Well Intel have clearly stated they thing executing SSE instructions via emulation is just as infringing as executing them in hardware.
However Microsoft, Qualcomm and the hardware vendors seem like they're going to launch Snapdragon based devices with an x86 emulator. I suppose we'll have to see what happens - Intel might license its patents. Or it might sue.
Interestingly in the Transmeta case, Transmeta sued Intel. Intel then sued over SIMD patents. And the license fees ended up going from Intel to Transmeta. Then again Transmeta left the CPU market soon after, so maybe Intel got what it wanted in return for its license fees.
Saddam agreed to complete disarmament and full inspections prior to the invasion, but not until the US and UK were on his doorstep. He even offered exile for himself. However the "coalition of the willing" ignored him and invaded anyway.
He didn't leave Kuwait before the Gulf War. And he didn't disarm verifiably before the invasion - he maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity for fear of Iran, according to George Piro who interrogated him for the FBI
https://archives.fbi.gov/archi... "Saddam misled the world into believing that he had weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to the war because he feared another invasion by Iran, but he did fully intend to rebuild his WMD program."
That turned out well. And the DPRK was watching. They know that they can't trust the USA to let them exist unless they are in a position to make them pay dearly for invading. Kim doesn't want to end up like Saddam or Ghadaffi.
The US won't attack the DPRK because it has enough conventional weapons to cause mass carnage in South Korea. Then again if you're Kim, maybe the fact that people don't want to see Korean killed doesn't even occur to you, because his regime has killed a lot of Koreans - ones in the South when the North invaded and loads in the North due to starvation, concentration camps and so on.
Other countries without much of an effective military seem to manage okay from a diplomatic standpoint.
Well it depends what you mean. The UK does OK diplomatically, but then it spends 2% of GDP on defence, has nukes and aircraft carriers and has the US as a close ally. UK diplomatic policy independent of the US wouldn't be effective. In fact the only times the UK operated independent of the US - Suez or the Falklands for example - it either lost diplomatically or had to use its military to get anything done. France mirrors the UK, except with no US alliance. Germany spends 1% on defence but has NATO to back it up. In fact most NATO countries don't spend 2% and freeloaded on the US to defend them in the Cold War. Post Cold War they're effective if they can shame the US into action, but ineffective with when they can't.
The DPRK's leadership just wants to exist. They are no real threat (or haven't been until the US pushed them into it).
Except they threaten war with almost everyone. They've killed their own people. They've attacked South Korea on multiple occasions. Now they've got nuclear ICBMs they could easily put the US in a situation where it attacks them. I.e. nukes haven't brought them security. Of course inside North Korea, you'd be killed for saying that. Which is what makes them an autistic regime. And that in turn makes them dangerous.
It's ridiculous. Just leave them alone and wait for their population to oust the leaders of a failed system. It's cheaper and safer for the planet.
What should the US do if North Korean fuels up an ICBM, puts a nuke on it and shows every sign of launching it, either at the US or a country the US is treaty bound to protect?
With prompt global strike you could hit the missile on the ground with a non nuclear weapon. With boost phase intercept you'd have a chance of hitting it in just after launch.
Earlier this week the DPRK offered diplomacy and the UN sent an envoy. The US's response so far has been "Not until you give up your nukes". Wut? You don't start a diplomatic exercise by making demands before you will agree to talks. There is no risk to talking unless you don't want a resolution.
The DPRK acts out because it gets rewarded for it. Clinton and Bush both did deals with them where they agreed to stop their nuclear and missile programs. South Korea and the US shipped them oil, food, and
As someone else pointed out above the iron in meteorites is metallic. If you didn't have that you'd have to smelt iron ore. Which required higher temperatures than bronze.
Though oddly enough once you can smelt iron it's easier to get iron ore than it is to get copper and tin or arsenic which you need for bronze.
So once you can smelt iron it's actually easier to get hold of the ore so you can make weapons in volume. And iron plus carbon gives you steel which is harder than bronze.
I.e. if you're a militaristic society, mass produced iron weapons means it's well and truly smiting time for your neighbors. Steel weapons plus a bit of organisation means gives you the Roman army, which subjugated most of Western Europe.
Well you need a mix of both. To parody Einstein's "Science without Religion Is Lame, Religion without Science Is Blind" in a way he'd no doubt have strongly objected to "Diplomacy without the threat of force Is lame, the threat of force without diplomacy is blind".
It's also debatable whether regimes like North Korea or Iran are actually deterrable in the way the USSR was and China hopefully is. After all Saddam's Iraq was not deterrable - given a threat of regime destruction it failed to leave Kuwait (which would have fractured the coalition stopped the first Gulf War) and also failed to disarm verifiably (which led to the US/UK invasion and Saddam being hanged by his enemies). A rational but evil regime - say the USSR or (hopefully) the PRC - would have realised the US was serious in each case and backed off. As someone observed of Saddam he was very good at reading his inner circle but absolutely hopeless at reading the intentions of the US or the 'international community'. Such an autistic regime - essentially one that followed 'the threat of force without diplomacy' - way well decide to launch nukes even if that means the end of the regime.
And space is weaponized as soon as you become dependent on spy satellites and GPS. Launching a few Rods From God kinetic bombardment satellites doesn't change that.
Right now North Korea has a missile which could reach the US, and nuclear warheads. It threatens to start a nuclear war almost on a weekly basis. Previous attempts at diplomacy have completely failed to stop its progress to developing the components for a nuclear tipped ICBM. I'd say that at some point in the future having the means to stop that ICBM being launched or destroying it in the boost phase may well save a US city from destruction. And would save many North Korean cities from being zapped when the US retaliates.
Now you may say "let's let other people deal with this". And as a Brit, I sympathize. The difference is that the UK could punt stuff to the US after WWII. The US has no other compatible power to do that to.
And if you're interested in 'Diplomacy without the threat of force', the UK tried that in the run up to WWII. It almost cost the country. And the US doesn't have anyone who can come in and save it, the way the US did for the UK in WWII.
