Phoning ET would be a lot fun if we could destroy his world with a virus.
It's because of people like you that the aliens have banned any communications with this planet. According to the Quarantine Act, no communication may be done in a radius of 20 light years around our planet. Since alien communication uses exclusively directed communication beams, usually no stray communication reaches the planet. Of course, there's no 100% solution, and indeed, a single signal was once detected on earth (known as wow! signal). However, the error in the communications device was found and corrected quickly enough (after about two and a half minutes) that this event didn't repeat.
Perhaps you don't understand anything about neutrinos. They don't respond to electromagnetism, gravity, or the strong force. That means it's really hard to get a hold of them, like impossible.
Of course they respond to gravity. Everything responds to gravity, with no exception whatsoever. Also, given that we now know for sure that neutrinos have mass, even from a Newton point of view it would be strange if they wouldn't respond to gravity.
Well, if someone e.g. sends a planetary-size nuclear bomb to you, you surely want to know before it arrives. Note that you don't need that information faster-than-light, you only need it faster-than-bomb:-)
Well, for the topic at hand, another book by Lem is more relevant: His Master's Voice. Yes, it's about an extraterrestrial message sent with neutrinos.
Simple example: If you monitor the ways where people go, you'll know the places where most people pass, and will put those things you want them to buy on those places.
They will track you the best, because when the signal quality gets worse, your phone increases its own signal strength in order to keep the connection as long as possible.
There's no need to use a signal jammer. It's your very own phone. Maybe you've never heard of that concept, but mobile phones tend to have an option which has about the same effect on your own phone phone as a jammer, but without disturbing other people's phones: Just switch your phone off! As an added bonus, you'll also increase the battery life of your phone.
It isn't really necessary to monitor all the 2 million CCTVs at the same time. If they want to watch you specifically, they only need to find out your current location once, and then a single person can monitor you, switching from one camera to the next as you move. Yes, monitoring everyone all the time is not realistic. But face it, most people are uninteresting for the government anyway (if not, the government is already in deep trouble). The large number of cameras doesn't enable to watch millions of people all the time, but they do enable to watch a selected few people continuously
Well, the question which crosses my mind is: What else could you selectively disable this way? Imagine you would disable the part of the brain responsible to remember new things. Then you could interrogate someone without him even remembering afterwards (OTOH it might prove counterproductive, if he can't remember your question long enough to answer it:-)). Or is there a region responsible to control that you don't tell certain things? Then disabling that part of the brain would cause that you'd not be able to keep your secrets.
Another thought: If someone applied that to some part of your brain controlling vital functions, you'd surely die from that. But would there be a chance to detect it afterwards? Or would that be actually a device for perfect murder?
Well, for graphical input, it would be quite fine. Not as your main screen, but as a graphics tablet which directly shows the drawn graphics as well. It would be roughly like drawing on paper, which is much easier than drawing on one place and having the drawn stuff appear in another.
If the system has minimal contention (so the normal case is that all three resources are unclaimed) and resources are held very briefly (so if a resource is taken it is likely to be released before another is taken, anyway) then it may work. In real systems these are hard properties to guarantee.
However, note that we are talking about a very specific system here: The kernel. I admit I'm not a kernel expert, but I see just two different things which might need locks: Hardware resources and internal kernel structures. Now I can't imagine any reason why any code would want to lock hardware and kernel structures at the same time: Either you are communicating with the hardware, in which case you lock that hardware (and the corresponding driver's data structures). I doubt there's ever the need for any piece of code to lock more than one hardware device at the same time. Therefore hardware locking should be the easy part.
Now, for locking internal kernel data structures, I'd say if the kernel spends significant amounts of time updating those, you have major problems anyway (except for waiting for hardware, the system shouldn't spend significant time in the kernel). Therefore I'd guess your conditions should always be fulfilled for the kernel (if not, the system probably isn't actually usable anyway, even without locking problems).
Now, as I said, I'm no kernel expert, so I may have overlooked something very fundamental.
One should, perhaps, wonder what currently unreasonable problem should actually start being addressed RIGHT NOW!! The things I can think of divide neatly into two camps. 1) We don't know enough to even get started, and 2) It really seems utterly implausible, even given this example to work from. Unfortunately, somewhere in there is something that's being overlooked, and I don't know what. Kernel support for Actors? Kernel security to control Actors? Kernel support for Language parsing? They all seem implausible.
To just add another few wild guesses:
Managing GPUs (if there are several GPUs, one of them might be used by some graphics program, while the other might be used by a different program to do GPGPU style processing; maybe we will even need multitasking for GPUs, so several programs can use the same GPU at different times)
FPGA support (maybe in the future FPGAs will be common computer components, possibly even integrated into the processor; the kernel will have to manage access to FPGAs; maybe even allow two processes to use different parts of the same FPGA at the same time)
Management of processor-specific memory (making sure that the data a certain process needs is in the memory belonging to that processor; it probably isn't a given that in massive multicore processors, all cores will have access to all of the memory; and even if they have, there might be considerable performance issues if the data is in the wrong memory page)
But couldn't the deadlock risk be removed by adding a strategy where you have to acquire all your locks at the same time, with a single call?
That is, have one call, say
lock(resource1|resource2|resource3);
to lock the three resources at once, and disallow any further call to lock before unlock was called by the process. The lock call would wait until all three resources are unlocked by other threads, and then lock all three of them atomically. This would prevent a deadlock, because you could only lock a resource when you don't currently hold a lock.
