You're right, of course about the "never look" advice. I skipped a few logic steps in the interest of brevity. My belief is anything you could possibly ever want to do with software is probably covered by an overly-broad existing patent. The idea about telling the boss about the existing patent didn't have anything to do with filing a new patent, per se, just a move to triple the damages if said boss ever got hauled into court.
When you get paid to do a job what you produce isn't yours. Of course you can be fired for this - and what difference does it make whether you file the patent or someone else does? If you feel really strongly about it you can hold firm, but realize if they can you there's nothing you can do.
On the other hand, if you really want to screw him you can search the patent databases and find one that's similar. Then tell your boss. Knowingly violating a patent is treble damages, which is why they tell you never to look. They'll probably fire you for that too, but that should severely complicate their foray into patentland.
Gee, leftists like SCLC and Jesse Jackson are part of phoney grassroots organizations? Where is DocRuby to tell us only Republicans are crooked?
They're all crooked. The art of politics in America is dealing on things you don't care about so you have clout on the things you do care about. This, I think, is the natural evolution of a representative system - Iowa farmers don't care about coastal wetlands, and Californians could give a shit about farm subsidies. So there's the basis of a deal. Oh, the farmers might care a bit about coastal wetlands, but not enough to vote against someone. Ditto with the Californians on farm subsidies.
Over the years companies and organizations have managed to insert themselves into the process by providing money to members of Congress to vote a certain way on issues they don't care about. I mean, seriously, how many of those geezers do you think really understand the stakes in net neutrality? I'll bet more than half have never used a computer.
I can't imagine a legislative "reform" which will address the root causes here, especially given Supreme Court rulings on the subject (money == free speech? Really? What does that mean for the people with no money?). The real solution is to have the government do less, so companies don't benifit so much by controling it. But I don't see anywhere near enough public support for a move in that direction. What will probably happen is another round of "campaign finance reform", which will, paradoxically, make things worse.
Personally, I view unskipable commercials as an invitation to rip the disk and edit them out. And since I've already ripped it, if a friend wants to borrow it for a bit, why should I give them the version with the commercial. And, since I've already had to go through the trouble to rip the thing, why shouldn't I just make them a separate copy in case I want to watch it again? And, since I now have two copies, why would I want the second copy back?
This is especially true with kids movies. Children like to watch the same thing over and over and over. The shrinks say this is normal. I've resigned myself to watching The Incredibles three times in a row (every day for a month), but I'll be damned if I'm gonna sit through the commercials every time.
This is nothing more than the bureaucracy letting the governor know who runs Bartertown. You can bet the system could be made to work if everyone was getting a raise.
Al Queda is still a marginal, regional group of thugs. But what you're saying is just wrong. The organization's peak of influence and recruiting was from about 2001 to 2004. Since then they've gone from defeat to defeat, which is really bad for recruiting. Al Queda is smaller, less skilled, and less organized than it was before 9/11. As far as money goes... who knows? Even bin Laden may not know what's left, assuming he's still alive (which I doubt).
The reason they're trying to return to Afghanistan is precisely because they lost public support in Iraq, where the locals are more likely to turn them in instead of providing shelter. It turns out if you deliberately target civilians with truck bombs the locals eventually weary of your presence. Suicide bombing isn't as easy as you seem to believe. It typically requires a group of ten to twelve (non suicidal) experts to put together a suicide bombing, and of course every bombing requires a fresh set of "guidance systems". Without local protection for the professionals, the bombings drop off, as we've seen.
As far as Afghanistan is concerned, the major element of bad guys isn't Al Queda or even Taliban. The major headache is, as usual, drug dealers. The big problem in Afghanistan is we've let the drug warriors have too much influence in operations - stamping out little mujahadeen fires and eliminating the opium crop are two mostly opposed goals, and until we decide which is more important Afghanistan will be muddled. Well, "we" being the general we, since I know which one I think is more important.
Don't be silly. If what you're saying is remotely true, Al Queda should be picking up support all throughout the Arab world. But they're not. In fact, Arabs are more likely to view Al Queda negatively than they were on September 12, 2001. Why is that, do you think?
Nobody likes a loser, not even the people the loser is ostensibly fighting for.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Especially in Iraq and Afghanistan angry rebels were simply slaughtered in an effort to "hold off" the US Army. If there were ever two glaring failures of insurgency, those are them.
In addition to what others have posted, I'd like to point out nontrivial encryption/decryption takes a fair amount of computing horsepower. For a modern processor it's an afterthought, but if they had included encryption in ARPANET the project would have died in the lab for lack of system owners willing to connect.
