My own take on the Fermi paradox comes from the observation that modern radio communication systems - spread spectrum and ODFM - approach the Shannon limit of the bandwidth's information carrying capacity. As they do that, they approach the appearance of pure noise.
Even if the communications look like noise, they will raise the noise floor over the normal cosmic background radiation. No matter how the signal is encoded, the RF power will be detectable. All we would need to look for is bright spots in the sky where the "noise" floor is higher than normal.
Contractors encouraged not to visit site
on
Top Secret America
·
· Score: 1
I first heard about this site through an email from work. We handle a lot of government contracts, some of which are probably secret (though I'm not involved in any of that). The email was instructing us not to visit the site. That way we could more convincingly "neither confirm nor deny" anything from that site.
Computers are not intelligent because they are unable to reason. They iterate until they achieve an optimal solution to a specific set of rules.
Could you define "reason"? The AI field has worked for a while (until the 80s) to build machines that reason. There were some successes with expert systems and things like that (which, given sufficient data could "reason" according to standard definition). The problem with them is that they need complete information, so they never really made it out of the lab. Current works have turned instead of "reasoning" systems to Bayesian inference engines which use complicated statistical methods and approximations to find the most likely answer. They build estimates of probability distributions based on training (equivalent to experience) and then can use them to make decisions or predictions. They are much more flexible than the reasoning machines that were build before and handle incomplete data appropriately.
These probably don't "reason" by your definition, but then again, neither does the human brain: the current understanding of cognition suggests that it is also a inference engine, making probabilistic judgments based on experience in spite of limited information.
If these methods count as AI, then AI already exists. It is used in everything from handwriting and speech recognition to ranking players on XBox Live. If you look at the tasks that AI researchers hoped to solve when research in AI began, a large number of them have been solved. So if a computer can solve a problem that was previously considered an AI problem, wouldn't it be "moving the goal posts" to say that we don't have any AI today?
I think there's a third way that should allow the two groups to coexist. Just give up on science as "the way things are" and instead define it as "the way things seem to be". Science can never tell us the way things work. It can't tell us whether the world is 6000 years old or if there was a man some 2000 years ago that rose from the grave. All science can do is tell us "the world seems to behave according to this model". The model in and of itself is useful for predicting certain things (past, present or future), but can never be guaranteed to provide the facts of the matter (particularly if you assume the existence of an omnipotent being).
That's a really bad idea. Sure that may help in this particular case, but then you're just creating more problems down the road. As long as people are not making a rational evaluation of the issue on an individual level, then these mindless "stampedes" will occur every time something hits an emotional chord in the population. It would be better to simply analyze each issue independently and try to encourage the promotion rational thought instead of emotional reaction.
OT: Speaking of which, maybe we/.'ers should form a political organization to reform education to promote rational thought and critical thinking. If the young earth ID people can infiltrate school boards and rewrite education, then we should be able to too.
That may be right, but it shouldn't be that way. If you have a cell phone and cancel the service, you can still use it to call 911 in emergencies. Why shouldn't OnStar be handled the same way?
Gold is a soft metal. It can neither be eaten or drunk. It is poor for constructing shelters. In and of itself, it provides no net increase in production of useful goods. In essence, gold is only as valuable as people think it is. You might be better off buying diamonds, since at least they can be made into useful tools. Regardless such an investment is not likely to increase in effective value without soft external factors.
Real investments should have some use or purpose that can directly be used to increase wealth. A good example of this is land. Until interstellar travel picks up some, it really is a limited resource. It can be used directly to create food. Water can also be harvested. Shelter can be constructed. If you have more than you need, you can rent it out to others in exchange for something else. Other less direct example are goods that directly improve productivity such as plows, tractors, fertilizers, power plants, etc. If such items are too expensive for an individual, groups can collectively fund these investments and share the benefits.
