Yes it can [point to an arbitrary memory location (such as into the middle of a string)], since strings in lisp are sequences, and you can easily point to their cdr which might be in the middle of the string.
Strings in LISP are sequences, but they aren't lists, at least, not in Common LISP. In Common LISP, they are one-dimensional arrays (character vectors). As such, a cdr can't point into the middle of a string, since cdr can't point to a subsequence of an array. In fact, the only thing that you can do with a substring as a whole in CL is make a copy of it and replace it. (It's possible that some CL implementations allow other operations, and it's possible that other LISP dialects (e.g., Scheme) may allow other operations, but those are not Common LISP.)
Re: Prohibitively Expensive and Complicated ROVs
on
Homebrew Underwater ROV
·
· Score: 3, Funny
As a former submariner I would love to have one to play with, but they seem prohibitively expensive and complicated [...]
My understanding, based on what I read somewhere, is that it's possible to build one yourself if you have two weeks and a $100 budget.
I haven't encountered a feature of Java or C++ that is not directly expressible in CLOS.
My guess is that you meant "a feature of the Java and C++ class systems". I can, off the top of my head, think of three things that you can do with C++ that you can't do with CLOS, or even CL (except through external libraries):
Point to and dereference absolute memory locations (needed for device drivers, etc.), or use pointers in general. (Yes, the cdr of a cons is (usually) a kind of pointer, but it can't point to an arbitrary memory location (such as into the middle of a string).)
Allocate and free memory, especially "force" free memory (delete an object) to trigger an object's destructor. (Yes, you may be able to force GC (I think, although I can't find a function in CLtL to do this), but not (AFAIK) for a single object (and, even then, I don't know whether the CL spec guarantees that all unreffed objects will actually be collected during forced GC (if there is such a thing as forced GC, about which, as I mentioned earlier in this (relatively) very long, and overly punctuated (and overly parenthesized), sentence, I am not sure)). And, yes, I know that it's generally bad practice to delete an object that may have pointers pointing to it, but this is an example of what you can do in C++ that you can't do in LISP, not what you should do.)
Force cast an object of one type to another incompatible type while leaving its bit pattern intact (e.g., float to long and back, to examine and modify the float's internal structure using C++'s bit-twiddling operators). If you want to do this in most versions of CL, you have to write the float to a binary string-stream using a binary file function in the "EXT" (external) package (which is not part of "standard" CL (although it's usually the same extension in many CL implementations)), read it back in as an integer, do the examination/operation, write it back out to the binary string-stream, then read it back in as a float.
Granted, most of the time you don't want to do these things, and LISP (and, to some extent, Java) prevents you from doing these things accidentally, but if you want to do these things on purpose, you can't in (most dialects of) LISP (without relying on external libraries).
Design patterns are a tool, not a silver bullet. Get what you can out of them but don't be surprised when doesn't solve all the problems in the world.
I fully expected design patterns to solve all of the problems in the world, and was surprised when they didn't. Hunger still exists. War still exists. Republicans and Democrats still exist. Design patterns have not solved these and other problems, to my complete and utter surprise. (Hitler doesn't exist any more, but I don't know how much design patterns had to do with that.) Had I read your post earlier, my surprise might have been alleviated, or perhaps avoided altogether.
If your post can prevent one person from being surprised when design patterns don't solve all of the problems in the world, then I would say that it was worth all of the extensive effort that you obviously put into it. You, sir (or madam), are a sage.
I would bet that they took extra tile pannels into space with them this time.
As another respondant wrote, each Shuttle tile has its own unique shape, so packing replacement tiles is not really an option. From what I have seen/heard/read, they now have some sort of goop that can fill in for missing tiles, punctures, etc. (The reason that the whole lander isn't covered with this goop in the first place is that the goop is much heavier than the tiles.)
Now with 3 or 4 space shuttles in the whole world how much environmental harm could all that foam cause? None.
The foam covers part of the Main Tank, which is the only major part of the Shuttle that is not re-used. So, it is more than "3 or 4". However, I agree with the rest of your post. Compared to the other pollution caused by a Shuttle launch (noise/vibration, vapor trail, splattered/charred avians, dead ocean creatures (killed by incoming SRBs), etc.), a bit of non-PC foam seems pretty minor to me.
Not so much "intelligence" as a kind of natural equilibrium, with quantum mechanics allowing the occasional tunneling. As to the credibility of this explanation, I'm going to say that it's probably sufficient for Star Trek, and leave it at that.