Hmmmm. That PSA stuff is fascinating, and I need to look more into that, but unfortunately I'm on travel and using internet cafes. Going to have to defer this discussion for a couple weeks, as each post is costing me five bucks. I'll have a response about mid-month if you're still interested.
As I said, a lack of rigorous thinking. Is it "proof by assertion day"? Do you have any evidence at all to back up the assertion Iraq oil contracts were given to US companies at below market rates? Ive never seen that documented anywhere.
As far as Cheney getting deferred compensation from Haliburton... so what? That kind of thing is pretty normal for CEOs. I'm pretty sure they were obligated to pay him whether or not the company made money.
Surely you must be joking about the donations thing. Large companies in the US donate to both sides. That's the way the game is played. Yes, it's corrupt, but good luck changing it since both parties are swilling at the same trough. But the way these donations pan out are in the form of congressional earmarks and special tax breaks. The idea Bush would go to war as a result of a paltry couple million in donations is laughable. Oil companies make donations to keep their exploration tax breaks.
Denying oil to the Chinese? Okay, now youve crossed into never-never land. Oil is fungible. The Chinese don't need to buy oil from Iraq because they can buy it from the Russians. Or the Nigerians. Or the Saudis. Oil is a comodity, and as long as Iraqi oil is on the market somewhere it has the same effect as being on the market everywhere. This is the same reason we've been laughing at Hugo Chavez whenever he threatens to embargo the US - because it won't make any difference at all. Besides, why would we want to deny oil to the Chinese when the reason they need it is to make stuff for the US consumer market?
Are you trying to imply we went into Afghanistan over oil pipelines? Politically, the president had two options by dusk on 9/11 - invade Afghanistan or nuke it.
Now, with one of your secondary goals you're getting close. It was partially to send a message to the other governments in the middle east. Saddam had managed to completely undermine the sanctions by promising contracts to European and Russian companies (as well as outright bribes at the UN). If events had been allowed to take their course the sanctions would have come off within a year or two and people like bin Laden would have been vindicated in calling the US a paper tiger. We had been making threats since 1991, and if you never carry through people begin to ignore you and plot ways to take advantage of your unwillingness to act. Did you think it was a coincidence Khadafi came clean on his nuclear program after the invasion of Iraq?
The "military-industrial-complex" stuff is just silly. Boots on the ground dont benefit the big players in the industry. In fact, many of the dollars to pay for the war have come out of other programs, like the cancellation of DDX, reduction in the number of F-22 and F-35 fighters, as well as the decision by the army to scrap plans to field a new battle rifle. For every defense contractor whos making money off this war theres one whos losing money because of it. Virtually every procurement for the navy and air force has been stripped to pay for programs related to Iraq, like new counterbattery radar sytems and more armored vehicles.
Defense contractors make way more money on high-tech weapons programs that get cancelled before deployment. That way they get all the development money but they don't actually have to make something that works.
Well, I suppose if you believe it was about oil, then that makes a certain amount of sense. Well, actually not, since that never made sense as a rationale for the war. But based on what I see on Kos and Digg (and, unfortunately, slashdot) rigorous thinking isnt a strong point on the left.
I am kind of curious, though. Who are the shadowy masters again? Illuminati? Gnomes of Zurich? The Bilderburgers? Oh no, I got it - Rockerfellers! Its the Rockerfellers, right? Something about Rockerfellers, Iraq, the Federal Reserve and Roswell?
Oh, well, if you're gonna widen the lense like that I could say those people choose to put up with it because they could always kill themselves instead.
I've seen projects where a local 3-man team of developers outperformed 20- or 40-man teams in the outsourcing location.
Yep. Seen it myself. There's this funny, destructive cycle that sometimes happens with medium to large sized companies. There's an in-house team that works reasonably well, but management sees a way to cut costs by getting rid of all those programming prima donnas. So they make the in-house guys train the people that are going to replace them, and eventually everything gets moved offshore.
But then management realizes they've lost a lot of control over how things are done. The offshoring company has lots of customers, and sometimes our company isn't the most important. We keep hearing things are on track, but when the code is actually delivered it's buggy as hell, and the codebase utterly unmaintainable, so verson two is even worse. Eventually some enterprising middle manager has a proposal:
Sure, the offshore contractor give us the best bang for our buck. But we're having trouble figuring out when things will actually be done, and this is wreaking havoc for sales and marketing. We've been outmaneuvered by our competition on more than one occasion when the offshore contractor didn't deliver. For this one important project, let's get somebody local, somebody who's in our timezone and sits a few cubicles down from my office. He won't be able to bullshit me about how the software is coming along, because he's right here in the office. He'll be an employee, and with our 401K program he'll have an incentive to stay instead of bailing and leaving a steaming pile of crap.