The idea of stocks are to collectively fund such investments. The problem is that investments are sometimes difficult to liquidate. That's where stocks come in. The problem is that people are treating stocks as the investment "with buy low and sell high" instead of simply as a tool to liquidate shared investments. The primary gain from investment should (and theoretically must) come from the improved productivity of the investment and increased value of infrastructure. Unfortunately, this effect appears to be lost in the noise of the stock market, only being visible in the long term.
Ah, but if you're the criminal you can get paid twice: 1) find vulnerability 2) sell vulnerability to fraudsters ($$) 3) report vulnerability to google for $$ 4) google patches vulnerability so fraudsters can't use it anymore 5) goto 1 6) profit!
No, 768-bit RSA is not broken. they just found the factors for a single number. It only took them 2.5 years, and over 5 terabytes of data too. I don't consider this making 768-bit RSA "broken" any more than 56bit DES is "broken", because they didn't find a way to solve it faster than brute force. The point is that it is now possible to solve this kind of problem. And if they can do it in 2.5 years with 3 supercomputers, a dedicated adversary could probably do it in a few months with a couple dozen.
Factorization is simply finding the prime factors of a number: For example, the factors of n=21 are p=3 and q=7.
In RSA, I would take these factors and use them to calculate some other things: I choose e=11 to be my public key exponent (since it is less than and shares no common factors with (7-1)*(3-1)). Then I would calculate my private key exponent "d" such that d*e=1 mod n: for example, d=2 would work.
So you announce n and e publicly. Someone can break your key if they can find d, which is equivalent to finding the two factors of n: p and q. So if I were to tell you 21, you have basically broken my private key once you know 3 and 7 are p and q. In the article, it's not much different. Basically they found p and q for a 768-bit n.
So what? The farmer was just doing what farmer's have done for centuries! Every year farmers would save the seeds from the tastiest/most productive/most robust plants and use them as seeds for the coming years. It is only through thousands of years of this process that we have gotten the crops we have today. Why should a farmer stop using the methods botanical husbandry that have been employed for the entire existence of his profession just because his neighbor decided to stop and use GM crops instead?
The key point of QKD is it makes perfect secrecy (using one-time pads) practical. One-time pads are the most secure form of cipher. The only way anyone can decrypt something encrypted with a one-time pad is if they have the one-time pad--no amount of computing power will EVER be able to break it.
As for using RSA to secure QKD, it actually has significant benefits. Once the QKD is started, any tampering with the optical fiber will be detected at both ends, so a MITM will have to interrupt while the fiber is dark. If the key is switched every time the QKD is started then the MITM would have to break RSA within milliseconds with only a single authentication token. This will be infeasible for a LONG time.
There are also some other things they can do to verify it. They can use clock synchronization to verify that the photons are traveling along the known distance of the fiber optic cable. They can use multiple communication channels after the key is measured to reduce the probability of an undetected MITM attack (i.e. mail the hash of the key, call them using a telephone and compare hashes, post the hash on a website, email the hash, etc). The more they do, the more likely any MITM attack can be detected.
But what if the bill doesn't reference a section of law that it changes. What if you have part of one law that says that "Ice cream can not be sold on Tuesdays", and then part of another law is proposed that says that "Ice cream must be sold on the third Tuesday of the month". Unless the people writing the new law know about the old one, there's no way for them to reference the old law. There is no easy way to detect conflicts like this.
Additionally a logical language for law would have additional benefits. Since it is computer parseable, most lawyers could be replaced by technicians who can translate the real world situation into an equivalent logical query and determine which laws are relevant and what they mean. Of course the legal system would still need judges and juries to decide guilt and whether the law is fair (and submit bug reports to congress).
The key is not encoded -- it is random. Both the "sender" and receiver have no idea what the photon's characteristics are. They both flip coins to see which type of measurement to make. Then they keep the bits where they made the same type of measurement and throw away the others.