The antimatter deposits reside in naturally-occurring magnetic pressor-beam bottles, which keep the matter out, and the antimatter in. (A pressor beam is the opposite of a tractor beam, in that it "presses" matter (and antimatter) away, rather than "tractoring" it in.) The mutual annihilation caused by the stray atom of matter or antimatter that occasionally crosses the boundary creates enough energy to make the bottles self-sustaining. The aliens (who are made of conventional matter) mine the antimatter by distorting the shape of the bottles (using energy) so that they "fracture" into smaller-sized bottles, which are more easily handled (or, occasionally, antimatter fields are found that already have bottles of the appropriate size). The bottles make the antimatter relatively easy to transport, so the antimatter is left in the bottles until it is needed.
wtf? assuming you mean a tankful of antimatter fuel (say, 56kg): today 10 grams of antimatter costs 1.75 trillion dollars, so that means 56kg of antimatter costs 98000 trillion dollars. that means
1 zarbo = 326 666 666 666 666 666 dollars
Your calculations are off because you are using early 21st century Earth technology as your basis of calculations. Aliens are able to extract antimatter from large deposits found naturally occuring in various parts of the galaxy, controlled largely by OAEW (the Organization of Antimatter-Exporting Worlds). Now, the price of antimatter can fluctuate. For example, the price rose rapidly in the 1970s during the Aldebrian Antimatter Embargo. However, the price of antimatter is still far less out in the galaxy than here on Earth.
Disputes over antimatter have resulted in some galactic conflicts. For example, only recently, the United Federation of Planets invaded Tarsus IV, ostensibly to depose the brutal dictator "Kodos the Executioner", whom, it was claimed, had supported a terrorist attack on the UFP Trade Center, and who was supposedly harboring Weapons of Galactic Destruction. Both of these assertions were later proved false, and many are saying that the invasion was really to secure Tarsus IV's antimatter fields. (UFP officials state that even though no WGDs were found, the people of Tarsus IV are still better off now than they were before, because they are free of Kodos (who was found hiding in a traveling Shakespearean theatre company, and who is currently awaiting trial on charges of murder and over-acting). Still, some Tarsus IVians resent the UFP's presence on their world, and have been attacking the occupying troups.)
Some environmentalists are claiming that the supply of antimatter in the galaxy is dwindling at an alarming rate, and that in thirty years or so, the galaxy will run out of easily-mined antimatter. However, they have been making claims like this for decades, and new technologies are arising that can mine sparse antimatter fields that may have been too expensive to mine using earlier methods. Still, much research is going on into alternate forms of energy, especially renewable forms of energy like Stellar power.
Scientists are also researching an energy source called Zero-Point Energy, but they have yet to exceed the "break-even" point (where more power is produced by the reaction than goes in to initiating the reaction) that would result in portable "Zero-Point Modules" (ZPMs). (There is a circulating rumour that a race called "The Ancients" was had access to such technology, but this is denied by UFP officials.) If scientists can make this breakthrough, the galaxy will have an essentially infinite supply of energy, and OAEW's stranglehold will be broken.
The problem is that the current format can only be understood by a particular type of obsolete computer that NASA is about to scrap.
The operative word here is "about". The computer hasn't been scrapped yet, and they should take advantage of that.
Why can't they use the obsolete equipment to read all of the tapes and transfer the raw data to a more modern medium? My totally uninformed guess is that a couple of hundred tapes should fit on a couple of DVDs, which can then be replicated as many times as needed. The hardware needed to communicate the info between the obsolete computer and an ordinary PC (say, over an RS-232 line or Centronics-style parallel port) should be relatively trivial to build. I don't see why the entire operation should cost a quarter of a million dollars. However, if they want to pay me that much, I'll do it.
The only way to insulate the walls properly would entail taring out the dry wall on the outside walls of the house in order to place the insulation in situ.
You might want to look into blown-in insulation. It requires a 2"-3" hole in the drywall between each stud, which means a lot of patching, but you don't have to tear down and replace the entire wall.
You'd think no one else in the world had ever dealt with DST before.
What's stupid is the entire concept of Daylight Saving Time. In fact, timezones themselves are stupid. Everyone should be on UTC.
Who said that local Noon should be when the Sun is directly above our heads? In fact, with time zones, the Sun can be directly above your head anywhere in the range between 1130 and 1230 (or even earlier/later, because time zones are not strictly longitudinal), and DST can increase the range even further. In the "old days", each town/city had its own time zone, synchronized to local Noon. The railroads were largely resposible for our current system of hourly time zones. There are places on Earth today that don't follow the hourly convention, and are one-half, or even one-quarter, of an hour "off" the conventional system.