Now, he's just trying to ensure the gant chart for his pet project isn't entirely at the mercy of some outside company, but his plan works really well. So the manager starts taking on more responsibility, more new projects. He hires more people. Eventually the offshore projects are stranded and all the "important", meaning "all", projects are started in house. The department gets renamed "Applications Development".
Then this new manager fresh out of business school wonders "why are we paying local guys so much when we can hire people in the Phillipines for a tenth of their salary..."
And oh, btw, I'm an Indian engineer here on H1b and there are very very few cases on "indentured servitude"
You're lucky you're on H1-B now and not twenty years ago. It used to be you couldn't transfer employers while you were trying to get a green card. I worked for a company that treated H1-B people exactly like indentured servants - sending them out to customer sites for long periods away from family and working them 20 hours a day (and paying for 8, of course). Sure, they could have walked. But when you're five years into the green card process and walking means starting over, you'll take a lot of shit from your boss. They always quit the minute the green card arrived, but that was usually between five and six years.
That clip was conspicuously short of anything resembling hard numbers. I have no doubt it's possible to use renewable power sources. But at what cost? I'm curious to know if that project will actually scale without breaking the bank.
I wonder if Greenpeace realizes the choice isn't between coal plants with sequestered carbon and windmills. In reality, barring some fortuitous breakthrough in solar power, as oil gets more expensive the choice will be between coal plants with this technology and coal plants without it. I believe Greenpeace has completely overestimated the average person's willingness to make lifestyle sacrifices for the sake of atmospheric carbon reductions.
I wish organizations like this would try to be part of the solution instead of just trying to limit our options. You can't accuse the coal companies of proposing a technology that isn't economically feasible on the one hand and then propose wholesale conversion to technologies that are even less economically feasible.
We wouldn't even have this problem if the very same people hadn't killed the nuclear industry through scaremongering and excessive litigation.
That's what I've been thinking. If I were a Yahoo shareholder right now I'd be very, very pissed off. The board of Yahoo was really looking out for itself here and not for the shareholders - no way no how Yahoo was even worth what Microsoft offered originally.
The article is pretty silly, but the most silly aspect is the assumption spacefaring means starfaring. If there exists no practical way to exceed the speed of light, we may never have seen other civilizations because they're just too damn far away. There may be billions of stars in the universe, but what are the odds there is a human-habitable planet within, say, 100 light years? Is it really worth the effort to colonize a planet so far away? Your colony ship takes, say, 10,000 years to arrive at it's destination (and that's a smokin' fast colony ship!), and the inhabitants spend the next 10,000 years terraforming the target. Hell, by the time you come in physical contact with your colony it will be populated by a species distinct from the colonizers.
A light year is a long, long way. While it may make sense for us to leave our home planet, I have yet to see a reasonable scenario where we would leave our home star system.
And why does the author assume we'll be able to observe evidence of an advanced civilization? The engineer in me thinks part of technical sophistication is only sending radio waves to the intended target, not slinging them all over the universe. When the world is covered by a fiber grid, and all RF communications is low power spread spectrum, will our civilization be observable via a radio telescope? I doubt it - won't be enough there to pick out of the background.
And let's say the universe is teaming with technological species. When we look up at a star a billion light years away, we're seeing what occurred there a billion years ago. There might be a whole galaxy filled with easily detectable life forms, but if it's a billion light years away we won't know for another billion years.
After initially being a proponent, I've come to the same conclusion about unit tests myself. I don't think they're worthless, but the time you spend developing or maintaining unit tests could be more profitably spent elsewhere. Especially maintaining.
That's my experience, anyway. I suppose it's pretty heavily dependent on your environment, your customers, and exactly how tolerant your application is of bugs. Avionics software for a new jet fighter has a different set of demands than ye olde "display records from the database" business application. More applications fall in the second category than the first.
The article says "enhanced lethality", but I'm wondering if you couldn't get the same enhanced lethality from long rod penetrators with far less money using the "bigger hammer" philosophy. For example, LOSAT:
The key attraction of LOSAT is the tremendous overmatch lethality of the KEM that defeats all future predicted armored combat vehicles.
