Maybe this is begging the question, but WHY are you mad? It seems rather unlikely that this leak will hurt you in the slightest way in terms of sales of the future game. The people who have the hardware capable of trying it and are savvy enough to download it mostly know what "alpha" means. Anyway, if you were really worried about fans losing interest because of buggy demos, why release tech demos? I recall some of the Quake tech demos were extremely buggy and almost unplayable on some computers, yet it didn't seem to dampen fan enthusiasm.
The only thing I see that might be irritating is that ATI seems to have broken trust with you.
Good points. Nature can't find the VERY BEST solution to a problem, at least not very quickly. BUT, I'm saying that for very small and somewhat simple organisms that reproduce, the cell found in biology is probably near the optimal result. Dexel suggests that tinier machines can work, but I think that thermal limits will prevent precision machinery at that level. Certainly biology doesn't work that way, it instead relies on thermal chaos for many organisms to work.
Plus, I don't see why fears of grey goo mean much because by the time its possible to design an intricate molecular machine of this complexity designing a simple "kill molecule" that gums it up and stops it will be much easier.
HOWEVER, I do agree that in the NEAR future, NOT 2040 (like TODAY) a killer virus could be created. Inserting genes into viruses has already successfully been proven : if the evil person added say the mutated genes that cause cancer to a known contagious virus you would have a death weapon. Essentially, the victim might not even get sick from the virus but would have hundreds or thousands of his cells become cancerous (with a form of cancer chosen that has no known drugs that are effective against it). Hundreds of tumors would break out and irrevocably kill the person.
While such a virus probably would have weaknesses and countermeasures, the parts of the world without the technology to counter them would die off horribly.
I honestly don't see what the big deal is. Radio interference where a signal travels farther than intended and interferes with other communications is an old problem, and inherent in most communication methods in use. Its a technical problem, and should be treated like one with resolution in an objective manner. The digital T.V. station should probably change the frequency its using (since the police radios may not be able to without buying new ones)
The whole problem with envisioning self replicating nanotech engines is that most people don't realize this self replication would only occur in carefully controlled conditions. That is, conditions not found on earth or anywhere else in the solar system. The goo would only be able to reproduce in special vats where enough energy and the right materials is available, as well as cooling systems to get rid of all the waste heat from thousands of nanotech engines. OTHERWISE, these devices would already exist (actually, they do. Its called the cell, and its a near optimal result for the given conditions. That's why the fear of some magical "grey goo" going wild and eating up everything is unfounded, because that would imply creating a life form far superior to current life and out-competing it)
As for destroying tanks, a far more deadly weapon would be small autonomous robots that swarm in by the hundreds...about the size of a baseball or so. They would be equipped with shaped charges.
Actually, "grey goo" per say is pretty much impossible, due to thermodynamics (heat engines at the molecular level are very inefficient, and it takes a LOT of energy to melt rock or steel)
The 10,000 times comes from the concept that thousands of users can share the exact same frequency (yes, even at 60 hz or lower though there wouldn't be much point) if the tuning hardware listens only to the signal coming from a particular point.
That is, with thousands of people using the same frequency it appears to be totally random noise unless your receiver is focused on a spot perhaps a few hundred meters in diameter. To any outside observers this communication method would seem like noise. And yes, bandwidth is pretty much infinite using this method (between two parties it isn't but for the entire system it basically is), and no, regulation by government is not needed with this transmission method because its impossible to jam. Granted, you would require some sort of "hailing frequency" that would have to be policed, but once a communication session is started outside interference would be meaningless.
I said a $10 chip with todays technology....in 20 years it very well might be a 3 cent part.
Billions of years? Think again. There is a tremendous amount of evidence that technological progress is accelerating exponentially (and its been doing so even before humans existed on earth). Soon enough life from earth will hit the vertical part of the curve...advancing to the limits allowed by physics (if there are any.).
Note I said life from earth, obviously I mean later improved versions of intelligent life, not humans.