Any intermediate party will either receive the photon (so the receiver won't) or not receive the photon (and can't measure it). Further, no intermediate party knows what measurements the sender and receiver will make so they can't make the same measurements. If the intermediary can't make the same measurements then it can't generate the same key, and can't generate a passable photon for the receiver. Assuming the sender and receiver have another channel which is secure against man in the middle attacks (though not necessarily secure against eavesdroppers), they can tell each other which type of measurements they made and know what to keep.
Recheck your probability theory please. If you look at the Central Limit Theorem, you'll see that the larger the number of aircons the closer the distribution will be to the Gaussian (normal) distribution. This distribution has an infinitely long tail which means the maximum power spike is theoretically infinite for a Gaussian distribution (but practically limited by the worst case combination of all aircons at once).
Of course the Central Limit Theorem assumes all the distributions are independent. If you add the control system from the article, these become dependent, and the Central Limit Theorem no longer applies.
I just fail to see how having a slightly corrupt uuencoded file is the same as not having a file. In the case of an encrypted file, you also have a file that appears corrupt. And it is obvious to everyone that there is a message (the file), even if they can't decode it. I'm sorry I just fail to see how the scheme you proposed could be considered stenography.
That's not steganography. That's encryption, and a crappy one at that. If you take your PGP file (and remove any unnecessary header stuff), it will also look like a corrupt file, just like your UUencoded image. Steganography is hiding some data inside something else, like hiding a message in an image. For example, the police see an image of kittens, but you hid your child porn in the LSBs of the image, they can't see it.
RTFWikipedia: "Indium ranks 61st in abundance in the Earth's crust at approximately 0.25 ppm [2], which means it is more than three times as abundant as silver, which occurs at 0.075 ppm"
There's apparently a lot of it on earth, but not much purified. As it becomes more useful, we can get more.
Each chip is actually just a really thin slice of silicon with extra impurities added in important places. This small slice of silicon is quite fragile and doesn't really have an interface that you can easily connect to. So they put this slice in a "package" which is usually plastic or ceramic but occasionally metal. Then they use very thin gold wires to connect points on the silicon slice to pins that come out of the package. Then the package is sealed. The package exists to protect the fragile silicon slice from the environment and aid in conducting heat away from the chip. Nvidia has admitted that there was a problem with their packaging process that reduced the efficiency of heat transfer.
I agree with you that equation seems to be the way many companies are deciding their technological investments. If you think about it however, you might notice the problem with that equation:
It does not take into account the effect improved technology will have on future markets. Successful businesses focus just as much on the future as the present. Sure the present is important, you botch that and whatever your future plans are, they're worthless. On the other hand it is idiotic to ignore the future. Successful companies look for opening markets or weaknesses in their competition and build up to take advantage of them.
I'm no MBA, but what you really need is a cost benefit analysis and risk analysis. You need to consider the costs of both sides (cost implementing bandwidth controls, cost of implementing technology, cost/benefit of losing/gaining market share, cost of rapid depreciation of added infrastructure), as well as the risks to generate a spectrum of possible futures weighted by their possibility and considering smaller projects that could be implemented to hedge your bets and reduce risk. Then you decide the path that leads to the set of outcomes with the most benefit with a risk that matches that of your company charter.
That's pure BS. Even high-level languages have these problems. No one has had buffer overruns on PHP served pages, but how many have been hacked? Even they crash sometimes.
And finally GARBAGE COLLECTION IS NO REMEMDY FOR MEMORY ISSUES. People are claiming this all the time, so I'll repeat garbage collection is no remedy for memory issues. People claim that garbage collected languages can't leak memory, and while I admit that this is true, this guarantee is practically worthless. The definition of a memory leak is a section of memory that is no longer referenced, but has not yet been freed. Garbage collection addresses this directly by freeing memory that is no longer referenced. And you say "that's great! All our memory problems are solved!", but instead we have "object lifetime" issues. You have references to this and that in your program and the problem is you still have to carefully plan when objects should disappear, and check to ensure that you have no references to that object anywhere in any of your active data structures. If you do, everything that is referenced by that object or referenced by a reference from that object or... ad infinitum is still not freed. I'd almost say manual reference counting is better because at least it forces you to think about how to cleanly delete your data structures.