Granted, MAHEM would be a bit more compact, but the more complicated something is, the more likely it is to fail. Not only is the development of LOSAT completed, but the missile itself is so fast there's really nothing the target can do to intercept or evade.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh heh. "knit-your-own_yoghurt"? I love a good twist of phrase! (No sarcasm intended)
You're right, of course about the "never look" advice. I skipped a few logic steps in the interest of brevity. My belief is anything you could possibly ever want to do with software is probably covered by an overly-broad existing patent. The idea about telling the boss about the existing patent didn't have anything to do with filing a new patent, per se, just a move to triple the damages if said boss ever got hauled into court.
When you get paid to do a job what you produce isn't yours. Of course you can be fired for this - and what difference does it make whether you file the patent or someone else does? If you feel really strongly about it you can hold firm, but realize if they can you there's nothing you can do.
On the other hand, if you really want to screw him you can search the patent databases and find one that's similar. Then tell your boss. Knowingly violating a patent is treble damages, which is why they tell you never to look. They'll probably fire you for that too, but that should severely complicate their foray into patentland.
Gee, leftists like SCLC and Jesse Jackson are part of phoney grassroots organizations? Where is DocRuby to tell us only Republicans are crooked?
They're all crooked. The art of politics in America is dealing on things you don't care about so you have clout on the things you do care about. This, I think, is the natural evolution of a representative system - Iowa farmers don't care about coastal wetlands, and Californians could give a shit about farm subsidies. So there's the basis of a deal. Oh, the farmers might care a bit about coastal wetlands, but not enough to vote against someone. Ditto with the Californians on farm subsidies.
Over the years companies and organizations have managed to insert themselves into the process by providing money to members of Congress to vote a certain way on issues they don't care about. I mean, seriously, how many of those geezers do you think really understand the stakes in net neutrality? I'll bet more than half have never used a computer.
I can't imagine a legislative "reform" which will address the root causes here, especially given Supreme Court rulings on the subject (money == free speech? Really? What does that mean for the people with no money?). The real solution is to have the government do less, so companies don't benifit so much by controling it. But I don't see anywhere near enough public support for a move in that direction. What will probably happen is another round of "campaign finance reform", which will, paradoxically, make things worse.
Personally, I view unskipable commercials as an invitation to rip the disk and edit them out. And since I've already ripped it, if a friend wants to borrow it for a bit, why should I give them the version with the commercial. And, since I've already had to go through the trouble to rip the thing, why shouldn't I just make them a separate copy in case I want to watch it again? And, since I now have two copies, why would I want the second copy back?
This is especially true with kids movies. Children like to watch the same thing over and over and over. The shrinks say this is normal. I've resigned myself to watching The Incredibles three times in a row (every day for a month), but I'll be damned if I'm gonna sit through the commercials every time.
This is nothing more than the bureaucracy letting the governor know who runs Bartertown. You can bet the system could be made to work if everyone was getting a raise.
Al Queda is still a marginal, regional group of thugs. But what you're saying is just wrong. The organization's peak of influence and recruiting was from about 2001 to 2004. Since then they've gone from defeat to defeat, which is really bad for recruiting. Al Queda is smaller, less skilled, and less organized than it was before 9/11. As far as money goes... who knows? Even bin Laden may not know what's left, assuming he's still alive (which I doubt).
The reason they're trying to return to Afghanistan is precisely because they lost public support in Iraq, where the locals are more likely to turn them in instead of providing shelter. It turns out if you deliberately target civilians with truck bombs the locals eventually weary of your presence. Suicide bombing isn't as easy as you seem to believe. It typically requires a group of ten to twelve (non suicidal) experts to put together a suicide bombing, and of course every bombing requires a fresh set of "guidance systems". Without local protection for the professionals, the bombings drop off, as we've seen.
As far as Afghanistan is concerned, the major element of bad guys isn't Al Queda or even Taliban. The major headache is, as usual, drug dealers. The big problem in Afghanistan is we've let the drug warriors have too much influence in operations - stamping out little mujahadeen fires and eliminating the opium crop are two mostly opposed goals, and until we decide which is more important Afghanistan will be muddled. Well, "we" being the general we, since I know which one I think is more important.
Don't be silly. If what you're saying is remotely true, Al Queda should be picking up support all throughout the Arab world. But they're not. In fact, Arabs are more likely to view Al Queda negatively than they were on September 12, 2001. Why is that, do you think?