Yes, but if you follow the story many of the enemies are aiding or even responsible for the grey death, a virus that kills MILLIONS. I made sure to waste every single enemy on the levels where you are trying to stop the grey death. They, without a doubt, deserved it.
And my point was that none of these reasons are relevant. A few centuries, absolutely nothing compared to billions of years that have already passed, and none of these constraints will mean much.
"easier" compared to what? Current radios are thousands of times more advanced than smoke signals.
"cheaper" Umm cell phones already do some of this, they are semi-wideband devices. The fancy encoding can easily be done by a $10 chip with todays technology.
"faster" A more advanced communication protocol transmit information faster
"hassle of change". 10,000 times or better efficiency improvement is worth the hassle. Besides, even if the improvement were small over a period of centuries we'd do it anyway
physics constraints : physics means it is possible to have every radio on earth sharing the same band. To sort out which transmission you want to listen to you have to know where the sender is located. You then electronically focus your antennae on that spot, blocking all the other senders.
Why am I not convinced of this argument? You shouldn't be, either. Your standards for comparison : human politics, "design complexity" (compared to what? Today's electronics, certainly), stupid consumers (they CAN use a VCR that sets its own clock), using obsolete designs because they still work; don't mean much.
Do you really believe in a few centuries that any of these issues will still exist in there present form? Such a belief would be like thinking that problems with horse manure in city streets would be an ever present issue.
You can't predict the future, and neither can I, but I CAN prove to you that the best possible radio scheme appears as completely random noise to outside observers. A point which you haven't disputed. I can also prove to you that there is an overall long term tendency for humans, and life in general, to use more effective solutions to a given problem. Obviously better radios are a more effective solution, and obviously shutting down radios that waste spectrum is also a good idea.
3 Kelvin is the correct answer. Thanks for the link to alterslash, I do agree that I would rather the moderation were done by people who knew something.
LOL to be honest, its more likely that the aliens would never figure out the message. How would they know the bits mapped to numbers? How would they know that 5 random seeming numbers referred to atomic elements? Or how would they understand a chemical formula? Human height/population is meaningless without a scale, images might work if it weren't almost infindesmally unlikely for them to understand that we meant pixels.
No matter how smart the aliens were, a random seeming series of bits could mean anything.
*Ahem* All but the atomic clock signal would be transmitted more effectively if the beam is focused on the target. To communicate with a space probe, you would focus the signal at the dot not all over the sky (that's what we do now). To communicate with a distant planet you'd do the same thing.
Carrier signal? That's a relic from analog transmission...those WILL go away. Remember, a T.V. station to work in analog has to gobble an ENORMOUS chunk of spectrum...enough for dozens of equivalent bandwidth digital channels or an almost infinite number with more advanced techniques.
For the same reason, we would quit wasting spectrum with AM and shortwave...I'm sure you can cram thousands of times of much information in with better techniques.
Redundant signal? Yes, that's still done with more advanced systems BUT the redundancy uses a "key" so the same symbol might get mapped to 50 different modulations split between the channels. Giving the same noise as before.
Radar? I won't try to speculate on the future of radar but it would not surprise me at all if broadspectrum radars worked better and were harder to jam.
Re:Hate to rain on the protest march...
on
Airborne Mouse
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· Score: 2
Yes. You could try to counteract it with a motion of your own, but...
And yes, you could have your arm pinned against the wall from the acceleration, still as a statue but the mouse would think you were still trying to move the pointer in that direction.
Just because the phone system uses cheaper off the shelf routers and the TCP/IP protocol does NOT mean it will be particularly vulnerable to hacking. You are confusing the successful efforts of script kiddies to hack cheaply set up servers running commercial OSes with an entirely different problem. These routers, which are rarely hacked, use flash firmware and a standard hardware configuration. They are usually not remotely reprogrammable, and use extremely stable code that is short on features, long on reliability (the opposite of commercial OSes). Hacks of these backbone beats are EXTREMELY RARE...most failures are due to operator error.
No, I don't work for CISCO or the other companies, just explaing what they sell and why it works.
