Good points.
What I am saying is that this isn't such an exciting event. Tanenbaum will have been involved in many research projects of this sort during his career; every year or so, he will start another one. And each time he will say that he hopes to achieve something new, and give examples of what that might be. So it's business as usual.
On bureaucracy: in order to get EU funding, you have to agree to be part of a wider project with research goals that don't necessarily match up with your own, and so you end up doing lots of donkey work simply to satisfy the EU. This is why I complain of bureaucracy, since the pseudo-research that is produced has negative value, wasting time that could be spent on real research. This may vary from project to project, but it can be very demoralising to work on projects (I work on two!) where most of the official work is just tedious box-ticking and the real research is not strictly part of the project. This is why I am whining about it on the Internet.
The aim is not to produce a better operating system, the aim is to secure funding. This is what academics actually do; good research is (at best) a byproduct. This is business as usual for a research group. The real research will be a low priority, because the group will need to satisfy the EU bureaucracy that they are doing something worthwhile. Consequently, most of their time will be spent writing reports.
Bear in mind that ideas like "self healing software" are buzzwords that you put on research proposals in order to get them accepted. See also: "cyber-physical systems", "multicore paradigms" and "sensor networks".
Well, who wouldn't want to wait months for an operation, even after alleged "improvements", while risking death in a poorly-run hospital? Poorly-run because bureaucracies are inefficient, and in the public sector, there is no motive for improvement.
I wonder why so many people buy private healthcare insurance in Britain, paying twice for healthcare, if NHS provision is so good?
Could it be that the NHS isn't actually that great, and people only believe that it is because they are lied to by the Government and the media? Both of which tell them that (1) the NHS is value for money and (2) the alternative would be worse.
The British imagine that poor people were dying in the streets and becoming destitute to pay for operations, until the NHS was brought in to fix everything. It doesn't occur to them that without the tax burden, even the poorest people were free to make their own arrangements for healthcare, and that's exactly what happened. Friendly societies and charity hospitals used to be commonplace until the NHS replaced them with something "better". And now, the tax burden is so high that even people who live below the poverty line are paying income tax in Britain.
Thankyou; that's exactly right. Your post is the least deserving of a Troll mod that I have ever seen.
The British economy is completely fucked because these cretins took our tax money and squandered it on their social engineering projects. This is another one of them. Here's an idea - instead of spending £250m of our money on broadband, why not lower some taxes? Then, we would be able to spend our own money on the things that are important to us, instead of it being spent for us. Maybe that would be broadband, maybe not.
Even the poorest working people in Britain have to pay income tax. The Government obsession with surveillance is only the most well known of the many things that are wrong here. Petition for Gordon Brown to resign.
Oligarchy, then. Britain has all the trappings of democracy. They serve to keep the people satisfied in the belief that they have a political voice. There is an "opposition" in the form of David Cameron, and there is a "free press", but you will find that the "opposition" agrees with New Labour on every important matter, and the "free press" does not challenge them when a challenge is needed. This is a sign of a non-free state. For further signs you need only look at New Labour's law-making record over the past decade. Things are pretty bad, and thanks to the "independent" media, you may only be aware of the very tip of the iceberg.
Oh I agree with you. All these people are paranoid nuts because there's definitely nothing wrong with Britain or it's government. I wouldn't even bother considering the matter any further because everything is 100% ok, no problems here.
We are not living in a dictatorship. It must be true, I saw it on the BBC and I read about it in The Guardian. Surely the state controlled media would not be biased in any way? After all, we are not living in a dictatorship. It must be true, I saw it on the BBC and I read about it in The Guardian. There are no gulags yet, and detention without trial is only applied to terrorists, and then only for 42 days. And obviously the definition of "terrorist" is only ever applied to Bin Laden types. Everything is fine. I read about it in The Guardian. If you disagree with me, you are a crazy paranoid person. Everything is fine. The travel database and the ID cards are for our protection against terror. The state controlled media would not lie to me, this is not a dictatorship. British politicians are the best in the world. It must be true, I saw it on the BBC.
Data retention is optional in mainland Europe but mandatory in Britain. The UK Government are using the EU to implement the laws they want, and then blaming those laws on Brussels. Our taxes, hard at work - when we're not paying for their second homes, we're paying for surveillance and the PR that sells the need for it to the main stream media. And through all this, they still have the brass balls to tell us that talk of a police state is daft. Where does it end? All you US'ians who have complained about Obama or Bush - consider how much worse it would be if you lived over here.
DRM apologist! Stop it. Just STOP IT.
Like the EFF say, Apple's abuses would not be tolerated if they came from Microsoft, Ford or Toyota.
Abuses like this are always tolerated by the Apple geeks. No matter what Apple does, there an apologist who is ready to explain why it's necessary and important. It's like listening to early 20th century intellectuals apologising for the Soviet Union. No matter what happened in the USSR, the intellectuals were ready to explain why Stalin was a great guy. They were talking ideologically-inspired bollocks. Similarly, the Apple you believe in, and the Apple that really exists, are very different.
So stop it. Stop this stupid "Apple is good" groupthink, because Apple aren't good. If they ever were, then this incident and the TV out incident should tell you that things have changed. Apple is Microsoft, but in fashionable and more expensive clothes, and it's time we all admitted that.
(Score -1, Insulted Apple)
No2ID has been running for several years now without doing anything to discredit itself and its members, such as aligning itself with the far right, carrying out violent protests, or endorsing a particular party. Those are the sort of wrecking tactics that we might expect the Government to use if it secretly controlled them.
However, its main problem is that it is an unfashionable issue. The main stream media is to blame for this. Instead of warning people about the ID register, they have encouraged complacency and the "doesn't bother me, I have nothing to hide" attitude which is so dangerous in an effective democracy.