Wright's examination led to development of a similar British system codenamed SATYR, used throughout the 1950s by the British, Americans, Canadians and Australians.
There were later models of the device, some with more complex internal structure (the center post under the membrane attached to a helix, probably to increase Q). Maximizing the Q-factor was one of the engineering priorities, as this allowed higher selectivity to the illuminating signal frequency, and therefore higher operating distance and also higher acoustic sensitivity.[8]
The CIA ran a secret research program at the Dutch Radar Laboratory (NRP) in Noordwijk (Netherlands) from 1954 to approximately 1967 to create its own covert listening devices based on a dipole antenna with a detector diode (crystal) and a small microphone amplifier. The devices were developed under the Easy Chair research contract[9] and were known as Easy Chair Mark I (1955), Mark II (1956), Mark III (1958), Mark IV (1961) and Mark V (1962).[10] Although initially they could not get the resonant cavity microphone to work reliably, several products involving Passive Elements (PEs) were developed for the CIA as a result of the research. In 1965, the NRP finally got a reliably working pulsed cavity resonator, but by that time the CIA was no longer interested in passive devices, largely because of the high levels of RF energy involved.[11]
Assuming the Cuban embassy sickness outbreak was caused by a microwave surveillance attempt, it was a very primitive one that used microwave beams powerful enough to have a biological effect rather like The Thing which the US did in 1945, and the US reverse engineered but lost interest because of the 'high levels of RF energy involved'.
A competent attempt would have used something like spread spectrum ones below the noise floor which are unlikely to have a biological effect, or lasers or something.
This system would require a lot of lead time to load the B-52, takeoff, fly to NK airspace, launch the cruise missile, and wait for its subsonic engines to propel it to the target.
The NK missile launch last week occurred with NO warning. They were able to fuel and prepare the missile for launch without detection.
Boeing didn't need to do that because the United Launch Alliance - Boeing and Lockheed - had a monopoly on launches and so it didn't need to improve anything.
Now Musk is competing with them they're under a bit more pressure. Competition is a good thing.
In fact the only reason the US got to the moon was because of competition with the USSR. Post Cold War the US stopped doing manned space flight above LEO, and so did everyone else.
The DPRK has been declaring war, or claiming war has been declared against it 200 times since 1997. It's basically the default thing for the DPRK to do.
Despite the very public statement, Ri's comments are far from the first time the DPRK has claimed that declarations of war have been made against it.
The phrase "declaration of war" appears in Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) English language articles over 200 times since 1997 - a search of NK Pro's KCNA Watch database shows - and many of those entries echo Ri's press conference.
In fact, Ri's comments aren't even the first time that North Korea has claimed Trump himself has declared war on the country.
On September 22 and 23, six articles were published by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in response to Trump's UN General Assembly (UNGA) speech on September 19, during which he threatened to "totally destroy" North Korea
"The United States has great strength and patience but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea," Trump said during his UNGA address.
The six KCNA articles carried statements from the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country of the DPRK (CPRC), the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea (CC, WPK), various military officials and citizens, all of whom claimed the speech represented a declaration of war.
"Trump's rubbish is the open declaration of war against our supreme dignity, state, social system and people, and an unpardonable extra-large provocation," the CPRC statement said, according to KCNA.
So aside from Trump's recent comments, what constitutes a declaration of war in the eyes of the North Korean state?
THE COUNTRY THAT CRIED WAR
In April, KCNA published a memorandum by the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) that provided a recap of what, it claimed, were declarations of war against North Korea.
A review of the memorandum reveals a broad set of criteria. For one, policies from North Korea's opponents have been cited as a declaration of war.
In 2003, for instance, the MFA considered President George Bush to have openly declared "nuclear war" against North Korea "by putting it as a target of preemptive nuclear strike," according to the memorandum.
Accusations against the DPRK also qualified. Again in 2003, KCNA said that U.S. claims that North Korea was engaged in "drug smuggling, counterfeiting of money, suppression of religion, human traffic (sic) and training of computer hackers" as well increased pressure on aviation and merchant vessel activity, qualified as a declaration of war "no matter how hard they may try to cover up them."
The adoption of sanctions against the country have also inspired this response from North Korean state media and in 2006, the year of North Korea's first nuclear test, it claimed that the adoption of UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions against the country was a "de facto 'declaration of war'."
"The UNSC 'resolution,' needless to say, cannot be construed otherwise than a declaration of a war against the DPRK," the MFA said, following the adoption of Resolution 1718.
The same claim has been made repeatedly following the adoption of subsequent UNSC resolutions as well as after the U.S.'s imposition of unilateral sanctions. Further UN action against North Korea has also inspired similar responses.
In November 2014, a UNGA committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of a draft resolution recommending that North Korea be referred to the International Criminal Court.
North Korea's National Defence Commission (NDC) responded with the following statement: "The brigandish 'resolution' against the DPRK's genuine human rights means the most undisguised war declaration to infringe upon its sovereignty," the November 23 NDC statement read.
In a situation where North Korea is brandishing a nuclear tipped ICBM and threatening to launch it at the US a bit like a crazy person with a gun doing a suicide by cop, all of those start to seem like they'd be very nice to have.
Giant, no-caps headings are still a terrific alternative to the tired and needlessly skeuomorphic concept of "tabs." Windows Phone's almost complete lack of borders in favor of cleverly utilized bands of negative space still makes it one of the best looking interfaces around. Live tiles are still colorful, and striking, and a somehow weirdly fun take on icons, even if an army of widget-squares maybe isn't quite as nice as having a proper notification hub.
However look at the comments
You don't find Windows 8 hard to support?