Who says these routers will be part of the internet, anyway. Its doubtful you'd be able to send packets to one. Hacking REAL SYSTEMS is a lot more difficult than the ignorant public believes it to be, in fact I'd say many true embedded systems cannot be hacked. (if you can't reprogram it because it has no writable memory, how exactly are you going to subvert it?)
Who says we will be listening at this intersection of time and space? Current theory is that civilizations/intelligent life advance stupendously fast. Remember all the current progress has been made in 100 years...out of BILLIONS. It seems almost inevitable that in another hundred years this era will end (the era of humans) and simple radio signals unless used in a deliberate communication attempt are unlikely.
So the odds that we would be able to pick up extremely weak signals from a developing civilization at a given time period of listening are so small to be negligable.
The SETI project is being done for religious reasons. (not organized religion...just a general feeling that if we discovered intelligent life we would feel we had a purpose)
That's odd....I don't remember our economy tanking right after the S&L bailout. I'm not saying it was necessarily a positive thing for us or the japanese to do it...just that saying it was the "cause" of the current Japanese economic troubles would be the epitome of ignorance.
Re:Hate to rain on the protest march...
on
Airborne Mouse
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· Score: 2
What's really ironic is that I just got a 5 rating for a comment I made before I read the article. Folks, don't depend on/. for reliable information even the high ranks are mostly rumor and hearsay.
Turns out the mouse has inertial sensors and I think lets you move it just like a regular mouse when airborne...you get the same mapping effect, just no desk needed. Sounds very tiring, but might be useful in cramped spaces where no desk is available (cars, airliners, ect)
BUT what if the monopoly, though resulting from free market pressure, cannot easily be competed with even though it is lazy? Microsoft is extremely difficult to compete with because
1. Software dev is very very time consuming and expensive. To get a truly "good" version of an application may take a decade of revisions and much money. Even if you DID have the money to make, say, a direct competitor to Office to really make it as good as what microsoft already has takes years.
2. Its a pain in the ass to use other operating systems for general purpose computing. Practically every program ever written runs under windows or via emulator. Yes, if all you need is say photoshop and similar tools then a mac is good and if you are into geeky stuff such as servers and databases Linux works. One of the real reasons OS X works better for some is that it is designed to appeal to artists, while Linux appeals to geeks. Both OSs provide a SPECIALIZED experience. This is the reason why the are better for SOME things.
3. Its a pain changing. Its a pain to switch software or operating system, its a pain to switch away from Office/Word when all your old documents are in a proprietary microsoft format.
4. The key features windows is missing do NOT really affect consumers that much. Yes, windows is unstable but if you turn the PC off after a few hours those memory leaks won't ever affect you. Yes, its insecure but most consumers have little information of importance stored on their PC, and recovering from a hacker just requires a recovery cd. Only when you get into servers do you need the absolute stability.
Consumers and business buyers want more FEATURES, not better ones. I'd far rather have less gimmicky features that are half broken and instead have a few absolutely reliable ones, but the business managers who give microsoft money would rather buy the system with more goodies and long spec sheets. It seems like a better bargain to them, like that lawn mower with 5 different grass collection options (even if only 1 of the works) seems to you.
But are libertarians willing to have the governent break up monopolies and "guilds" of producers that band together to drive everyone else out. Like a certain software maker?
Of course, due to the way our "just" court system works the big corporations are very difficult to actually stop with legal means, but the goverment is at least trying.
Hate to rain on the protest march...
on
Airborne Mouse
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· Score: 5, Insightful
But is this really any more accurate than, say, a joystick? The advantage of a mouse is that mouse movements by your hand map directly to your screen. With practice you can just move it and get very close to the desired point.
A joystick like device lets you control the rate of change of pointer position, not the position directly itself. While useful for some things, for aiming my railgun or getting work done this gadget is junk.
Well, on a related topic has anyone thought of this explanation for why SETI has found no results:
Most current radios, based on decades old tech, broadcast a very orderly signal. It is confined to a narrow band range, only one transmitter is allowed per channel, the data being transmitted is uncompressed and so has many repeating orderly patterns.