Nobody likes a loser, not even the people the loser is ostensibly fighting for.
I knew all those old pennies would come in handy for something.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Especially in Iraq and Afghanistan angry rebels were simply slaughtered in an effort to "hold off" the US Army. If there were ever two glaring failures of insurgency, those are them.
In addition to what others have posted, I'd like to point out nontrivial encryption/decryption takes a fair amount of computing horsepower. For a modern processor it's an afterthought, but if they had included encryption in ARPANET the project would have died in the lab for lack of system owners willing to connect.
Hmmmm. That PSA stuff is fascinating, and I need to look more into that, but unfortunately I'm on travel and using internet cafes. Going to have to defer this discussion for a couple weeks, as each post is costing me five bucks. I'll have a response about mid-month if you're still interested.
As I said, a lack of rigorous thinking. Is it "proof by assertion day"? Do you have any evidence at all to back up the assertion Iraq oil contracts were given to US companies at below market rates? Ive never seen that documented anywhere.
As far as Cheney getting deferred compensation from Haliburton... so what? That kind of thing is pretty normal for CEOs. I'm pretty sure they were obligated to pay him whether or not the company made money.
Surely you must be joking about the donations thing. Large companies in the US donate to both sides. That's the way the game is played. Yes, it's corrupt, but good luck changing it since both parties are swilling at the same trough. But the way these donations pan out are in the form of congressional earmarks and special tax breaks. The idea Bush would go to war as a result of a paltry couple million in donations is laughable. Oil companies make donations to keep their exploration tax breaks.
Denying oil to the Chinese? Okay, now youve crossed into never-never land. Oil is fungible. The Chinese don't need to buy oil from Iraq because they can buy it from the Russians. Or the Nigerians. Or the Saudis. Oil is a comodity, and as long as Iraqi oil is on the market somewhere it has the same effect as being on the market everywhere. This is the same reason we've been laughing at Hugo Chavez whenever he threatens to embargo the US - because it won't make any difference at all. Besides, why would we want to deny oil to the Chinese when the reason they need it is to make stuff for the US consumer market?
Are you trying to imply we went into Afghanistan over oil pipelines? Politically, the president had two options by dusk on 9/11 - invade Afghanistan or nuke it.
Now, with one of your secondary goals you're getting close. It was partially to send a message to the other governments in the middle east. Saddam had managed to completely undermine the sanctions by promising contracts to European and Russian companies (as well as outright bribes at the UN). If events had been allowed to take their course the sanctions would have come off within a year or two and people like bin Laden would have been vindicated in calling the US a paper tiger. We had been making threats since 1991, and if you never carry through people begin to ignore you and plot ways to take advantage of your unwillingness to act. Did you think it was a coincidence Khadafi came clean on his nuclear program after the invasion of Iraq?
The "military-industrial-complex" stuff is just silly. Boots on the ground dont benefit the big players in the industry. In fact, many of the dollars to pay for the war have come out of other programs, like the cancellation of DDX, reduction in the number of F-22 and F-35 fighters, as well as the decision by the army to scrap plans to field a new battle rifle. For every defense contractor whos making money off this war theres one whos losing money because of it. Virtually every procurement for the navy and air force has been stripped to pay for programs related to Iraq, like new counterbattery radar sytems and more armored vehicles.
Defense contractors make way more money on high-tech weapons programs that get cancelled before deployment. That way they get all the development money but they don't actually have to make something that works.
Well, I suppose if you believe it was about oil, then that makes a certain amount of sense. Well, actually not, since that never made sense as a rationale for the war. But based on what I see on Kos and Digg (and, unfortunately, slashdot) rigorous thinking isnt a strong point on the left.
I am kind of curious, though. Who are the shadowy masters again? Illuminati? Gnomes of Zurich? The Bilderburgers? Oh no, I got it - Rockerfellers! Its the Rockerfellers, right? Something about Rockerfellers, Iraq, the Federal Reserve and Roswell?
Oh, well, if you're gonna widen the lense like that I could say those people choose to put up with it because they could always kill themselves instead.
I've seen projects where a local 3-man team of developers outperformed 20- or 40-man teams in the outsourcing location.
Yep. Seen it myself. There's this funny, destructive cycle that sometimes happens with medium to large sized companies. There's an in-house team that works reasonably well, but management sees a way to cut costs by getting rid of all those programming prima donnas. So they make the in-house guys train the people that are going to replace them, and eventually everything gets moved offshore.