Why does the local day have to change when the Sun is on the other side of the Earth? I could kind of understand this back in the "old days", when everyone went to bed at sunset, but in our increasingly 24-hour society, in makes much less sense. What detrimental effects would there be if the day changed from Monday to Tuesday when it was light out? When everything is open 24 hours anyway, I doubt that there would be very many.
Note that I don't mean that kids should be going to school in the middle of the night, etc. In some locales, kids would go to school at 1100 UTC, in others, at 1700 UTC. Note that they do this already; it's just that 1700 UTC may be 9 AM local time. People's schedules wouldn't necessarily change vis a vis daylight and nighttime; only the time measurement would change.
If everyone used UTC, communications across time zones would be much easier. (No more "Is that 10 AM East coast time, or 10 AM West Coast time?".) People wouldn't have to reset their watches every time they visted Aunt Mabel in the next state over. The International Dateline would disappear.
Oh, and since we would be doing such a massive change anyway, this would be the perfect opportunity to decimalize time (and it's about time that we decimalized time). Just think: With decimalized time, most people would be working only 3.3 hours a day! (On the down side, whenever anyone said "Just a minute!" or "Just a sec!", you would have to wait longer.)
My post was meant to be humorous. You see, I was criticizing you for using a ridiculous nickname, when my own nickname is just as ridiculous. To make this clear, I signed my post, which I normally never do. Intentional hypocracy is supposed to be funny here on Slashdot, and, occasionally, elsewhere. It's like those posts that begin "Your a moron.", which is a kind of joke because the intentionally mis-spelled "You're" is showing that the person who stated "Your a moron." is also a moron. (A similar situation is when someone whose nickname is "Speling Natsi" corrects someone else's spelling, etc.)
When I was in college, I had a friend of mine, who, whenever anyone said he was positive about something (e.g., "I'm positive that I saw him in the cafeteria."), would sneer, "Only complete idiots are positive." I would then ask, "Are you sure?". He would reply, "I'm positive!".
If you understand this kind of humor, then you should know where my post was coming from.
It's especially nice to use names like sillybilly on slashdot
What kind of nickname is "sillybilly"? Why are you hiding behind a nickname? Do you have something to hide? You'd never see me hiding behind some ridiculous nickname.
The patent in question isn't quite as general as you may believe.
Claim 1:
A method, comprising: selecting pixels to be used as an emoticon; assigning a character sequence to the pixels; and transmitting the character sequence to a destination to allow for reconstruction of the pixels at the destination.
This could cover the following sequence:
An app displays the emoticon on the source CRT. This requires the source app/OS to "select pixels" from a font in order to display the emoticon.
The app copies the emoticon to the output buffer, which is "assigning a character sequence to the pixels". (It happens that this is the same sequence that the user originally entered, but the patent does not disclaim this).
The app/OS sends the emoticon to the destination machine.
"The app" in this case can be any email client, a browser with a text box, etc.
Another example is an email client that sends a picture of an emoticon using uuencode or base64.
I think that this patent covers more than I think that you think that it does.
This is silly. Pin count should be a power of 2 (or power of 2 - 1 to provide a "key"). So there should be 2048 (2047) pins on the next CPU, say, a 32x64-pin rectangle. Added advantage: People will attempt to insert a rectangular package the wrong way only half the time, whereas they will attempt to insert a square package the wrong way 3/4 of the time, meaning a 16.6666666666% (approx.) decrease in wrong-way-package-insertion attemptationisticalizations. Unfortunately, this advantage will go away when the pin count is upped again to 4096 (4095).
After years of careful study, direct and indirect observation, experiments, unreliable anecdotal evidence, and hallucinations brought about by the ingestion of multiple substances of questionable origin and composition, I think that I can safely say, without any fear of contradiction, now, or in some indeterminate future, by any persons, living, dead, or zombified, that the answer to your question is "what".