To increase capacity future radios will do the opposite.. They will broadcast compressed data that seems completely random, they will use a large swath of spectrum, they will repeat parts of the same signal across a large portion of the spectrum using a "chipping" algorithm. Even farther in the future, so many radios at once may be talking on the same spectrum that to identify a particular sender in order to communicate you'll have to use multiple antennaes and know his location (you'll share spectrum based on location).
What is the end result of advanced communication gear that intelligent minds develop? What is the optimal result? To an outside observer the signal will seem like pure, almost totally random noise. Only to the electronics of a particular receiver that has the correct encryption and chipping key will it seem like anything else.
THAT's why we can't hear anything. Trillions of sentient beings could communicate using this method and we wouldn't hear a thing.
A Sybian in a cell phone? Now that just might be a good idea. Of course, if you thought women talking on cellphones driving their 2 ton SUVs were bad enough, imagine that chaos if they were being pleasured by the sybian AND talking on the phone AND driving...
Not to mention, it will only cost 100-150 million to make Episode 3. They could release it for free and have enough money left over to make several more movies with the profits from the last two movies.
It said in the article IBM has been granted 3,411 patents this year, and makes 1.4 billion from royalties off existing patents.
I know slashdotters tend to be supportive of IBM because of their Linux funding, but 3400 patents??? I honestly don't think there are that many good, original ideas that can be discovered in one year. It sounds like IBM is abusing the system : I would strongly suspect that much of what they patent is fairly obvious to those in the know or has already occurred to someone else. But instead, IBM has the patents and plans to knee^H^H^H^H anyone who thinks of an idea they happened to have patented and tries to use it.
This is NOT how it was meant to be. Instead of protecting brilliant inventors who come up with nifty gadgets, these patents are basically a big corporation leaching off the future. With this many patents, I'm sure at least one of them could be argued to apply to just about any conceivable, REAL breakthrough that the REAL inventors make in the computer world. When that happens, IBM will send their lawyers to hit you up for money and you'll have to pay unless you are also a big corporation with enough lawyers on the payroll.
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Actually, its quite possible the chip in the phone is several times faster than your old desktop.
Maybe this is begging the question, but WHY are you mad? It seems rather unlikely that this leak will hurt you in the slightest way in terms of sales of the future game. The people who have the hardware capable of trying it and are savvy enough to download it mostly know what "alpha" means. Anyway, if you were really worried about fans losing interest because of buggy demos, why release tech demos? I recall some of the Quake tech demos were extremely buggy and almost unplayable on some computers, yet it didn't seem to dampen fan enthusiasm.
The only thing I see that might be irritating is that ATI seems to have broken trust with you.
Good points. Nature can't find the VERY BEST solution to a problem, at least not very quickly. BUT, I'm saying that for very small and somewhat simple organisms that reproduce, the cell found in biology is probably near the optimal result. Dexel suggests that tinier machines can work, but I think that thermal limits will prevent precision machinery at that level. Certainly biology doesn't work that way, it instead relies on thermal chaos for many organisms to work. Plus, I don't see why fears of grey goo mean much because by the time its possible to design an intricate molecular machine of this complexity designing a simple "kill molecule" that gums it up and stops it will be much easier. HOWEVER, I do agree that in the NEAR future, NOT 2040 (like TODAY) a killer virus could be created. Inserting genes into viruses has already successfully been proven : if the evil person added say the mutated genes that cause cancer to a known contagious virus you would have a death weapon. Essentially, the victim might not even get sick from the virus but would have hundreds or thousands of his cells become cancerous (with a form of cancer chosen that has no known drugs that are effective against it). Hundreds of tumors would break out and irrevocably kill the person. While such a virus probably would have weaknesses and countermeasures, the parts of the world without the technology to counter them would die off horribly.
I honestly don't see what the big deal is. Radio interference where a signal travels farther than intended and interferes with other communications is an old problem, and inherent in most communication methods in use. Its a technical problem, and should be treated like one with resolution in an objective manner. The digital T.V. station should probably change the frequency its using (since the police radios may not be able to without buying new ones)
Actually, a massively parallel processor running at 3 mhz or even slower would leave all known chips (including YOUR BRAIN) in the dust.