However the discussion in this thread is about the use of the word "intuitive", which doesn't mean "easy to use". It doesn't even mean "easy to learn" (if an application uses "foo" to mean "yes" and "bar" to mean "no" on its buttons, that's relatively easy to learn, and certainly as easy to use as "yes"/"no", but it's by no means intuitive). An intuitive interface means you can correctly guess most common operations without consulting the manual or online help.
I'm not impressed either. I tried "Einstein, but not Albert", and what was the first page I got? Exactly: Albert Einstein. Followed by Albert Einstein's brain, Hans Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein Memorial, Albert Einstein Award... That's what I'd expect from a search engine like Google, but not from a search engine which claims to "understand" the text.
Slashdot Mirror
It's because of people like you that the aliens have banned any communications with this planet. According to the Quarantine Act, no communication may be done in a radius of 20 light years around our planet. Since alien communication uses exclusively directed communication beams, usually no stray communication reaches the planet. Of course, there's no 100% solution, and indeed, a single signal was once detected on earth (known as wow! signal). However, the error in the communications device was found and corrected quickly enough (after about two and a half minutes) that this event didn't repeat.
Actually here on earth, in regions where people live the longest they usually have the fewest children.
Of course they respond to gravity. Everything responds to gravity, with no exception whatsoever. Also, given that we now know for sure that neutrinos have mass, even from a Newton point of view it would be strange if they wouldn't respond to gravity.
Well, if someone e.g. sends a planetary-size nuclear bomb to you, you surely want to know before it arrives. Note that you don't need that information faster-than-light, you only need it faster-than-bomb :-)
But will it still work with Intel-based Macs?
Well, for the topic at hand, another book by Lem is more relevant: His Master's Voice. Yes, it's about an extraterrestrial message sent with neutrinos.
No, but it can display the Linux source code.
Simple example: If you monitor the ways where people go, you'll know the places where most people pass, and will put those things you want them to buy on those places.
They will track you the best, because when the signal quality gets worse, your phone increases its own signal strength in order to keep the connection as long as possible.
There's no need to use a signal jammer. It's your very own phone. Maybe you've never heard of that concept, but mobile phones tend to have an option which has about the same effect on your own phone phone as a jammer, but without disturbing other people's phones: Just switch your phone off! As an added bonus, you'll also increase the battery life of your phone.
It isn't really necessary to monitor all the 2 million CCTVs at the same time. If they want to watch you specifically, they only need to find out your current location once, and then a single person can monitor you, switching from one camera to the next as you move.
Yes, monitoring everyone all the time is not realistic. But face it, most people are uninteresting for the government anyway (if not, the government is already in deep trouble). The large number of cameras doesn't enable to watch millions of people all the time, but they do enable to watch a selected few people continuously
I guess Google Street China will not have to go to the trouble of blurring faces :-)
I for one would welcome our new speech-destroying overlords, if I just managed to say it ...
But DRM features in the microphone made sure his song wasn't transmitted due to copyright violation on the music.
Well, the question which crosses my mind is: What else could you selectively disable this way? Imagine you would disable the part of the brain responsible to remember new things. Then you could interrogate someone without him even remembering afterwards (OTOH it might prove counterproductive, if he can't remember your question long enough to answer it :-)). Or is there a region responsible to control that you don't tell certain things? Then disabling that part of the brain would cause that you'd not be able to keep your secrets.
Another thought: If someone applied that to some part of your brain controlling vital functions, you'd surely die from that. But would there be a chance to detect it afterwards? Or would that be actually a device for perfect murder?
Well, for graphical input, it would be quite fine. Not as your main screen, but as a graphics tablet which directly shows the drawn graphics as well. It would be roughly like drawing on paper, which is much easier than drawing on one place and having the drawn stuff appear in another.
However, note that we are talking about a very specific system here: The kernel. I admit I'm not a kernel expert, but I see just two different things which might need locks: Hardware resources and internal kernel structures. Now I can't imagine any reason why any code would want to lock hardware and kernel structures at the same time: Either you are communicating with the hardware, in which case you lock that hardware (and the corresponding driver's data structures). I doubt there's ever the need for any piece of code to lock more than one hardware device at the same time. Therefore hardware locking should be the easy part.
Now, for locking internal kernel data structures, I'd say if the kernel spends significant amounts of time updating those, you have major problems anyway (except for waiting for hardware, the system shouldn't spend significant time in the kernel). Therefore I'd guess your conditions should always be fulfilled for the kernel (if not, the system probably isn't actually usable anyway, even without locking problems).
Now, as I said, I'm no kernel expert, so I may have overlooked something very fundamental.
I think you want to read about the "whoosh" system call.
To just add another few wild guesses:
That is, have one call, say to lock the three resources at once, and disallow any further call to lock before unlock was called by the process. The lock call would wait until all three resources are unlocked by other threads, and then lock all three of them atomically. This would prevent a deadlock, because you could only lock a resource when you don't currently hold a lock.
Ok, but how can a text editor help?
However the discussion in this thread is about the use of the word "intuitive", which doesn't mean "easy to use". It doesn't even mean "easy to learn" (if an application uses "foo" to mean "yes" and "bar" to mean "no" on its buttons, that's relatively easy to learn, and certainly as easy to use as "yes"/"no", but it's by no means intuitive). An intuitive interface means you can correctly guess most common operations without consulting the manual or online help.
Well, Google at least knows the answers to the important questions: What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?
I'm not impressed either. I tried "Einstein, but not Albert", and what was the first page I got? Exactly: Albert Einstein. Followed by Albert Einstein's brain, Hans Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein Memorial, Albert Einstein Award ... That's what I'd expect from a search engine like Google, but not from a search engine which claims to "understand" the text.
No, they just copied the marketing from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Share and enjoy!