Furthermore, garbage collection does NOTHING about memory fragmentation. Memory fragmentation occurs because all the objects you want to allocate are different sizes. Even though when first allocated you could compact them all together, after freeing a couple and and allocating some more, you can end up a ton of memory wasted between the different objects that somehow got spaced out. What you want to allocate a 64 byte structure, too bad the largest space we have left is 62, guess we have to brk another page to put it on. Strings are particularly notorious for fragmentation (which is why Firefox already uses pooling to combat the problem). Until 'everything is a handle' replaces the modern 'everything is a pointer' in modern languages and the runtime defragments memory while the program is running (at a scandalous cost in performance), memory fragmentation will be another problem to consider.
The fact is there is no easy solution to any of these problems. You can't say `use language X, it has feature Y' and you won't have that problem. These problems are hard, but at least there is some benefit -- it justifies making that much more than minimum wage.
You are not required to agree to the terms of the GPL in order to use the software. Read the license a little more carefully: It "affirms" (eg. reiterates, reinforces) your unlimited right to run the program. This implies that you already have the unlimited right to run the unmodified program, but under the license this is even more so. This is clarified even further in other sections:
9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.
The key is that each of those cycles is *not* a potential bit. Radio communication is inherently different from RS232 or other simple wired standards (the newer ones are more complicated and borrow quite a bit from techniques developed for radio).
The primary difference is that bandwidth is limited. This means that you can't use every cycle. In the simplest case (ASK) you take the signal you want to transmit (which would be similar to your 800baud RS232 signal), and then remove the high frequency components so that the highest remaining frequency component is less than 1/2 the bandwidth. This will smooth all the edges out of your nice neat pulses, making them much more difficult to identify =(. Then we need to mix (multiply) this signal with the carrier frequency (located in the middle of your available bandwidth), and out pops the signal you want to transmit (centered around the carrier frequency).
Or mathematically:
s[n] = (bit == 1) ? 1 : -1; s(t) = s[n*bitrate] at time n*bitrate < t < (n+1)*bitrate x(t) = all frequency components of s(t) with frequency less than Bandwidth/2;//Low Pass Filter y(t) = x(t)cos(2*pi*CarrierFrequency*t)
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the communications look like noise, they will raise the noise floor over the normal cosmic background radiation. No matter how the signal is encoded, the RF power will be detectable. All we would need to look for is bright spots in the sky where the "noise" floor is higher than normal.
I first heard about this site through an email from work. We handle a lot of government contracts, some of which are probably secret (though I'm not involved in any of that). The email was instructing us not to visit the site. That way we could more convincingly "neither confirm nor deny" anything from that site.
Computers are not intelligent because they are unable to reason. They iterate until they achieve an optimal solution to a specific set of rules.
Could you define "reason"? The AI field has worked for a while (until the 80s) to build machines that reason. There were some successes with expert systems and things like that (which, given sufficient data could "reason" according to standard definition). The problem with them is that they need complete information, so they never really made it out of the lab. Current works have turned instead of "reasoning" systems to Bayesian inference engines which use complicated statistical methods and approximations to find the most likely answer. They build estimates of probability distributions based on training (equivalent to experience) and then can use them to make decisions or predictions. They are much more flexible than the reasoning machines that were build before and handle incomplete data appropriately.
These probably don't "reason" by your definition, but then again, neither does the human brain: the current understanding of cognition suggests that it is also a inference engine, making probabilistic judgments based on experience in spite of limited information.
If these methods count as AI, then AI already exists. It is used in everything from handwriting and speech recognition to ranking players on XBox Live. If you look at the tasks that AI researchers hoped to solve when research in AI began, a large number of them have been solved. So if a computer can solve a problem that was previously considered an AI problem, wouldn't it be "moving the goal posts" to say that we don't have any AI today?