The whole problem with envisioning self replicating nanotech engines is that most people don't realize this self replication would only occur in carefully controlled conditions. That is, conditions not found on earth or anywhere else in the solar system. The goo would only be able to reproduce in special vats where enough energy and the right materials is available, as well as cooling systems to get rid of all the waste heat from thousands of nanotech engines. OTHERWISE, these devices would already exist (actually, they do. Its called the cell, and its a near optimal result for the given conditions. That's why the fear of some magical "grey goo" going wild and eating up everything is unfounded, because that would imply creating a life form far superior to current life and out-competing it)
As for destroying tanks, a far more deadly weapon would be small autonomous robots that swarm in by the hundreds...about the size of a baseball or so. They would be equipped with shaped charges.
Actually, "grey goo" per say is pretty much impossible, due to thermodynamics (heat engines at the molecular level are very inefficient, and it takes a LOT of energy to melt rock or steel)
The 10,000 times comes from the concept that thousands of users can share the exact same frequency (yes, even at 60 hz or lower though there wouldn't be much point) if the tuning hardware listens only to the signal coming from a particular point.
That is, with thousands of people using the same frequency it appears to be totally random noise unless your receiver is focused on a spot perhaps a few hundred meters in diameter. To any outside observers this communication method would seem like noise. And yes, bandwidth is pretty much infinite using this method (between two parties it isn't but for the entire system it basically is), and no, regulation by government is not needed with this transmission method because its impossible to jam. Granted, you would require some sort of "hailing frequency" that would have to be policed, but once a communication session is started outside interference would be meaningless.
I said a $10 chip with todays technology....in 20 years it very well might be a 3 cent part.
Billions of years? Think again. There is a tremendous amount of evidence that technological progress is accelerating exponentially (and its been doing so even before humans existed on earth). Soon enough life from earth will hit the vertical part of the curve...advancing to the limits allowed by physics (if there are any.).
Note I said life from earth, obviously I mean later improved versions of intelligent life, not humans.
Yes, but if you follow the story many of the enemies are aiding or even responsible for the grey death, a virus that kills MILLIONS. I made sure to waste every single enemy on the levels where you are trying to stop the grey death. They, without a doubt, deserved it.
And my point was that none of these reasons are relevant. A few centuries, absolutely nothing compared to billions of years that have already passed, and none of these constraints will mean much. "easier" compared to what? Current radios are thousands of times more advanced than smoke signals. "cheaper" Umm cell phones already do some of this, they are semi-wideband devices. The fancy encoding can easily be done by a $10 chip with todays technology. "faster" A more advanced communication protocol transmit information faster "hassle of change". 10,000 times or better efficiency improvement is worth the hassle. Besides, even if the improvement were small over a period of centuries we'd do it anyway physics constraints : physics means it is possible to have every radio on earth sharing the same band. To sort out which transmission you want to listen to you have to know where the sender is located. You then electronically focus your antennae on that spot, blocking all the other senders.
Why am I not convinced of this argument? You shouldn't be, either. Your standards for comparison : human politics, "design complexity" (compared to what? Today's electronics, certainly), stupid consumers (they CAN use a VCR that sets its own clock), using obsolete designs because they still work; don't mean much. Do you really believe in a few centuries that any of these issues will still exist in there present form? Such a belief would be like thinking that problems with horse manure in city streets would be an ever present issue. You can't predict the future, and neither can I, but I CAN prove to you that the best possible radio scheme appears as completely random noise to outside observers. A point which you haven't disputed. I can also prove to you that there is an overall long term tendency for humans, and life in general, to use more effective solutions to a given problem. Obviously better radios are a more effective solution, and obviously shutting down radios that waste spectrum is also a good idea. 3 Kelvin is the correct answer. Thanks for the link to alterslash, I do agree that I would rather the moderation were done by people who knew something.