But then management realizes they've lost a lot of control over how things are done. The offshoring company has lots of customers, and sometimes our company isn't the most important. We keep hearing things are on track, but when the code is actually delivered it's buggy as hell, and the codebase utterly unmaintainable, so verson two is even worse. Eventually some enterprising middle manager has a proposal:
Sure, the offshore contractor give us the best bang for our buck. But we're having trouble figuring out when things will actually be done, and this is wreaking havoc for sales and marketing. We've been outmaneuvered by our competition on more than one occasion when the offshore contractor didn't deliver. For this one important project, let's get somebody local, somebody who's in our timezone and sits a few cubicles down from my office. He won't be able to bullshit me about how the software is coming along, because he's right here in the office. He'll be an employee, and with our 401K program he'll have an incentive to stay instead of bailing and leaving a steaming pile of crap.
Now, he's just trying to ensure the gant chart for his pet project isn't entirely at the mercy of some outside company, but his plan works really well. So the manager starts taking on more responsibility, more new projects. He hires more people. Eventually the offshore projects are stranded and all the "important", meaning "all", projects are started in house. The department gets renamed "Applications Development".
Then this new manager fresh out of business school wonders "why are we paying local guys so much when we can hire people in the Phillipines for a tenth of their salary..."
Yeah, my firewall ran out of space on the routing table and kept rebooting itself every few seconds. His problem is probably something like that.
That clip was conspicuously short of anything resembling hard numbers. I have no doubt it's possible to use renewable power sources. But at what cost? I'm curious to know if that project will actually scale without breaking the bank.
I wonder if Greenpeace realizes the choice isn't between coal plants with sequestered carbon and windmills. In reality, barring some fortuitous breakthrough in solar power, as oil gets more expensive the choice will be between coal plants with this technology and coal plants without it. I believe Greenpeace has completely overestimated the average person's willingness to make lifestyle sacrifices for the sake of atmospheric carbon reductions.
I wish organizations like this would try to be part of the solution instead of just trying to limit our options. You can't accuse the coal companies of proposing a technology that isn't economically feasible on the one hand and then propose wholesale conversion to technologies that are even less economically feasible.
We wouldn't even have this problem if the very same people hadn't killed the nuclear industry through scaremongering and excessive litigation.
That's what I've been thinking. If I were a Yahoo shareholder right now I'd be very, very pissed off. The board of Yahoo was really looking out for itself here and not for the shareholders - no way no how Yahoo was even worth what Microsoft offered originally.
The article is pretty silly, but the most silly aspect is the assumption spacefaring means starfaring. If there exists no practical way to exceed the speed of light, we may never have seen other civilizations because they're just too damn far away. There may be billions of stars in the universe, but what are the odds there is a human-habitable planet within, say, 100 light years? Is it really worth the effort to colonize a planet so far away? Your colony ship takes, say, 10,000 years to arrive at it's destination (and that's a smokin' fast colony ship!), and the inhabitants spend the next 10,000 years terraforming the target. Hell, by the time you come in physical contact with your colony it will be populated by a species distinct from the colonizers.
A light year is a long, long way. While it may make sense for us to leave our home planet, I have yet to see a reasonable scenario where we would leave our home star system.
And why does the author assume we'll be able to observe evidence of an advanced civilization? The engineer in me thinks part of technical sophistication is only sending radio waves to the intended target, not slinging them all over the universe. When the world is covered by a fiber grid, and all RF communications is low power spread spectrum, will our civilization be observable via a radio telescope? I doubt it - won't be enough there to pick out of the background.
And let's say the universe is teaming with technological species. When we look up at a star a billion light years away, we're seeing what occurred there a billion years ago. There might be a whole galaxy filled with easily detectable life forms, but if it's a billion light years away we won't know for another billion years.
After initially being a proponent, I've come to the same conclusion about unit tests myself. I don't think they're worthless, but the time you spend developing or maintaining unit tests could be more profitably spent elsewhere. Especially maintaining.
That's my experience, anyway. I suppose it's pretty heavily dependent on your environment, your customers, and exactly how tolerant your application is of bugs. Avionics software for a new jet fighter has a different set of demands than ye olde "display records from the database" business application. More applications fall in the second category than the first.
That seems to be the problem with every story about revolutionary technology. A mention on slashdot every couple years, then nothing.
Granted, MAHEM would be a bit more compact, but the more complicated something is, the more likely it is to fail. Not only is the development of LOSAT completed, but the missile itself is so fast there's really nothing the target can do to intercept or evade.