The next "revolution" (actually, evolution) will probably be in parallel processing. It's already starting, what with multi-CPU chips, multi-socket boards and all. (Actually, it's been going on for many years.) Eventually, each PC will have thousands or millions of CPUs, all working in parallel. The challenge is in how to get them to communicate efficiently with each other and with shared peripherals. Will the CPUs be configured as a hypergrid, as some sort of hierarchy, or something else? Will the CPUs be able to reconfigure themselves dynamically as needed, and, if so, how flexible will this reconfigurabilty be? How will memory be shared among processors? Will each CPU have its own local memory, plus some memory that it shares with other CPUs? Research into these questions, and others, has been going on for years (I read about a lot of this when I was in college in the 1970s), but it's going to get more intense as multi-CPU machines get cheaper and cheaper.
localize the electron wavefunctions [...] conduction bands [...] delocalise in Momentum space [...] Shannon entropy [...] entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilenger states
Why not just reverse the polarity of the Heisenberg compensators and realign the plasma relays so that the main deflector dish emits a phased tachyon burst of Crayola radiation? Problem solved!
Paintball is wimpy since they moved to water-based paint. When I played regularly (early 1980s), the balls used oil-based paint. What was really fun was when a first-timer would show up dressed in decent clothing. Once, some idiot wore an expensive suede jacket to a game. When advised that the paint was oil-based, and would be nearly impossible to remove, he replied, "Well, I don't plan on getting hit.". Guess who got hit the most that afternoon?
That said, although Paintball is wimpier than it used to be, it's still more fun than shooting someone with squirtguns or light. I wish that they'd bring back the oil-based paint, though.
Slashdot Mirror
In Common LISP, they are one-dimensional arrays (character vectors).
As such, a cdr can't point into the middle of a string, since cdr can't point to a subsequence of an array.
In fact, the only thing that you can do with a substring as a whole in CL is make a copy of it and replace it.
(It's possible that some CL implementations allow other operations, and it's possible that other LISP dialects (e.g., Scheme) may allow other operations, but those are not Common LISP.)
I can, off the top of my head, think of three things that you can do with C++ that you can't do with CLOS, or even CL (except through external libraries):
- Point to and dereference absolute memory locations (needed for device drivers, etc.), or use pointers in general.
- Allocate and free memory, especially "force" free memory (delete an object) to trigger an object's destructor.
- Force cast an object of one type to another incompatible type while leaving its bit pattern intact (e.g., float to long and back, to examine and modify the float's internal structure using C++'s bit-twiddling operators).
Granted, most of the time you don't want to do these things, and LISP (and, to some extent, Java) prevents you from doing these things accidentally, but if you want to do these things on purpose, you can't in (most dialects of) LISP (without relying on external libraries).(Yes, the cdr of a cons is (usually) a kind of pointer, but it can't point to an arbitrary memory location (such as into the middle of a string).)
(Yes, you may be able to force GC (I think, although I can't find a function in CLtL to do this), but not (AFAIK) for a single object (and, even then, I don't know whether the CL spec guarantees that all unreffed objects will actually be collected during forced GC (if there is such a thing as forced GC, about which, as I mentioned earlier in this (relatively) very long, and overly punctuated (and overly parenthesized), sentence, I am not sure)).
And, yes, I know that it's generally bad practice to delete an object that may have pointers pointing to it, but this is an example of what you can do in C++ that you can't do in LISP, not what you should do.)
If you want to do this in most versions of CL, you have to write the float to a binary string-stream using a binary file function in the "EXT" (external) package (which is not part of "standard" CL (although it's usually the same extension in many CL implementations)), read it back in as an integer, do the examination/operation, write it back out to the binary string-stream, then read it back in as a float.
Hunger still exists.
War still exists.
Republicans and Democrats still exist.
Design patterns have not solved these and other problems, to my complete and utter surprise.
(Hitler doesn't exist any more, but I don't know how much design patterns had to do with that.)
Had I read your post earlier, my surprise might have been alleviated, or perhaps avoided altogether.
If your post can prevent one person from being surprised when design patterns don't solve all of the problems in the world, then I would say that it was worth all of the extensive effort that you obviously put into it.
You, sir (or madam), are a sage.
Or something.
From what I have seen/heard/read, they now have some sort of goop that can fill in for missing tiles, punctures, etc.
(The reason that the whole lander isn't covered with this goop in the first place is that the goop is much heavier than the tiles.)
So, it is more than "3 or 4".
However, I agree with the rest of your post.
Compared to the other pollution caused by a Shuttle launch (noise/vibration, vapor trail, splattered/charred avians, dead ocean creatures (killed by incoming SRBs), etc.), a bit of non-PC foam seems pretty minor to me.
There are currently two Soyez's docked with the ISS, which means that six can leave (three/capsule), and three must stay.
Whereas claiming that 1 zarbo = 326 666 666 666 666 666 dollars is the very epitome of reality.
Not so much "intelligence" as a kind of natural equilibrium, with quantum mechanics allowing the occasional tunneling.