LOL to be honest, its more likely that the aliens would never figure out the message. How would they know the bits mapped to numbers? How would they know that 5 random seeming numbers referred to atomic elements? Or how would they understand a chemical formula? Human height/population is meaningless without a scale, images might work if it weren't almost infindesmally unlikely for them to understand that we meant pixels. No matter how smart the aliens were, a random seeming series of bits could mean anything.
*Ahem* All but the atomic clock signal would be transmitted more effectively if the beam is focused on the target. To communicate with a space probe, you would focus the signal at the dot not all over the sky (that's what we do now). To communicate with a distant planet you'd do the same thing. Carrier signal? That's a relic from analog transmission...those WILL go away. Remember, a T.V. station to work in analog has to gobble an ENORMOUS chunk of spectrum...enough for dozens of equivalent bandwidth digital channels or an almost infinite number with more advanced techniques. For the same reason, we would quit wasting spectrum with AM and shortwave...I'm sure you can cram thousands of times of much information in with better techniques. Redundant signal? Yes, that's still done with more advanced systems BUT the redundancy uses a "key" so the same symbol might get mapped to 50 different modulations split between the channels. Giving the same noise as before. Radar? I won't try to speculate on the future of radar but it would not surprise me at all if broadspectrum radars worked better and were harder to jam.
Yes. You could try to counteract it with a motion of your own, but... And yes, you could have your arm pinned against the wall from the acceleration, still as a statue but the mouse would think you were still trying to move the pointer in that direction.
Just because the phone system uses cheaper off the shelf routers and the TCP/IP protocol does NOT mean it will be particularly vulnerable to hacking. You are confusing the successful efforts of script kiddies to hack cheaply set up servers running commercial OSes with an entirely different problem. These routers, which are rarely hacked, use flash firmware and a standard hardware configuration. They are usually not remotely reprogrammable, and use extremely stable code that is short on features, long on reliability (the opposite of commercial OSes). Hacks of these backbone beats are EXTREMELY RARE...most failures are due to operator error.
No, I don't work for CISCO or the other companies, just explaing what they sell and why it works.
Who says these routers will be part of the internet, anyway. Its doubtful you'd be able to send packets to one. Hacking REAL SYSTEMS is a lot more difficult than the ignorant public believes it to be, in fact I'd say many true embedded systems cannot be hacked. (if you can't reprogram it because it has no writable memory, how exactly are you going to subvert it?)
Who says we will be listening at this intersection of time and space? Current theory is that civilizations/intelligent life advance stupendously fast. Remember all the current progress has been made in 100 years...out of BILLIONS. It seems almost inevitable that in another hundred years this era will end (the era of humans) and simple radio signals unless used in a deliberate communication attempt are unlikely. So the odds that we would be able to pick up extremely weak signals from a developing civilization at a given time period of listening are so small to be negligable. The SETI project is being done for religious reasons. (not organized religion...just a general feeling that if we discovered intelligent life we would feel we had a purpose)
That's odd....I don't remember our economy tanking right after the S&L bailout. I'm not saying it was necessarily a positive thing for us or the japanese to do it...just that saying it was the "cause" of the current Japanese economic troubles would be the epitome of ignorance.
What's really ironic is that I just got a 5 rating for a comment I made before I read the article. Folks, don't depend on /. for reliable information even the high ranks are mostly rumor and hearsay.