"Are you on the desktop or "tile" screen?" "What's the tile screen?" "The screen with all those tiles..." "Oh...no, I'm on the desktop." "Can you hit the Windows key and get back to the tile screen?" "Where's the Windows key?" "On the bottom row of your keyboard." "Oh, I see it. OK I'm there." "Now hit Windows + I and a menu will pop out of the right side" "It does, but every time I move my mouse near it it disappears..." "*sigh*"
I didn't say it's easy to support. I said it's not that hard of an OS to us once you actually try. It's terrible to support because people are fucking stupid. That's where WebEx comes in handy.
Windows Phone managed to stagger on for one more release before Microsoft killed it.
You're not supposed to use the 'Music App' from the company who sold you the hardware. You're supposed to hunt for third party apps in the wild, braving spyware and adware, like MEN used to do.
Tim Cook is basically playing the role of Leto Atreides here. He knows his rule is tyrannical and he's decided to start The Scattering to third party applications.
People complain when I mention Tulip Mania, so instead I will tell a joke
Jeremy Sloan asked his son Michael what he'd like for his upcoming sixth birthday. Michael said he wanted a hamster, so Jeremy visited the local pet shop and found the perfect hamster. The little guy was in the peak of health, so he bought it on the spot. He also bought a cage with a wheel, some food and a water bottle. As he was paying for the birthday present, the store owner said, "Any problems whatsoever, just come back here. I live right above the shop and I'll help you out any time you want."
Jeremy put the hamster and cage in his car and drove home. He left them in there until his son had gone to bed so that he wouldn't see them when he brought them in. Michael's birthday was the next day, so Jeremy got up early to wrap the presents and to check on the hamster. He was horrified to see the hamster was dead at the bottom of the cage; it's legs stiff in the air. He knew his son would be distraught as the boy had talked about nothing else for weeks. Quickly, Jeremy put on his coat and drove round to the pet shop and knocked on the owner's door. He explained the problem and the owner was quite understanding and gave Jeremy a new hamster, refusing payment for it
Jeremy asked, "What can I do with the old one? I don't want to bury it as the cat may dig it up and I don't want to throw it away in case my son sees it in the bin"
The shop owner replied, "What I do is mix up a strong sugar solution - about 1.5 kg of sugar to a litre of water. Bring that to a boil and then add the hamster. Simmer it about two hours, stirring periodically. It makes quite a nice jam."
Jeremy looked a little bewildered, but says thank you and raced back home. He gave the new hamster to Michael who was absolutely thrilled with it. He dashed off to play with it the rest of the day. Jeremy decided it was a good time to get rid of the dead hamster, so he tries the pet shop owner's recipe. He finds the sugar in the pantry and brings the water to a boil. After a couple hours, the mixture has become jam-like so Jeremy takes a spoonful, blows on it till it's cooler, and tastes it. It's absolutely disgusting. He's so revolted that he throws the rest of it out the kitchen window, into the flower bed below
A couple days later, Jeremy noticed that daffodils were springing up under his kitchen window, right where he tossed that awful concoction. "That's odd", he thinks to himself, "I've never had daffodils before"
Next day, his son asks him to take him to the pet shop to get some more food for his hamster. So Jeremy and Michael go to the store, and while Michael is looking at new hamster toys, the owner asks Jeremy, "Did you try that recipe I gave you?"
"Yes, but it tasted so awful that I threw it out the window. Odd thing is, I've got daffodils springing up there now."
"Daffodils?" asked the store owner, "Are you sure? You usually get tulips from hamster jam.
OK, gather the responses from this forum and show to him.
IRQL is derived on the hardware interrupt level (the interrupt controller register). Historically this is the PDP/VAX-11 feature, and thus a VMS feature, though things are going back - in modern x64 CPUs, you have CR8 register as APIC TPR, so, once again the IRQL register is embedded to the CPU.
But it is too convinient to also implement "preemptivity suspend" as an IRQL raise. After all, ISRs run with preemptivity suspended.
The people who built DEC's VMS operating system also helped design the processors that DEC used, and many of them came to Microsoft and designed Windows NT, which was the basis for modern versions of Windows, including Windows XP and Windows 7. These guys wanted a way to disable (very quickly) just some of the interrupts in the system. They considered it useful to hold off interrupts from some sources while servicing interrupts from other sources.
They also realized that, just as you must acquire locks in the same order everywhere in your code to avoid deadlocks, you must also service interrupts with the same relative priority every time. It doesn't work if the clock interrupts are sometimes more important than the IDE controller's interrupts and sometimes they aren't.
Interrupts are frequently called "Interrupt ReQuests" and the priority of a specific IRQ is its Level. These letters, all run together, are IRQL.
So if you lay out all the interrupt sources in the system and create a priority for each one, or sometimes a priority for each group, you can start to do interesting things.
Consider a spinlock. Spinlocks (at least in the traditional sense) are implemented by having a processor spin in a tight loop trying to atomically modify a variable. The cache coherency hardware guarantees that only one processor can do that at a time, so lock acquisition goes only to the processor that succeeds. Other processors keep spinning until they succeed.
The processor that "owns" the lock needs to release the lock as soon as possible, as the other (waiting) processors are burning up processor time waiting to acquire the lock. So you really don't want to interrupt that processor and schedule some other thread for execution, causing all the waiters to spin until the owning thread is rescheduled.
In this situation, some operating systems encourage the owner of the spinlock to disable all interrupts so that the code can't be interrupted. (Note, too, that interrupts really need to be disabled before trying to acquire the lock, or the thread might be interrupted between acquiring the lock and disabling interrupts.)
The designers of VMS and NT decided that they didn't want to disable all interrupts just because some code somewhere acquired a spinlock. Some things shouldn't wait. TLB flushes, are a good example. So if only some interrupts are disabled while a spinlock is held, then you can still briefly interrupt the code that owns the lock for much more important tasks. Perhaps even more importantly, you can interrupt the processors which are spinning, waiting to acquire a spinlock for these important tasks, causing them to do something useful instead of just spinning.