No surprise, then, that No2ID rarely gets a mention. To their credit, the BBC do link to the No2ID site when it's relevant, and they do get quotes from the No2ID people, but they tend only to include these as a token "opposing viewpoint" and not a real argument.
And New Labour (the UK Government - still...) have the brass balls to tell us that we're not living in a police state.
Jack Straw (senior idiot MP). "Talk of a police state is daft".
Tom Harris (idiot MP). "Our liberties are safe with Labour".
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister considers introducing a special law to deal with one (very unpopular) retired banker with a huge pension that was approved by his Government. How democratic.
As a UK subject I cannot wait to vote these fuckwits out.
That would avoid the two "vfat" patents, but the third patent is 6256642. This could apply to Linux's general strategy for managing Flash memory, no matter which filesystem is used.
http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat6256642.html
I wonder if we will end up with Linux distributions with "vfat" support disabled..
Why not a cop watching ten cameras, one on each corner? Less expense, same results. Or perhaps better results, depending on the cops. A cop watching video screens cannot shoot first and ask questions later.
Less expense, yes. Same results, no. The physical presence of cops deters crime. They can respond to problems immediately, and problems are less likely to occur. This is not true if they are stuck in a control centre on the other side of the city.
We've had this CCTV debate in Britain. Common sense lost, and now we have far more cameras than cops, and crime is still increasing. As a crime prevention measure, CCTV only ever succeeds in displacing crime away from the cameras, and it is nowhere near as good at doing that as having more cops.
Isn't the point that the admin could use IE as a malware vector? For example, force the player's computer to open http://www.malware.com/ieexploit.html, which then uses one of the many IE bugs to install a trojan? This also applies to the MOTD feature. Because Mani is a server-side feature, you are forced to trust the admin not to do this.
Even if you can trust the admin (and trusting him not to crack your computer is not the same as trusting him not to cheat), you can't necessarily be sure that the server is secure. It might be cracked; the cracker might replace the MOTD with a redirect to a malware site. This has happened to big advertising networks. Keylogging used to be about credit card numbers, now it's about WoW usernames and passwords. Steam users have never been more at risk. Arbitrary web page rendering is an extremely ill-considered feature.
I think the following is better:
It's better because (1) the password generated can be easily mouse-pasted between websites, terminals and documents, as it won't contain characters that break single-click selection such as @, (2) because it won't do a "short read" of /dev/random if there are less than 200 bytes of entropy available, and (3) because it only reads as many /dev/random bytes as it needs, preserving entropy.
This is the second generation of password-generating programs that I have written for my own use; the earlier generation had disadvantage number 1. This program prints one of 2^47.6 possible 8 character passwords, all of which are equally likely if /dev/random is assumed to be a truly random source.
Trotsky and Marx are where all this crap is coming from.
I agree that all sorts of nasty authoritarian ideas have come out of the US in the last decade, but there is a reason why the UK government thinks that ID cards and the National Identity Register are a really fantastically great idea. It has nothing to do with terrorists or US foreign policy, and everything to do with the revolutionary "heroes" that our Government worshipped when they were younger, people who saw nothing wrong with abolishing freedom in order to achieve "social equality".
Here is an excellent but rather radical book on the subject. Don't read it unless you want to have your preconceptions challenged.
Maybe it has something to do with Kurzweil's assertion that, if all else fails, the AI can be built by the brute force strategy of replicating everything that the human brain does. We would expect such a machine to inherit our flaws as well as our features. In fact it rather seems like we would have a thinking machine but no understanding of how it actually thinks.
Unless the AI believes it has a soul, that is. Perhaps these AIs will be too intelligent to believe in such things. Or perhaps they'll be too intelligent to reject them, particularly when death is the cost of doing so.
All you need is "xterm &"
Seriously, if you want a really lean-and-mean setup, just regard your window manager as a way to launch as many shells as you want. Then run your programs from the command line. I continue to use windowmaker for this very purpose. No shiny file managers or flashy dialogs, but all the shell-opening action one could ever desire.
The disadvantage is that your PC will be so efficient that you won't bother upgrading it for ten years, and one day you will find out that everybody on the web expects you to use Javascript now. Sites that were once fast have slowed to a crawl thanks to their "Web 2.0" features, and Flash continues to be as awful as it ever was. Finally, you gnaw through your Ethernet cable and decide never to venture online again.
Thing is, their hands were forced. What would you do in their place? Imagine how it would look in the police files if they didn't blindly press on with the prosecution.
Type of offence: Possesion/Manufacture of Child Porn
Number of suspects: 6
Action taken: None
Look at that. No action, against SIX suspected pedophiles! A whole pedophile ring! There's only one possible answer - the investigating officers are corrupt! They've turned a blind eye to these monsters. Obviously, the police are child rapists too.
Seriously, this is why there is a court system. The police don't want to be accountable for ignoring a "child porn" offense, but the courts can be, when all the facts are heard and the defense lawyers have spoken. The case will probably be thrown out. Nobody will get a criminal record, and the careers of the policemen and prosecutors will also be safe, because they stuck to procedure instead of taking the risk of applying common sense.
Stuff like this goes on all the time in England, where police are even more afraid of using their common sense. It's Cover Your Ass, all the time. But because of the courts, silly accusations don't normally lead to convictions. Just lots of wasted time.
Good point. Indeed, I do mean the compiler. This is something that the automatic optimiser could do. Although I would want to be able to give the compiler a hint about how things should be done for extremely rare cases where (1) the automatic system doesn't work and (2) performance really matters.
It is also useful to hear about the MTRRs and PATs. The Slashdot approach to research: if you don't know how to do something, just post that "it can't be done" and wait for a correction :).