Turns out the mouse has inertial sensors and I think lets you move it just like a regular mouse when airborne...you get the same mapping effect, just no desk needed. Sounds very tiring, but might be useful in cramped spaces where no desk is available (cars, airliners, ect)
BUT what if the monopoly, though resulting from free market pressure, cannot easily be competed with even though it is lazy? Microsoft is extremely difficult to compete with because 1. Software dev is very very time consuming and expensive. To get a truly "good" version of an application may take a decade of revisions and much money. Even if you DID have the money to make, say, a direct competitor to Office to really make it as good as what microsoft already has takes years. 2. Its a pain in the ass to use other operating systems for general purpose computing. Practically every program ever written runs under windows or via emulator. Yes, if all you need is say photoshop and similar tools then a mac is good and if you are into geeky stuff such as servers and databases Linux works. One of the real reasons OS X works better for some is that it is designed to appeal to artists, while Linux appeals to geeks. Both OSs provide a SPECIALIZED experience. This is the reason why the are better for SOME things. 3. Its a pain changing. Its a pain to switch software or operating system, its a pain to switch away from Office/Word when all your old documents are in a proprietary microsoft format. 4. The key features windows is missing do NOT really affect consumers that much. Yes, windows is unstable but if you turn the PC off after a few hours those memory leaks won't ever affect you. Yes, its insecure but most consumers have little information of importance stored on their PC, and recovering from a hacker just requires a recovery cd. Only when you get into servers do you need the absolute stability. Consumers and business buyers want more FEATURES, not better ones. I'd far rather have less gimmicky features that are half broken and instead have a few absolutely reliable ones, but the business managers who give microsoft money would rather buy the system with more goodies and long spec sheets. It seems like a better bargain to them, like that lawn mower with 5 different grass collection options (even if only 1 of the works) seems to you.
But are libertarians willing to have the governent break up monopolies and "guilds" of producers that band together to drive everyone else out. Like a certain software maker? Of course, due to the way our "just" court system works the big corporations are very difficult to actually stop with legal means, but the goverment is at least trying.
But is this really any more accurate than, say, a joystick? The advantage of a mouse is that mouse movements by your hand map directly to your screen. With practice you can just move it and get very close to the desired point. A joystick like device lets you control the rate of change of pointer position, not the position directly itself. While useful for some things, for aiming my railgun or getting work done this gadget is junk.
Well, on a related topic has anyone thought of this explanation for why SETI has found no results :
Most current radios, based on decades old tech, broadcast a very orderly signal. It is confined to a narrow band range, only one transmitter is allowed per channel, the data being transmitted is uncompressed and so has many repeating orderly patterns.
To increase capacity future radios will do the opposite.. They will broadcast compressed data that seems completely random, they will use a large swath of spectrum, they will repeat parts of the same signal across a large portion of the spectrum using a "chipping" algorithm. Even farther in the future, so many radios at once may be talking on the same spectrum that to identify a particular sender in order to communicate you'll have to use multiple antennaes and know his location (you'll share spectrum based on location).
What is the end result of advanced communication gear that intelligent minds develop? What is the optimal result? To an outside observer the signal will seem like pure, almost totally random noise. Only to the electronics of a particular receiver that has the correct encryption and chipping key will it seem like anything else.
THAT's why we can't hear anything. Trillions of sentient beings could communicate using this method and we wouldn't hear a thing.
A Sybian in a cell phone? Now that just might be a good idea. Of course, if you thought women talking on cellphones driving their 2 ton SUVs were bad enough, imagine that chaos if they were being pleasured by the sybian AND talking on the phone AND driving...
Not to mention, it will only cost 100-150 million to make Episode 3. They could release it for free and have enough money left over to make several more movies with the profits from the last two movies.
It said in the article IBM has been granted 3,411 patents this year, and makes 1.4 billion from royalties off existing patents.
I know slashdotters tend to be supportive of IBM because of their Linux funding, but 3400 patents??? I honestly don't think there are that many good, original ideas that can be discovered in one year. It sounds like IBM is abusing the system : I would strongly suspect that much of what they patent is fairly obvious to those in the know or has already occurred to someone else. But instead, IBM has the patents and plans to knee^H^H^H^H anyone who thinks of an idea they happened to have patented and tries to use it.
This is NOT how it was meant to be. Instead of protecting brilliant inventors who come up with nifty gadgets, these patents are basically a big corporation leaching off the future. With this many patents, I'm sure at least one of them could be argued to apply to just about any conceivable, REAL breakthrough that the REAL inventors make in the computer world. When that happens, IBM will send their lawyers to hit you up for money and you'll have to pay unless you are also a big corporation with enough lawyers on the payroll.