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As I was listening to Anil talk about daemons spawning processes and sysadmins killing them, I thought, "What a great user interface!" Imagine running around with a shotgun blowing away your daemons and processes, never needing to type kill -9 again. Sneaking up on my processes. In 1981, Vernor Vinge introduced the concept of cyberspace to the reading public in his novella True Names , <a href="truenames.html"> in which characters could plug into a virtual universe where their actions in a fantasy world mapped to performing sophisticated actions on the network. For example, walking along a tricky path through a swamp would be the same as going through a firewall. The mapping of abstract operations to an intuitive environment is a difficult problem. There are two distinct obstacles: the environment must be intuitive and the mapping must be accurate. If the environmen...