Note that this means that every spinlock has an associated IRQL, and you have to use that IRQL consistently, or the machine will deadlock. In NT, by default, every spinlock has the same IRQL, called DISPATCH_LEVEL. DISPATCH_LEVEL means, essentially, that the interrupts which can cause a thread to stop running are disabled. (More about that later.)
2) "Oh No, things are much worse than we thought". A story based on an outlier which makes apocalyptic predictions
3) If anyone disputes this go to 1). Also accuse them of being an outlier which makes things seem less apocalyptic.
By which process the future is both known with perfect accuracy and continuously getting worse unless we adopt some expensive policy. Actually if you read carefully almost no one globally is adopting these policies. The few places that did - Germany for example - found their CO2 emissions rising, and many that ignored them completely like the US found CO2 emissions falling due to a switch from coal to fracked gas.
And if you look at instrument readings it's clear that the models overstated the amount of warming.
Ironically people like Matt Ridley who get denounced as deniers are making predictions which are near the bottom of the range of the model predictions. Meanwhile environmental activists are making predictions which are way above that range.
I can't help but read this in an exaggerated Russian accent, a bit like the one Pavel Chekov used when he talked about 'nuclear vessels' in Star Trek IV : The Voyage Home.
Yeah, and if it were the North Koreans or Cubans or some other third world Stalinist hellhole's spooks doing it, they may well have done it in an incompetent way that caused health problems due to them effectively microwaving the embassy people on too high a power.
If it was a competent country they'd have figured out how to do it in an undetectable way - e.g. spread spectrum signals near the noise floor
The rapid phase transition (chip rate Tc) signal has a larger bandwidth given that the rate is greater Rc (without changing the power of the original signal) and behaves similar to noise in such a way that their spectrums are similar for bandwidth in scope. In fact, the power density amplitude of the spread spectrum output signal is similar to the noise floor. The signal is âoehiddenâ under the noise
I remember having a vxWorks system on my desk that run an FTP server which could pull files off a NOR flash array. It easily outperformed the Windows PC on my desk for TCIP/IP and filesystem access, despite running a much slower CPU and having what by modern standards was really slow flash memory (of course of the time it wasn't too bad - only slightly slower on a read than uncached main memory)
And when you traced through the code you could see why. It used zbuf TCP, all the code was Ring 0, and the most common case for a filesystem read call was only about a dozen instructions - basically see if the data is in the same buffer as last time and if so return data from there.
And you could fit the whole thing - kernel, application, filesystem, TCP/IP and even an FTP server and shell for debugging - into 64-128K.
The shell was great too - if you typed
foo ( 1, 2, "aa" )
All it did was lookup foo in the symbol table and pass the arguments too it. Which means you leaked data for strings, but that didn't matter because it only happened when debugging/troubleshooting and you could just reboot to get it back. Rebooting took a couple of seconds.
Absolutely awesome software. It was like using a 70's or 80's version of Unix but it was hard realtime too - they documented the interrupt latency for each architecture.
Downside was it had a rather high licence fee and the system I worked on had no memory protection at all. Windriver had vxVMI which offered memory protection but the place I worked at had decided it was too expensive.
vxVMI just swapped the page table when a process was switched.
Two former US officials with a background in intelligence and surveillance said they had doubts that the health problems were the result of a deliberate attack with a sonic weapon. They pointed out that the symptoms were first noticed in late 2016, when US-Cuban relations were the best they had been in decades, following the visit of Barack Obama to Havana.
CNN quoted a US official saying Washington was investigating whether a third country was involved as "payback" for actions the US has taken elsewhere and to "drive a wedge between the US and Cuba". However, at least one Canadian diplomat is also said to have been affected, suggesting whatever happened did not exclusively target the US embassy.
"You can't rule out harassment, but why do it when you want things to go well, and why the Canadians? Nobody dislikes the Canadians!" said James Lewis, a former state department official and US military adviser with expertise in intelligence and spy technology.
Lewis said it was much more likely that a sonic surveillance device, designed to remotely pick up the vibrations caused by speech, could have been wrongly configured and emitted harmful sound waves as a result.
"We know with 100% certainly that the embassies are under surveillance, and the technology being used could just be crude and over-powered," he added. Although Nauert had said the Cuban incidents was unprecedented, Lewis pointed to a wave of health problems at the US embassy in Moscow in the 1970s thought to be linked to the use of microwave surveillance devices.
John Sipher, who spent 28 years in the CIA's National Clandestine Service, argued that while direct targeting of US diplomats is rare, unintended harm caused by surveillance efforts that go wrong are much more common.
"These efforts, while designed to further surveillance and eavesdropping and not to cause malicious damage, nevertheless risked or resulted in residual physical harm to US diplomats," Sipher said in a commentary on the Just Security website.
Also used by the UK and US to spy on Russians. Peter Wright worked out how to do it with the sides of filing cabinets, and hence not need to give Trojan Horse gifts
The US is quite justified to say to the Cubans 'It's a small island. It's also a police state. You have a good intelligence service. You probably know who's doing it. Get them to stop. Until then no more diplomats".
All these people mocking the idea are probably the paid Russian trolls I keep getting warned about. Of course the irony is the same people warning me about Russian trolls are the ones mocking this story.
I don't understand why, when Guillain Barre syndrome was discovered, they didn't just kill Guillain Barre, burn his body and cut the problem off at the root.
Slashdot Mirror
Well Intel have clearly stated they thing executing SSE instructions via emulation is just as infringing as executing them in hardware.
However Microsoft, Qualcomm and the hardware vendors seem like they're going to launch Snapdragon based devices with an x86 emulator. I suppose we'll have to see what happens - Intel might license its patents. Or it might sue.
Interestingly in the Transmeta case, Transmeta sued Intel. Intel then sued over SIMD patents. And the license fees ended up going from Intel to Transmeta. Then again Transmeta left the CPU market soon after, so maybe Intel got what it wanted in return for its license fees.
Saddam agreed to complete disarmament and full inspections prior to the invasion, but not until the US and UK were on his doorstep. He even offered exile for himself. However the "coalition of the willing" ignored him and invaded anyway.