I think there's a third way that should allow the two groups to coexist. Just give up on science as "the way things are" and instead define it as "the way things seem to be". Science can never tell us the way things work. It can't tell us whether the world is 6000 years old or if there was a man some 2000 years ago that rose from the grave. All science can do is tell us "the world seems to behave according to this model". The model in and of itself is useful for predicting certain things (past, present or future), but can never be guaranteed to provide the facts of the matter (particularly if you assume the existence of an omnipotent being).
That's a really bad idea. Sure that may help in this particular case, but then you're just creating more problems down the road. As long as people are not making a rational evaluation of the issue on an individual level, then these mindless "stampedes" will occur every time something hits an emotional chord in the population. It would be better to simply analyze each issue independently and try to encourage the promotion rational thought instead of emotional reaction.
OT: Speaking of which, maybe we /.'ers should form a political organization to reform education to promote rational thought and critical thinking. If the young earth ID people can infiltrate school boards and rewrite education, then we should be able to too.
That may be right, but it shouldn't be that way. If you have a cell phone and cancel the service, you can still use it to call 911 in emergencies. Why shouldn't OnStar be handled the same way?
Gold is a soft metal. It can neither be eaten or drunk. It is poor for constructing shelters. In and of itself, it provides no net increase in production of useful goods. In essence, gold is only as valuable as people think it is. You might be better off buying diamonds, since at least they can be made into useful tools. Regardless such an investment is not likely to increase in effective value without soft external factors.
Real investments should have some use or purpose that can directly be used to increase wealth. A good example of this is land. Until interstellar travel picks up some, it really is a limited resource. It can be used directly to create food. Water can also be harvested. Shelter can be constructed. If you have more than you need, you can rent it out to others in exchange for something else.
Other less direct example are goods that directly improve productivity such as plows, tractors, fertilizers, power plants, etc. If such items are too expensive for an individual, groups can collectively fund these investments and share the benefits.
The idea of stocks are to collectively fund such investments. The problem is that investments are sometimes difficult to liquidate. That's where stocks come in. The problem is that people are treating stocks as the investment "with buy low and sell high" instead of simply as a tool to liquidate shared investments. The primary gain from investment should (and theoretically must) come from the improved productivity of the investment and increased value of infrastructure. Unfortunately, this effect appears to be lost in the noise of the stock market, only being visible in the long term.
Ah, but if you're the criminal you can get paid twice:
1) find vulnerability
2) sell vulnerability to fraudsters ($$)
3) report vulnerability to google for $$
4) google patches vulnerability so fraudsters can't use it anymore
5) goto 1
6) profit!
No, 768-bit RSA is not broken. they just found the factors for a single number. It only took them 2.5 years, and over 5 terabytes of data too. I don't consider this making 768-bit RSA "broken" any more than 56bit DES is "broken", because they didn't find a way to solve it faster than brute force. The point is that it is now possible to solve this kind of problem. And if they can do it in 2.5 years with 3 supercomputers, a dedicated adversary could probably do it in a few months with a couple dozen.
Factorization is simply finding the prime factors of a number:
For example, the factors of n=21 are p=3 and q=7.
In RSA, I would take these factors and use them to calculate some other things:
I choose e=11 to be my public key exponent (since it is less than and shares no common factors with (7-1)*(3-1)). Then I would calculate my private key exponent "d" such that d*e=1 mod n: for example, d=2 would work.
So you announce n and e publicly. Someone can break your key if they can find d, which is equivalent to finding the two factors of n: p and q. So if I were to tell you 21, you have basically broken my private key once you know 3 and 7 are p and q.
In the article, it's not much different. Basically they found p and q for a 768-bit n.
Check out their demonstration videos at http://span.ece.utah.edu/radio-tomographic-imaging.
I was fortunate enough to see the demo at Mobicom last year. It's a really neat application, even if the math is nothing new.