As to the credibility of this explanation, I'm going to say that it's probably sufficient for Star Trek, and leave it at that.
The antimatter deposits reside in naturally-occurring magnetic pressor-beam bottles, which keep the matter out, and the antimatter in.
(A pressor beam is the opposite of a tractor beam, in that it "presses" matter (and antimatter) away, rather than "tractoring" it in.)
The mutual annihilation caused by the stray atom of matter or antimatter that occasionally crosses the boundary creates enough energy to make the bottles self-sustaining.
The aliens (who are made of conventional matter) mine the antimatter by distorting the shape of the bottles (using energy) so that they "fracture" into smaller-sized bottles, which are more easily handled (or, occasionally, antimatter fields are found that already have bottles of the appropriate size).
The bottles make the antimatter relatively easy to transport, so the antimatter is left in the bottles until it is needed.
Yeah, that's it.
Aliens are able to extract antimatter from large deposits found naturally occuring in various parts of the galaxy, controlled largely by OAEW (the Organization of Antimatter-Exporting Worlds).
Now, the price of antimatter can fluctuate.
For example, the price rose rapidly in the 1970s during the Aldebrian Antimatter Embargo.
However, the price of antimatter is still far less out in the galaxy than here on Earth.
Disputes over antimatter have resulted in some galactic conflicts.
For example, only recently, the United Federation of Planets invaded Tarsus IV, ostensibly to depose the brutal dictator "Kodos the Executioner", whom, it was claimed, had supported a terrorist attack on the UFP Trade Center, and who was supposedly harboring Weapons of Galactic Destruction.
Both of these assertions were later proved false, and many are saying that the invasion was really to secure Tarsus IV's antimatter fields.
(UFP officials state that even though no WGDs were found, the people of Tarsus IV are still better off now than they were before, because they are free of Kodos (who was found hiding in a traveling Shakespearean theatre company, and who is currently awaiting trial on charges of murder and over-acting).
Still, some Tarsus IVians resent the UFP's presence on their world, and have been attacking the occupying troups.)
Some environmentalists are claiming that the supply of antimatter in the galaxy is dwindling at an alarming rate, and that in thirty years or so, the galaxy will run out of easily-mined antimatter.
However, they have been making claims like this for decades, and new technologies are arising that can mine sparse antimatter fields that may have been too expensive to mine using earlier methods.
Still, much research is going on into alternate forms of energy, especially renewable forms of energy like Stellar power.
Scientists are also researching an energy source called Zero-Point Energy, but they have yet to exceed the "break-even" point (where more power is produced by the reaction than goes in to initiating the reaction) that would result in portable "Zero-Point Modules" (ZPMs).
(There is a circulating rumour that a race called "The Ancients" was had access to such technology, but this is denied by UFP officials.)
If scientists can make this breakthrough, the galaxy will have an essentially infinite supply of energy, and OAEW's stranglehold will be broken.
The computer hasn't been scrapped yet, and they should take advantage of that.
Why can't they use the obsolete equipment to read all of the tapes and transfer the raw data to a more modern medium?
My totally uninformed guess is that a couple of hundred tapes should fit on a couple of DVDs, which can then be replicated as many times as needed.
The hardware needed to communicate the info between the obsolete computer and an ordinary PC (say, over an RS-232 line or Centronics-style parallel port) should be relatively trivial to build.
I don't see why the entire operation should cost a quarter of a million dollars.
However, if they want to pay me that much, I'll do it.
It requires a 2"-3" hole in the drywall between each stud, which means a lot of patching, but you don't have to tear down and replace the entire wall.
In fact, timezones themselves are stupid.
Everyone should be on UTC.
Who said that local Noon should be when the Sun is directly above our heads?
In fact, with time zones, the Sun can be directly above your head anywhere in the range between 1130 and 1230 (or even earlier/later, because time zones are not strictly longitudinal), and DST can increase the range even further.
In the "old days", each town/city had its own time zone, synchronized to local Noon.
The railroads were largely resposible for our current system of hourly time zones.
There are places on Earth today that don't follow the hourly convention, and are one-half, or even one-quarter, of an hour "off" the conventional system.
Why does the local day have to change when the Sun is on the other side of the Earth?
I could kind of understand this back in the "old days", when everyone went to bed at sunset, but in our increasingly 24-hour society, in makes much less sense.
What detrimental effects would there be if the day changed from Monday to Tuesday when it was light out?
When everything is open 24 hours anyway, I doubt that there would be very many.
Note that I don't mean that kids should be going to school in the middle of the night, etc.
In some locales, kids would go to school at 1100 UTC, in others, at 1700 UTC.
Note that they do this already; it's just that 1700 UTC may be 9 AM local time.
People's schedules wouldn't necessarily change vis a vis daylight and nighttime; only the time measurement would change.
If everyone used UTC, communications across time zones would be much easier.
(No more "Is that 10 AM East coast time, or 10 AM West Coast time?".)
People wouldn't have to reset their watches every time they visted Aunt Mabel in the next state over.
The International Dateline would disappear.
Oh, and since we would be doing such a massive change anyway, this would be the perfect opportunity to decimalize time (and it's about time that we decimalized time).
Just think: With decimalized time, most people would be working only 3.3 hours a day!
(On the down side, whenever anyone said "Just a minute!" or "Just a sec!", you would have to wait longer.)
My post was meant to be humorous.
You see, I was criticizing you for using a ridiculous nickname, when my own nickname is just as ridiculous.
To make this clear, I signed my post, which I normally never do.
Intentional hypocracy is supposed to be funny here on Slashdot, and, occasionally, elsewhere.
It's like those posts that begin "Your a moron.", which is a kind of joke because the intentionally mis-spelled "You're" is showing that the person who stated "Your a moron." is also a moron.
(A similar situation is when someone whose nickname is "Speling Natsi" corrects someone else's spelling, etc.)
When I was in college, I had a friend of mine, who, whenever anyone said he was positive about something (e.g., "I'm positive that I saw him in the cafeteria."), would sneer, "Only complete idiots are positive."
I would then ask, "Are you sure?".
He would reply, "I'm positive!".
If you understand this kind of humor, then you should know where my post was coming from.
Why are you hiding behind a nickname?
Do you have something to hide?
You'd never see me hiding behind some ridiculous nickname.
Your friend,
some guy I know
- An app displays the emoticon on the source CRT.
- The app copies the emoticon to the output buffer, which is "assigning a character sequence to the pixels".
- The app/OS sends the emoticon to the destination machine.
"The app" in this case can be any email client, a browser with a text box, etc.This requires the source app/OS to "select pixels" from a font in order to display the emoticon.
(It happens that this is the same sequence that the user originally entered, but the patent does not disclaim this).
Another example is an email client that sends a picture of an emoticon using uuencode or base64.
I think that this patent covers more than I think that you think that it does.
They've applied for patents on "(r)" and "(c)".
Pin count should be a power of 2 (or power of 2 - 1 to provide a "key").
So there should be 2048 (2047) pins on the next CPU, say, a 32x64-pin rectangle.
Added advantage: People will attempt to insert a rectangular package the wrong way only half the time, whereas they will attempt to insert a square package the wrong way 3/4 of the time, meaning a 16.6666666666% (approx.) decrease in wrong-way-package-insertion attemptationisticalizations.
Unfortunately, this advantage will go away when the pin count is upped again to 4096 (4095).
U nderwater
B allasted
B ouyant
E xploratory
R obot
D eploying
U nbelievably
C ool and
K ooky
I ntegrated
E lectronics
The next "revolution" (actually, evolution) will probably be in parallel processing.
It's already starting, what with multi-CPU chips, multi-socket boards and all.
(Actually, it's been going on for many years.)
Eventually, each PC will have thousands or millions of CPUs, all working in parallel.
The challenge is in how to get them to communicate efficiently with each other and with shared peripherals.
Will the CPUs be configured as a hypergrid, as some sort of hierarchy, or something else?
Will the CPUs be able to reconfigure themselves dynamically as needed, and, if so, how flexible will this reconfigurabilty be?
How will memory be shared among processors?
Will each CPU have its own local memory, plus some memory that it shares with other CPUs?
Research into these questions, and others, has been going on for years (I read about a lot of this when I was in college in the 1970s), but it's going to get more intense as multi-CPU machines get cheaper and cheaper.
Problem solved!
Paintball is wimpy since they moved to water-based paint.
When I played regularly (early 1980s), the balls used oil-based paint.
What was really fun was when a first-timer would show up dressed in decent clothing.
Once, some idiot wore an expensive suede jacket to a game.
When advised that the paint was oil-based, and would be nearly impossible to remove, he replied, "Well, I don't plan on getting hit.".
Guess who got hit the most that afternoon?
That said, although Paintball is wimpier than it used to be, it's still more fun than shooting someone with squirtguns or light.
I wish that they'd bring back the oil-based paint, though.