He didn't leave Kuwait before the Gulf War. And he didn't disarm verifiably before the invasion - he maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity for fear of Iran, according to George Piro who interrogated him for the FBI
https://archives.fbi.gov/archi...
"Saddam misled the world into believing that he had weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to the war because he feared another invasion by Iran, but he did fully intend to rebuild his WMD program."
That turned out well. And the DPRK was watching. They know that they can't trust the USA to let them exist unless they are in a position to make them pay dearly for invading. Kim doesn't want to end up like Saddam or Ghadaffi.
The US won't attack the DPRK because it has enough conventional weapons to cause mass carnage in South Korea. Then again if you're Kim, maybe the fact that people don't want to see Korean killed doesn't even occur to you, because his regime has killed a lot of Koreans - ones in the South when the North invaded and loads in the North due to starvation, concentration camps and so on.
Other countries without much of an effective military seem to manage okay from a diplomatic standpoint.
Well it depends what you mean. The UK does OK diplomatically, but then it spends 2% of GDP on defence, has nukes and aircraft carriers and has the US as a close ally. UK diplomatic policy independent of the US wouldn't be effective. In fact the only times the UK operated independent of the US - Suez or the Falklands for example - it either lost diplomatically or had to use its military to get anything done. France mirrors the UK, except with no US alliance. Germany spends 1% on defence but has NATO to back it up. In fact most NATO countries don't spend 2% and freeloaded on the US to defend them in the Cold War. Post Cold War they're effective if they can shame the US into action, but ineffective with when they can't.
The DPRK's leadership just wants to exist. They are no real threat (or haven't been until the US pushed them into it).
Except they threaten war with almost everyone. They've killed their own people. They've attacked South Korea on multiple occasions. Now they've got nuclear ICBMs they could easily put the US in a situation where it attacks them. I.e. nukes haven't brought them security. Of course inside North Korea, you'd be killed for saying that. Which is what makes them an autistic regime. And that in turn makes them dangerous.
It's ridiculous. Just leave them alone and wait for their population to oust the leaders of a failed system. It's cheaper and safer for the planet.
What should the US do if North Korean fuels up an ICBM, puts a nuke on it and shows every sign of launching it, either at the US or a country the US is treaty bound to protect?
With prompt global strike you could hit the missile on the ground with a non nuclear weapon. With boost phase intercept you'd have a chance of hitting it in just after launch.
Earlier this week the DPRK offered diplomacy and the UN sent an envoy. The US's response so far has been "Not until you give up your nukes". Wut? You don't start a diplomatic exercise by making demands before you will agree to talks. There is no risk to talking unless you don't want a resolution.
The DPRK acts out because it gets rewarded for it. Clinton and Bush both did deals with them where they agreed to stop their nuclear and missile programs. South Korea and the US shipped them oil, food, and
As someone else pointed out above the iron in meteorites is metallic. If you didn't have that you'd have to smelt iron ore. Which required higher temperatures than bronze.
Though oddly enough once you can smelt iron it's easier to get iron ore than it is to get copper and tin or arsenic which you need for bronze.
So once you can smelt iron it's actually easier to get hold of the ore so you can make weapons in volume. And iron plus carbon gives you steel which is harder than bronze.
I.e. if you're a militaristic society, mass produced iron weapons means it's well and truly smiting time for your neighbors. Steel weapons plus a bit of organisation means gives you the Roman army, which subjugated most of Western Europe.
Well you need a mix of both. To parody Einstein's "Science without Religion Is Lame, Religion without Science Is Blind" in a way he'd no doubt have strongly objected to "Diplomacy without the threat of force Is lame, the threat of force without diplomacy is blind".
It's also debatable whether regimes like North Korea or Iran are actually deterrable in the way the USSR was and China hopefully is. After all Saddam's Iraq was not deterrable - given a threat of regime destruction it failed to leave Kuwait (which would have fractured the coalition stopped the first Gulf War) and also failed to disarm verifiably (which led to the US/UK invasion and Saddam being hanged by his enemies). A rational but evil regime - say the USSR or (hopefully) the PRC - would have realised the US was serious in each case and backed off. As someone observed of Saddam he was very good at reading his inner circle but absolutely hopeless at reading the intentions of the US or the 'international community'. Such an autistic regime - essentially one that followed 'the threat of force without diplomacy' - way well decide to launch nukes even if that means the end of the regime.
And space is weaponized as soon as you become dependent on spy satellites and GPS. Launching a few Rods From God kinetic bombardment satellites doesn't change that.
Right now North Korea has a missile which could reach the US, and nuclear warheads. It threatens to start a nuclear war almost on a weekly basis. Previous attempts at diplomacy have completely failed to stop its progress to developing the components for a nuclear tipped ICBM. I'd say that at some point in the future having the means to stop that ICBM being launched or destroying it in the boost phase may well save a US city from destruction. And would save many North Korean cities from being zapped when the US retaliates.
Now you may say "let's let other people deal with this". And as a Brit, I sympathize. The difference is that the UK could punt stuff to the US after WWII. The US has no other compatible power to do that to.
And if you're interested in 'Diplomacy without the threat of force', the UK tried that in the run up to WWII. It almost cost the country. And the US doesn't have anyone who can come in and save it, the way the US did for the UK in WWII.
The US didn't need to reverse engineer the Cuba embassy weapon. Both the US and USSR knew about that technology for ages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Wright's examination led to development of a similar British system codenamed SATYR, used throughout the 1950s by the British, Americans, Canadians and Australians.
There were later models of the device, some with more complex internal structure (the center post under the membrane attached to a helix, probably to increase Q). Maximizing the Q-factor was one of the engineering priorities, as this allowed higher selectivity to the illuminating signal frequency, and therefore higher operating distance and also higher acoustic sensitivity.[8]
The CIA ran a secret research program at the Dutch Radar Laboratory (NRP) in Noordwijk (Netherlands) from 1954 to approximately 1967 to create its own covert listening devices based on a dipole antenna with a detector diode (crystal) and a small microphone amplifier. The devices were developed under the Easy Chair research contract[9] and were known as Easy Chair Mark I (1955), Mark II (1956), Mark III (1958), Mark IV (1961) and Mark V (1962).[10] Although initially they could not get the resonant cavity microphone to work reliably, several products involving Passive Elements (PEs) were developed for the CIA as a result of the research. In 1965, the NRP finally got a reliably working pulsed cavity resonator, but by that time the CIA was no longer interested in passive devices, largely because of the high levels of RF energy involved.[11]
Assuming the Cuban embassy sickness outbreak was caused by a microwave surveillance attempt, it was a very primitive one that used microwave beams powerful enough to have a biological effect rather like The Thing which the US did in 1945, and the US reverse engineered but lost interest because of the 'high levels of RF energy involved'.
A competent attempt would have used something like spread spectrum ones below the noise floor which are unlikely to have a biological effect, or lasers or something.
This system would require a lot of lead time to load the B-52, takeoff, fly to NK airspace, launch the cruise missile, and wait for its subsonic engines to propel it to the target.
The NK missile launch last week occurred with NO warning. They were able to fuel and prepare the missile for launch without detection.
This is why the US needs Prompt Global Strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Boeing didn't need to do that because the United Launch Alliance - Boeing and Lockheed - had a monopoly on launches and so it didn't need to improve anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now Musk is competing with them they're under a bit more pressure. Competition is a good thing.
In fact the only reason the US got to the moon was because of competition with the USSR. Post Cold War the US stopped doing manned space flight above LEO, and so did everyone else.
https://www.quora.com/Why-have...
(Almost) anything is possible technologically but as soon as you have a monopoly, progress will slow because there's no incentive to improve.
The DPRK has been declaring war, or claiming war has been declared against it 200 times since 1997. It's basically the default thing for the DPRK to do.
https://www.nknews.org/2017/09...
Despite the very public statement, Ri's comments are far from the first time the DPRK has claimed that declarations of war have been made against it.
The phrase "declaration of war" appears in Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) English language articles over 200 times since 1997 - a search of NK Pro's KCNA Watch database shows - and many of those entries echo Ri's press conference.
In fact, Ri's comments aren't even the first time that North Korea has claimed Trump himself has declared war on the country.
On September 22 and 23, six articles were published by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in response to Trump's UN General Assembly (UNGA) speech on September 19, during which he threatened to "totally destroy" North Korea
"The United States has great strength and patience but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea," Trump said during his UNGA address.
The six KCNA articles carried statements from the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country of the DPRK (CPRC), the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea (CC, WPK), various military officials and citizens, all of whom claimed the speech represented a declaration of war.
"Trump's rubbish is the open declaration of war against our supreme dignity, state, social system and people, and an unpardonable extra-large provocation," the CPRC statement said, according to KCNA.
So aside from Trump's recent comments, what constitutes a declaration of war in the eyes of the North Korean state?
THE COUNTRY THAT CRIED WAR
In April, KCNA published a memorandum by the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) that provided a recap of what, it claimed, were declarations of war against North Korea.
A review of the memorandum reveals a broad set of criteria. For one, policies from North Korea's opponents have been cited as a declaration of war.
In 2003, for instance, the MFA considered President George Bush to have openly declared "nuclear war" against North Korea "by putting it as a target of preemptive nuclear strike," according to the memorandum.
Accusations against the DPRK also qualified. Again in 2003, KCNA said that U.S. claims that North Korea was engaged in "drug smuggling, counterfeiting of money, suppression of religion, human traffic (sic) and training of computer hackers" as well increased pressure on aviation and merchant vessel activity, qualified as a declaration of war "no matter how hard they may try to cover up them."
The adoption of sanctions against the country have also inspired this response from North Korean state media and in 2006, the year of North Korea's first nuclear test, it claimed that the adoption of UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions against the country was a "de facto 'declaration of war'."
"The UNSC 'resolution,' needless to say, cannot be construed otherwise than a declaration of a war against the DPRK," the MFA said, following the adoption of Resolution 1718.
The same claim has been made repeatedly following the adoption of subsequent UNSC resolutions as well as after the U.S.'s imposition of unilateral sanctions. Further UN action against North Korea has also inspired similar responses.
In November 2014, a UNGA committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of a draft resolution recommending that North Korea be referred to the International Criminal Court.
North Korea's National Defence Commission (NDC) responded with the following statement: "The brigandish 'resolution' against the DPRK's genuine human rights means the most undisguised war declaration to infringe upon its sovereignty," the November 23 NDC statement read.
The joint milit
Prompt global strike! Rods from God! Boost phase intercept! Laser weapons!
In a situation where North Korea is brandishing a nuclear tipped ICBM and threatening to launch it at the US a bit like a crazy person with a gun doing a suicide by cop, all of those start to seem like they'd be very nice to have.
You need to listen to this to get your blood lust up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Gizmodo gave Windows Phone 8.1 a positive review, and it's full of UX nerd nonsense like this.
https://gizmodo.com/windows-ph...
Giant, no-caps headings are still a terrific alternative to the tired and needlessly skeuomorphic concept of "tabs." Windows Phone's almost complete lack of borders in favor of cleverly utilized bands of negative space still makes it one of the best looking interfaces around. Live tiles are still colorful, and striking, and a somehow weirdly fun take on icons, even if an army of widget-squares maybe isn't quite as nice as having a proper notification hub.
However look at the comments
You don't find Windows 8 hard to support?
"Are you on the desktop or "tile" screen?"
"What's the tile screen?"
"The screen with all those tiles..."
"Oh...no, I'm on the desktop."
"Can you hit the Windows key and get back to the tile screen?"
"Where's the Windows key?"
"On the bottom row of your keyboard."
"Oh, I see it. OK I'm there."