So what? The farmer was just doing what farmer's have done for centuries! Every year farmers would save the seeds from the tastiest/most productive/most robust plants and use them as seeds for the coming years. It is only through thousands of years of this process that we have gotten the crops we have today. Why should a farmer stop using the methods botanical husbandry that have been employed for the entire existence of his profession just because his neighbor decided to stop and use GM crops instead?
The key point of QKD is it makes perfect secrecy (using one-time pads) practical. One-time pads are the most secure form of cipher. The only way anyone can decrypt something encrypted with a one-time pad is if they have the one-time pad--no amount of computing power will EVER be able to break it.
As for using RSA to secure QKD, it actually has significant benefits. Once the QKD is started, any tampering with the optical fiber will be detected at both ends, so a MITM will have to interrupt while the fiber is dark. If the key is switched every time the QKD is started then the MITM would have to break RSA within milliseconds with only a single authentication token. This will be infeasible for a LONG time.
There are also some other things they can do to verify it. They can use clock synchronization to verify that the photons are traveling along the known distance of the fiber optic cable. They can use multiple communication channels after the key is measured to reduce the probability of an undetected MITM attack (i.e. mail the hash of the key, call them using a telephone and compare hashes, post the hash on a website, email the hash, etc). The more they do, the more likely any MITM attack can be detected.
But what if the bill doesn't reference a section of law that it changes. What if you have part of one law that says that "Ice cream can not be sold on Tuesdays", and then part of another law is proposed that says that "Ice cream must be sold on the third Tuesday of the month". Unless the people writing the new law know about the old one, there's no way for them to reference the old law. There is no easy way to detect conflicts like this.
Additionally a logical language for law would have additional benefits. Since it is computer parseable, most lawyers could be replaced by technicians who can translate the real world situation into an equivalent logical query and determine which laws are relevant and what they mean. Of course the legal system would still need judges and juries to decide guilt and whether the law is fair (and submit bug reports to congress).
The key is not encoded -- it is random. Both the "sender" and receiver have no idea what the photon's characteristics are. They both flip coins to see which type of measurement to make. Then they keep the bits where they made the same type of measurement and throw away the others.
Any intermediate party will either receive the photon (so the receiver won't) or not receive the photon (and can't measure it). Further, no intermediate party knows what measurements the sender and receiver will make so they can't make the same measurements. If the intermediary can't make the same measurements then it can't generate the same key, and can't generate a passable photon for the receiver. Assuming the sender and receiver have another channel which is secure against man in the middle attacks (though not necessarily secure against eavesdroppers), they can tell each other which type of measurements they made and know what to keep.
Since the refrigerators have random and uncorrelated cycling they will experience large peaks due to the Central Limit Theorem (see my other post)
Recheck your probability theory please. If you look at the Central Limit Theorem, you'll see that the larger the number of aircons the closer the distribution will be to the Gaussian (normal) distribution. This distribution has an infinitely long tail which means the maximum power spike is theoretically infinite for a Gaussian distribution (but practically limited by the worst case combination of all aircons at once).
Of course the Central Limit Theorem assumes all the distributions are independent. If you add the control system from the article, these become dependent, and the Central Limit Theorem no longer applies.
Actually, in Chinese it's more than that. The words for she is a fairly recent invention that was only added after contact with western civilizations.
I just fail to see how having a slightly corrupt uuencoded file is the same as not having a file. In the case of an encrypted file, you also have a file that appears corrupt. And it is obvious to everyone that there is a message (the file), even if they can't decode it. I'm sorry I just fail to see how the scheme you proposed could be considered stenography.
That's not steganography. That's encryption, and a crappy one at that. If you take your PGP file (and remove any unnecessary header stuff), it will also look like a corrupt file, just like your UUencoded image. Steganography is hiding some data inside something else, like hiding a message in an image. For example, the police see an image of kittens, but you hid your child porn in the LSBs of the image, they can't see it.
RTFWikipedia: "Indium ranks 61st in abundance in the Earth's crust at approximately 0.25 ppm [2], which means it is more than three times as abundant as silver, which occurs at 0.075 ppm"
There's apparently a lot of it on earth, but not much purified. As it becomes more useful, we can get more.