"Now hit Windows + I and a menu will pop out of the right side"
"It does, but every time I move my mouse near it it disappears..."
"*sigh*"
I didn't say it's easy to support. I said it's not that hard of an OS to us once you actually try. It's terrible to support because people are fucking stupid. That's where WebEx comes in handy.
Windows Phone managed to stagger on for one more release before Microsoft killed it.
You're not supposed to use the 'Music App' from the company who sold you the hardware. You're supposed to hunt for third party apps in the wild, braving spyware and adware, like MEN used to do.
Tim Cook is basically playing the role of Leto Atreides here. He knows his rule is tyrannical and he's decided to start The Scattering to third party applications.
People complain when I mention Tulip Mania, so instead I will tell a joke
Jeremy Sloan asked his son Michael what he'd like for his upcoming sixth birthday. Michael said he wanted a hamster, so Jeremy visited the local pet shop and found the perfect hamster. The little guy was in the peak of health, so he bought it on the spot. He also bought a cage with a wheel, some food and a water bottle. As he was paying for the birthday present, the store owner said, "Any problems whatsoever, just come back here. I live right above the shop and I'll help you out any time you want."
Jeremy put the hamster and cage in his car and drove home. He left them in there until his son had gone to bed so that he wouldn't see them when he brought them in. Michael's birthday was the next day, so Jeremy got up early to wrap the presents and to check on the hamster. He was horrified to see the hamster was dead at the bottom of the cage; it's legs stiff in the air. He knew his son would be distraught as the boy had talked about nothing else for weeks. Quickly, Jeremy put on his coat and drove round to the pet shop and knocked on the owner's door. He explained the problem and the owner was quite understanding and gave Jeremy a new hamster, refusing payment for it
Jeremy asked, "What can I do with the old one? I don't want to bury it as the cat may dig it up and I don't want to throw it away in case my son sees it in the bin"
The shop owner replied, "What I do is mix up a strong sugar solution - about 1.5 kg of sugar to a litre of water. Bring that to a boil and then add the hamster. Simmer it about two hours, stirring periodically. It makes quite a nice jam."
Jeremy looked a little bewildered, but says thank you and raced back home. He gave the new hamster to Michael who was absolutely thrilled with it. He dashed off to play with it the rest of the day. Jeremy decided it was a good time to get rid of the dead hamster, so he tries the pet shop owner's recipe. He finds the sugar in the pantry and brings the water to a boil. After a couple hours, the mixture has become jam-like so Jeremy takes a spoonful, blows on it till it's cooler, and tastes it. It's absolutely disgusting. He's so revolted that he throws the rest of it out the kitchen window, into the flower bed below
A couple days later, Jeremy noticed that daffodils were springing up under his kitchen window, right where he tossed that awful concoction. "That's odd", he thinks to himself, "I've never had daffodils before"
Next day, his son asks him to take him to the pet shop to get some more food for his hamster. So Jeremy and Michael go to the store, and while Michael is looking at new hamster toys, the owner asks Jeremy, "Did you try that recipe I gave you?"
"Yes, but it tasted so awful that I threw it out the window. Odd thing is, I've got daffodils springing up there now."
"Daffodils?" asked the store owner, "Are you sure? You usually get tulips from hamster jam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The idea of IRQLs came from VMS.
http://www.osronline.com/showT...
OK, gather the responses from this forum and show to him.
IRQL is derived on the hardware interrupt level (the interrupt controller
register). Historically this is the PDP/VAX-11 feature, and thus a VMS feature,
though things are going back - in modern x64 CPUs, you have CR8 register as APIC
TPR, so, once again the IRQL register is embedded to the CPU.
But it is too convinient to also implement "preemptivity suspend" as an IRQL
raise. After all, ISRs run with preemptivity suspended.
Though perhaps the name IRQL was invented for NT
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c...
The people who built DEC's VMS operating system also helped design the processors that DEC used, and many of them came to Microsoft and designed Windows NT, which was the basis for modern versions of Windows, including Windows XP and Windows 7. These guys wanted a way to disable (very quickly) just some of the interrupts in the system. They considered it useful to hold off interrupts from some sources while servicing interrupts from other sources.
They also realized that, just as you must acquire locks in the same order everywhere in your code to avoid deadlocks, you must also service interrupts with the same relative priority every time. It doesn't work if the clock interrupts are sometimes more important than the IDE controller's interrupts and sometimes they aren't.
Interrupts are frequently called "Interrupt ReQuests" and the priority of a specific IRQ is its Level. These letters, all run together, are IRQL.
So if you lay out all the interrupt sources in the system and create a priority for each one, or sometimes a priority for each group, you can start to do interesting things.
Consider a spinlock. Spinlocks (at least in the traditional sense) are implemented by having a processor spin in a tight loop trying to atomically modify a variable. The cache coherency hardware guarantees that only one processor can do that at a time, so lock acquisition goes only to the processor that succeeds. Other processors keep spinning until they succeed.
The processor that "owns" the lock needs to release the lock as soon as possible, as the other (waiting) processors are burning up processor time waiting to acquire the lock. So you really don't want to interrupt that processor and schedule some other thread for execution, causing all the waiters to spin until the owning thread is rescheduled.
In this situation, some operating systems encourage the owner of the spinlock to disable all interrupts so that the code can't be interrupted. (Note, too, that interrupts really need to be disabled before trying to acquire the lock, or the thread might be interrupted between acquiring the lock and disabling interrupts.)
The designers of VMS and NT decided that they didn't want to disable all interrupts just because some code somewhere acquired a spinlock. Some things shouldn't wait. TLB flushes, are a good example. So if only some interrupts are disabled while a spinlock is held, then you can still briefly interrupt the code that owns the lock for much more important tasks. Perhaps even more importantly, you can interrupt the processors which are spinning, waiting to acquire a spinlock for these important tasks, causing them to do something useful instead of just spinning.
Note that this means that every spinlock has an associated IRQL, and you have to use that IRQL consistently, or the machine will deadlock. In NT, by default, every spinlock has the same IRQL, called DISPATCH_LEVEL. DISPATCH_LEVEL means, essentially, that the interrupts which can cause a thread to stop running are disabled. (More about that later.)
Interestingly you had
I actually quite liked the militant Civic Nationalism in The Postman.
1) The Science is Settled
2) "Oh No, things are much worse than we thought". A story based on an outlier which makes apocalyptic predictions
3) If anyone disputes this go to 1). Also accuse them of being an outlier which makes things seem less apocalyptic.
By which process the future is both known with perfect accuracy and continuously getting worse unless we adopt some expensive policy. Actually if you read carefully almost no one globally is adopting these policies. The few places that did - Germany for example - found their CO2 emissions rising, and many that ignored them completely like the US found CO2 emissions falling due to a switch from coal to fracked gas.
And if you look at instrument readings it's clear that the models overstated the amount of warming.
See for example
https://imgur.com/a/w5KKQ
From this talk
https://www.thegwpf.org/matt-r...
Ironically people like Matt Ridley who get denounced as deniers are making predictions which are near the bottom of the range of the model predictions. Meanwhile environmental activists are making predictions which are way above that range.
objectively the best
Making fun of the problem eh?
Nice try, Ivan.
irrevocable evidences
I can't help but read this in an exaggerated Russian accent, a bit like the one Pavel Chekov used when he talked about 'nuclear vessels' in Star Trek IV : The Voyage Home.
Yeah, and if it were the North Koreans or Cubans or some other third world Stalinist hellhole's spooks doing it, they may well have done it in an incompetent way that caused health problems due to them effectively microwaving the embassy people on too high a power.
If it was a competent country they'd have figured out how to do it in an undetectable way - e.g. spread spectrum signals near the noise floor
http://www.ni.com/white-paper/...
The rapid phase transition (chip rate Tc) signal has a larger bandwidth given that the rate is greater Rc (without changing the power of the original signal) and behaves similar to noise in such a way that their spectrums are similar for bandwidth in scope. In fact, the power density amplitude of the spread spectrum output signal is similar to the noise floor. The signal is âoehiddenâ under the noise
I remember having a vxWorks system on my desk that run an FTP server which could pull files off a NOR flash array. It easily outperformed the Windows PC on my desk for TCIP/IP and filesystem access, despite running a much slower CPU and having what by modern standards was really slow flash memory (of course of the time it wasn't too bad - only slightly slower on a read than uncached main memory)
And when you traced through the code you could see why. It used zbuf TCP, all the code was Ring 0, and the most common case for a filesystem read call was only about a dozen instructions - basically see if the data is in the same buffer as last time and if so return data from there.
And you could fit the whole thing - kernel, application, filesystem, TCP/IP and even an FTP server and shell for debugging - into 64-128K.
The shell was great too - if you typed
All it did was lookup foo in the symbol table and pass the arguments too it. Which means you leaked data for strings, but that didn't matter because it only happened when debugging/troubleshooting and you could just reboot to get it back. Rebooting took a couple of seconds.
Absolutely awesome software. It was like using a 70's or 80's version of Unix but it was hard realtime too - they documented the interrupt latency for each architecture.
Downside was it had a rather high licence fee and the system I worked on had no memory protection at all. Windriver had vxVMI which offered memory protection but the place I worked at had decided it was too expensive.
vxVMI just swapped the page table when a process was switched.
The inhabitants of Barnsley in the UK, on learning of Parkinson's Disease, killed all the people in the town with that name.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
Two former US officials with a background in intelligence and surveillance said they had doubts that the health problems were the result of a deliberate attack with a sonic weapon. They pointed out that the symptoms were first noticed in late 2016, when US-Cuban relations were the best they had been in decades, following the visit of Barack Obama to Havana.
CNN quoted a US official saying Washington was investigating whether a third country was involved as "payback" for actions the US has taken elsewhere and to "drive a wedge between the US and Cuba". However, at least one Canadian diplomat is also said to have been affected, suggesting whatever happened did not exclusively target the US embassy.
"You can't rule out harassment, but why do it when you want things to go well, and why the Canadians? Nobody dislikes the Canadians!" said James Lewis, a former state department official and US military adviser with expertise in intelligence and spy technology.
Lewis said it was much more likely that a sonic surveillance device, designed to remotely pick up the vibrations caused by speech, could have been wrongly configured and emitted harmful sound waves as a result.
"We know with 100% certainly that the embassies are under surveillance, and the technology being used could just be crude and over-powered," he added. Although Nauert had said the Cuban incidents was unprecedented, Lewis pointed to a wave of health problems at the US embassy in Moscow in the 1970s thought to be linked to the use of microwave surveillance devices.
John Sipher, who spent 28 years in the CIA's National Clandestine Service, argued that while direct targeting of US diplomats is rare, unintended harm caused by surveillance efforts that go wrong are much more common.
"These efforts, while designed to further surveillance and eavesdropping and not to cause malicious damage, nevertheless risked or resulted in residual physical harm to US diplomats," Sipher said in a commentary on the Just Security website.
Could be surveillance
https://science.slashdot.org/c...
Used by the Russians to spy on the US embassy - they needed to embed a resonator into a Great Seal of the US which they presented as a gift.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Also used by the UK and US to spy on Russians. Peter Wright worked out how to do it with the sides of filing cabinets, and hence not need to give Trojan Horse gifts
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
The US is quite justified to say to the Cubans 'It's a small island. It's also a police state. You have a good intelligence service. You probably know who's doing it. Get them to stop. Until then no more diplomats".
All these people mocking the idea are probably the paid Russian trolls I keep getting warned about. Of course the irony is the same people warning me about Russian trolls are the ones mocking this story.
I don't understand why, when Guillain Barre syndrome was discovered, they didn't just kill Guillain Barre, burn his body and cut the problem off at the root.