Each chip is actually just a really thin slice of silicon with extra impurities added in important places. This small slice of silicon is quite fragile and doesn't really have an interface that you can easily connect to. So they put this slice in a "package" which is usually plastic or ceramic but occasionally metal. Then they use very thin gold wires to connect points on the silicon slice to pins that come out of the package. Then the package is sealed. The package exists to protect the fragile silicon slice from the environment and aid in conducting heat away from the chip. Nvidia has admitted that there was a problem with their packaging process that reduced the efficiency of heat transfer.
I agree with you that equation seems to be the way many companies are deciding their technological investments. If you think about it however, you might notice the problem with that equation:
It does not take into account the effect improved technology will have on future markets. Successful businesses focus just as much on the future as the present. Sure the present is important, you botch that and whatever your future plans are, they're worthless. On the other hand it is idiotic to ignore the future. Successful companies look for opening markets or weaknesses in their competition and build up to take advantage of them.
I'm no MBA, but what you really need is a cost benefit analysis and risk analysis. You need to consider the costs of both sides (cost implementing bandwidth controls, cost of implementing technology, cost/benefit of losing/gaining market share, cost of rapid depreciation of added infrastructure), as well as the risks to generate a spectrum of possible futures weighted by their possibility and considering smaller projects that could be implemented to hedge your bets and reduce risk. Then you decide the path that leads to the set of outcomes with the most benefit with a risk that matches that of your company charter.
That's pure BS. Even high-level languages have these problems. No one has had buffer overruns on PHP served pages, but how many have been hacked? Even they crash sometimes.
... ad infinitum is still not freed. I'd almost say manual reference counting is better because at least it forces you to think about how to cleanly delete your data structures.
And finally GARBAGE COLLECTION IS NO REMEMDY FOR MEMORY ISSUES. People are claiming this all the time, so I'll repeat garbage collection is no remedy for memory issues. People claim that garbage collected languages can't leak memory, and while I admit that this is true, this guarantee is practically worthless. The definition of a memory leak is a section of memory that is no longer referenced, but has not yet been freed. Garbage collection addresses this directly by freeing memory that is no longer referenced. And you say "that's great! All our memory problems are solved!", but instead we have "object lifetime" issues. You have references to this and that in your program and the problem is you still have to carefully plan when objects should disappear, and check to ensure that you have no references to that object anywhere in any of your active data structures. If you do, everything that is referenced by that object or referenced by a reference from that object or
Furthermore, garbage collection does NOTHING about memory fragmentation. Memory fragmentation occurs because all the objects you want to allocate are different sizes. Even though when first allocated you could compact them all together, after freeing a couple and and allocating some more, you can end up a ton of memory wasted between the different objects that somehow got spaced out. What you want to allocate a 64 byte structure, too bad the largest space we have left is 62, guess we have to brk another page to put it on. Strings are particularly notorious for fragmentation (which is why Firefox already uses pooling to combat the problem). Until 'everything is a handle' replaces the modern 'everything is a pointer' in modern languages and the runtime defragments memory while the program is running (at a scandalous cost in performance), memory fragmentation will be another problem to consider.
The fact is there is no easy solution to any of these problems. You can't say `use language X, it has feature Y' and you won't have that problem. These problems are hard, but at least there is some benefit -- it justifies making that much more than minimum wage.
The primary difference is that bandwidth is limited. This means that you can't use every cycle. In the simplest case (ASK) you take the signal you want to transmit (which would be similar to your 800baud RS232 signal), and then remove the high frequency components so that the highest remaining frequency component is less than 1/2 the bandwidth. This will smooth all the edges out of your nice neat pulses, making them much more difficult to identify =(. Then we need to mix (multiply) this signal with the carrier frequency (located in the middle of your available bandwidth), and out pops the signal you want to transmit (centered around the carrier frequency).
Or mathematically: