Starting to sound like Open Source Fear Mongering to me.
You have to look at it from an insurance company's perspective. They provide insurance for things that go wrong. Sometimes the product is something commonly asked for (hey, can you insure my boat that runs on nitroglycerine?). Sometimes insurance companies come up with a product on their own and market it (hey, we'll sell you meteor impact insurance). In either case before they can tell if the product is viable is to set a good price for it. To set a good price for it, they have to study the market - find out what risks there are. Once they decide what chance the bad outcomes have, and how much they would cost, they can come up with a price for the insurance. After that they add a little onto the top for their own pockets and some fudge factor. Finally they can come around and say, "look, we see you have this problem with patent suits and we can insure it for 38 dollars a month" or whatever. So just because they come to the table with this does not automatically mean that it is a bad idea - in fact I think it can be used to cheaply get out of the bind of software lawsuits by big companies against little guy developers. They probably think the same thing, along with other markets as well. Sure you need to shell out some money. Sure, if everyone got together and just paid for lawsuit costs together it would be slightly cheaper. But since other people giving you money out of the goodness of their heart isn't a sure way to foot legal bills, a small premium isn't so bad. This article is a solution not a problem.
In my opinion any individual who purchases these shares is not doing themselves any favor. What is the goal behind buying any? Priced between 108-135 the odds of GOOG appreciating in value anytime soon after the IPO are slim.
And you base this on what? Do you have some sort of magical crystal ball that will let you see what will happen in google's future? I'm not saying it will, but I know enough to say that there is no way to tell what direction google's stock will go. If you could, then you'd either buy the stock or sell it and you'd make some money. So would thousands of other investors. The price would change to account for that, and you'd have a new price that takes into account all forward expectations. This is the fundamental reason that the stock market works. People know google is facing strong competition in the future - that's old news, and will be taken into account in the stock price. The only question mark for the IPO is how the market will react to the market. Discovering the expected return or the volatility from the prices will tell investors more about google, and they'll implement strategies accordingly. That's the unknown part of all this.
...this so called "interoperability" undermines the value proposition which apple and others bring to the table. lest we not think about apple for a bit, what happens to creative and those guys now if their attribute sets are further hurt that the iPod can play more formats?
Two words: tough shit. Competition is a good thing, and it is what makes capitalism work. If Apple can't adapt and survive, then that's their own problem. You and I will both be better off when they cut prices in iTMS to compete with Real.
I posted this on the last apple/real thread, but i don't think it was ever read. (note IANAL) Many people (including real) are expressing that they have a right to listen to whatever formats they wish on the iPod. Yet, no one was ever forced to purchase an iPod. As far as I see, the freedom to choose your selected audio formats is with the consumer before they purchase a music device. If a consumer is unhappy with their purchase, they are free to obtain a player that will utilize other music formats. my Ogg buddies love their machines knowing the functionality was more imporatant than the coolness factor, and I have my iPod due to my own journey through the MP3 player purchasing decision
Actually there is an even more basic right that you are completely missing: the right to do what you want with what you own. Many people interpret the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of hapiness" part of the declaration of independence to really mean "life, liberty, property." By your logic if I buy a car that can only seat 2 people in it, and then through my own modification (put in a back seat) it can now fit 5, I have somehow wronged the car company. To change that slightly to fit the Real vs Apple issue, imagine if instead of me doing the modification, some friendly company decided to do it for free. Is this somehow worse? Now I know that Real doesn't actually do anything to the iPod, they just change their own songs. (which they own the right to distribute) So I don't really understand how this violates anything. Even by your own argument, it isn't even a different audio format. Its the same format - what they are mad about is that the customers aren't locked into iTunes anymore. They can choose between iTunes and real's service. I think the real life equivalent is if you had an old car that took leaded gasoline, you could choose between (somehow) getting leaded gasoline or putting lead substitute into your unleaded gasoline.
Apple has spent a ton of money on R&D and adverting, and any other company is free to do the same to create and sell a product of superior value offering.
You somehow think that Apple has to get money now that they've spent money. Their business model may or may not be successful, but others are free to do what they want to make money as well. If they don't want to spend so much money on R&D or advertising (and honestly I wish I saw less iPod ads) then that's their choice. If instead they want to use Apple's advertising to drive their own product, that's their choice.
for real to piggyback on Apple's success is not only an admission of the lack of success with their own downloading venuture, but their failure to as of yet provide their own superior offering. it is in this spirit that we have such an excellent race with game consoles vying to prove they are the best value for specific consumers.
For Real to expand their potential buyer market to include iPod owners is a brilliant move. Apple's iTunes venture wouldn't feel threatened if Real's offering was vastly inferior. The competition will make Apple reduce their profit margins, which is bad for Apple but good for the consumer. Your final comparison to gaming consoles is comparing apples to oranges - imagine instead if Nintendo made a game that worked in both Gamecube and PS2. Wouldn't their available market be much larger? They would never do it of course, but a such a move would increase competition between console pricing. That's good.
Normally I am completely uninterested in the Missing Manual series of books. But I use Google so much (and it already does such a good job) that getting this book is very tempting. I didn't know about the Google Answers section, and I would love to know how to get that last 10% of usefulness out of their services.
M$FT should just throw in the towel on IE and reduce its function to Windows Update and able to download Mozilla/Netscape, (just make it a ftp downloader tool)
After reading this comment, Bill Gates was quoted as saying "yeah, and monkeys will fly out of my butt!"
I hadn't made the connection myself, but from a Google search - Blasting cap tins are metal containers that were used to store detonators. Blasting caps are needed to detonate high explosives used in mining, construction, warfare, etc. Since the caps contain a sensitive explosive, they were stored in sturdy metal containers to prevent accidental explosions.
So no, they aren't actually a capacitor. At least as far as I can tell. Some electrically activated explosives (C4?) might use a flash capacitor like the one in a disposable camera to generate enough power to detonate. They could use a flash capacitor in that case because it would be cheaper than a bigger battery. (This is an educated guess. I have nowhere near any explosives knowledge.)
Holy shit how did this get moderated as offtopic??? My post is about South Korea's success and how it is good for the United States. The story's topic is Broadband Is The Secret To South Korea's Success. Then I even threw in a stupid joke about how Korean players type in battlenet, which is broadband related.
japanese people: honourable and polite
korean people: shovenistic, dirty, arrogant, and rude.
Americans are different from Koreans how? (In Japanese eyes) I mean we're talking about a culture that folds their dirty clothes! Ultimately money is the middle ground that can make friends out of polar opposites. Do you think American - Chinese relationships would be so good if they were just another USSR and had little to trade with us? The poor relationship between Japanese and Korean people are just an example that western civilization has no monopoly on racism.
I'm glad that South Korea has an improved tech-based economy. They are United States Allies and have become another big friendly Asian trading partner. Maybe a personal freedom focused South Korea and Japan will offset China. If only the two (Koreans and Japanese) would get along...
...and what post for this topic wouldn't be complete without kekekeke ^_^
Heh I used to do that in electrical engineering lab - take a medium sized cap and hook it up over the power systems jacks. POP - left with only two wires and no cap left at all. Everyone knows that each electrical component is built with a certain amount of smoke inside of it that makes it work. Let the smoke out, and the thing won't work anymore:-(.
I am not sure heatpipes would work because they use different densities of the heat transfer medium (like water or air) to cycle it. While the mediums will still have different densities, they won't move at all because there would be no gravity. I guess you could spin the spacecraft, and that would produce a similar effect. However I think that the movement of the medium would eventually screw up the spin of the spacecraft until it became an uncontrolled tumble - bad. You could counteract this with gyros or thrusters I guess. Complicated.:-)
If you have some high efficiency way to turn that heat energy into light, you can then transmit it away at high speed.Which is exactly what I was suggesting with the high tech answer of "paint one side black and the other white"
When you do that the white side absorbs only a little of incoming heat, and then it is transferred by contact to the black side, which transmits the heat away pretty well. Yes, you don't have any "lasers" and you can't send any information or zap aliens this way, but all it requires is a can of Benjamin Moore and a roller.
But what about a laser powered by heat? Can it happen without having to reach the ionization temperature of the lasing medium? Anyone have any insight?
Now I am not a laser scientist (IANALS) but I am an electrical engineer. Almost all lasers are powered by heat, in a roundabout way. Power generators usually use a heat differential to produce a circular motion which is turned into electricity. Electricity goes to your laser and makes it go. So yes, a laser can be powered by heat. I don't think it can be done directly, and attaching a steam power plant to a satellite would be a little bizzare.
I assume that your goal here isn't to produce electricity because solar panels do a good job without all this fuss. Instead I assume the laser is to keep the spacecraft cool. Now stay with me while I describe heat transfer. There are two ways that an object can stay cool - either by bleeding heat into surrounding medium (none or very very little in space) or radiate it away. The radiation emitted is directly related to what is absorbed. For example, white absorbs little and emits little. Black absorbs a lot and radiates a lot. So to keep your spacecraft cool you could just paint the side towards the sun white (or mirror) and paint the side away from the sun black. Or you can do what NASA did and put a heat shield in front of the spacecraft with very little connection between the two. Sure it'll get hot, but the small connection means that there won't be much heat transfer between the heat sensitive electronics and the very hot shield. Its all about effeciency.
Because some people might not know them by heart... from the gnu.org website:
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices
stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively
when run, you must cause it, when started running for such
interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an
announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a
notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide
a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under
these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this
License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but
does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on
the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily
I find it unlikely that we wouldn't be able to understand an alien message within a few months. Such a discovery would have many people working on it. Assuming they use some sort of rational broadcasting method the format should be easy to decode within a few weeks at the most. The only issue we'll have is with the content, and that won't matter because we'll probably just fire off a message that is designed to be decoded and as understandable as possible, then listen to their broadcasts for the next couple hundred years trying to figure out their content.
And as to the question of what we'll be able to do with it - just knowing there is other intelligent life within communications range will be doing something so monumental that it might be more important than anything the ETs have to say.
Finally, no matter where they are in the galaxy, if we were to focus our broadcast to just transmit to them, we could reach them with radio. Right now we broadcast to the whole sky, and restricting that range would improve the broadcast strength by hundreds of dB's certainly, maybe more.
What's a Slashdot story without an anti-American post?
Since that has never occurred, it is hard to say. But the prophecies speak of a Duke Nuken Forever Gone Gold article with no trolls, everyone RTFA, no in-jokes, and no slashdot effect!
Slashdot Mirror
Starting to sound like Open Source Fear Mongering to me.
You have to look at it from an insurance company's perspective. They provide insurance for things that go wrong. Sometimes the product is something commonly asked for (hey, can you insure my boat that runs on nitroglycerine?). Sometimes insurance companies come up with a product on their own and market it (hey, we'll sell you meteor impact insurance). In either case before they can tell if the product is viable is to set a good price for it. To set a good price for it, they have to study the market - find out what risks there are. Once they decide what chance the bad outcomes have, and how much they would cost, they can come up with a price for the insurance. After that they add a little onto the top for their own pockets and some fudge factor. Finally they can come around and say, "look, we see you have this problem with patent suits and we can insure it for 38 dollars a month" or whatever. So just because they come to the table with this does not automatically mean that it is a bad idea - in fact I think it can be used to cheaply get out of the bind of software lawsuits by big companies against little guy developers. They probably think the same thing, along with other markets as well. Sure you need to shell out some money. Sure, if everyone got together and just paid for lawsuit costs together it would be slightly cheaper. But since other people giving you money out of the goodness of their heart isn't a sure way to foot legal bills, a small premium isn't so bad. This article is a solution not a problem.
In my opinion any individual who purchases these shares is not doing themselves any favor. What is the goal behind buying any? Priced between 108-135 the odds of GOOG appreciating in value anytime soon after the IPO are slim.
And you base this on what? Do you have some sort of magical crystal ball that will let you see what will happen in google's future? I'm not saying it will, but I know enough to say that there is no way to tell what direction google's stock will go. If you could, then you'd either buy the stock or sell it and you'd make some money. So would thousands of other investors. The price would change to account for that, and you'd have a new price that takes into account all forward expectations. This is the fundamental reason that the stock market works. People know google is facing strong competition in the future - that's old news, and will be taken into account in the stock price. The only question mark for the IPO is how the market will react to the market. Discovering the expected return or the volatility from the prices will tell investors more about google, and they'll implement strategies accordingly. That's the unknown part of all this.
...this so called "interoperability" undermines the value proposition which apple and others bring to the table. lest we not think about apple for a bit, what happens to creative and those guys now if their attribute sets are further hurt that the iPod can play more formats?
Two words: tough shit. Competition is a good thing, and it is what makes capitalism work. If Apple can't adapt and survive, then that's their own problem. You and I will both be better off when they cut prices in iTMS to compete with Real.
I posted this on the last apple/real thread, but i don't think it was ever read. (note IANAL) Many people (including real) are expressing that they have a right to listen to whatever formats they wish on the iPod. Yet, no one was ever forced to purchase an iPod. As far as I see, the freedom to choose your selected audio formats is with the consumer before they purchase a music device. If a consumer is unhappy with their purchase, they are free to obtain a player that will utilize other music formats. my Ogg buddies love their machines knowing the functionality was more imporatant than the coolness factor, and I have my iPod due to my own journey through the MP3 player purchasing decision
Actually there is an even more basic right that you are completely missing: the right to do what you want with what you own. Many people interpret the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of hapiness" part of the declaration of independence to really mean "life, liberty, property." By your logic if I buy a car that can only seat 2 people in it, and then through my own modification (put in a back seat) it can now fit 5, I have somehow wronged the car company. To change that slightly to fit the Real vs Apple issue, imagine if instead of me doing the modification, some friendly company decided to do it for free. Is this somehow worse? Now I know that Real doesn't actually do anything to the iPod, they just change their own songs. (which they own the right to distribute) So I don't really understand how this violates anything. Even by your own argument, it isn't even a different audio format. Its the same format - what they are mad about is that the customers aren't locked into iTunes anymore. They can choose between iTunes and real's service. I think the real life equivalent is if you had an old car that took leaded gasoline, you could choose between (somehow) getting leaded gasoline or putting lead substitute into your unleaded gasoline.
Apple has spent a ton of money on R&D and adverting, and any other company is free to do the same to create and sell a product of superior value offering.
You somehow think that Apple has to get money now that they've spent money. Their business model may or may not be successful, but others are free to do what they want to make money as well. If they don't want to spend so much money on R&D or advertising (and honestly I wish I saw less iPod ads) then that's their choice. If instead they want to use Apple's advertising to drive their own product, that's their choice.
for real to piggyback on Apple's success is not only an admission of the lack of success with their own downloading venuture, but their failure to as of yet provide their own superior offering. it is in this spirit that we have such an excellent race with game consoles vying to prove they are the best value for specific consumers.
For Real to expand their potential buyer market to include iPod owners is a brilliant move. Apple's iTunes venture wouldn't feel threatened if Real's offering was vastly inferior. The competition will make Apple reduce their profit margins, which is bad for Apple but good for the consumer. Your final comparison to gaming consoles is comparing apples to oranges - imagine instead if Nintendo made a game that worked in both Gamecube and PS2. Wouldn't their available market be much larger? They would never do it of course, but a such a move would increase competition between console pricing. That's good.
How would your life be different without a pulse?
I would have had much more in common with my ex-wife.
We know you did it OJ! Just because you weren't convicted in court doesn't mean you weren't convicted in our minds!
Normally I am completely uninterested in the Missing Manual series of books. But I use Google so much (and it already does such a good job) that getting this book is very tempting. I didn't know about the Google Answers section, and I would love to know how to get that last 10% of usefulness out of their services.
Fuck, that makes two. :-( Oh the irony.
Bleh I actually have two tags. One html code typo in about 100 comments? I think thats a pretty good accuracy.
M$FT should just throw in the towel on IE and reduce its function to Windows Update and able to download Mozilla/Netscape, (just make it a ftp downloader tool)
After reading this comment, Bill Gates was quoted as saying "yeah, and monkeys will fly out of my butt!"
I hadn't made the connection myself, but from a Google search -
Blasting cap tins are metal containers that were used to store detonators. Blasting caps are needed to detonate high explosives used in mining, construction, warfare, etc. Since the caps contain a sensitive explosive, they were stored in sturdy metal containers to prevent accidental explosions.
So no, they aren't actually a capacitor. At least as far as I can tell. Some electrically activated explosives (C4?) might use a flash capacitor like the one in a disposable camera to generate enough power to detonate. They could use a flash capacitor in that case because it would be cheaper than a bigger battery. (This is an educated guess. I have nowhere near any explosives knowledge.)
Holy shit how did this get moderated as offtopic??? My post is about South Korea's success and how it is good for the United States. The story's topic is Broadband Is The Secret To South Korea's Success. Then I even threw in a stupid joke about how Korean players type in battlenet, which is broadband related.
Unfortunately the question is not "what have you done for me?" but "what have you done for me lately?"
japanese people: honourable and polite
korean people: shovenistic, dirty, arrogant, and rude.
Americans are different from Koreans how? (In Japanese eyes) I mean we're talking about a culture that folds their dirty clothes! Ultimately money is the middle ground that can make friends out of polar opposites. Do you think American - Chinese relationships would be so good if they were just another USSR and had little to trade with us? The poor relationship between Japanese and Korean people are just an example that western civilization has no monopoly on racism.
Every joke, every pun, done to death, really.
-SG1
I'm glad that South Korea has an improved tech-based economy. They are United States Allies and have become another big friendly Asian trading partner. Maybe a personal freedom focused South Korea and Japan will offset China. If only the two (Koreans and Japanese) would get along...
...and what post for this topic wouldn't be complete without kekekeke ^_^
Heh I used to do that in electrical engineering lab - take a medium sized cap and hook it up over the power systems jacks. POP - left with only two wires and no cap left at all. Everyone knows that each electrical component is built with a certain amount of smoke inside of it that makes it work. Let the smoke out, and the thing won't work anymore :-(.
Two other words: The Darkness
Sorry for the asp / wmv format.
Animals that don't move are called vegetables.
Actually, they're called sessile.
You know, like a sessile Grog?
I am not sure heatpipes would work because they use different densities of the heat transfer medium (like water or air) to cycle it. While the mediums will still have different densities, they won't move at all because there would be no gravity. I guess you could spin the spacecraft, and that would produce a similar effect. However I think that the movement of the medium would eventually screw up the spin of the spacecraft until it became an uncontrolled tumble - bad. You could counteract this with gyros or thrusters I guess. Complicated. :-)
If you have some high efficiency way to turn that heat energy into light, you can then transmit it away at high speed.Which is exactly what I was suggesting with the high tech answer of "paint one side black and the other white"
When you do that the white side absorbs only a little of incoming heat, and then it is transferred by contact to the black side, which transmits the heat away pretty well. Yes, you don't have any "lasers" and you can't send any information or zap aliens this way, but all it requires is a can of Benjamin Moore and a roller.
But what about a laser powered by heat? Can it happen without having to reach the ionization temperature of the lasing medium? Anyone have any insight?
Now I am not a laser scientist (IANALS) but I am an electrical engineer. Almost all lasers are powered by heat, in a roundabout way. Power generators usually use a heat differential to produce a circular motion which is turned into electricity. Electricity goes to your laser and makes it go. So yes, a laser can be powered by heat. I don't think it can be done directly, and attaching a steam power plant to a satellite would be a little bizzare.
I assume that your goal here isn't to produce electricity because solar panels do a good job without all this fuss. Instead I assume the laser is to keep the spacecraft cool. Now stay with me while I describe heat transfer. There are two ways that an object can stay cool - either by bleeding heat into surrounding medium (none or very very little in space) or radiate it away. The radiation emitted is directly related to what is absorbed. For example, white absorbs little and emits little. Black absorbs a lot and radiates a lot. So to keep your spacecraft cool you could just paint the side towards the sun white (or mirror) and paint the side away from the sun black. Or you can do what NASA did and put a heat shield in front of the spacecraft with very little connection between the two. Sure it'll get hot, but the small connection means that there won't be much heat transfer between the heat sensitive electronics and the very hot shield. Its all about effeciency.
Or howabout BoyPubeBox? or maybe even PoxCubeBoy?
Because some people might not know them by heart... from the gnu.org website:
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's
source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you
conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate
copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the
notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty;
and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License
along with the Program.
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and
you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices
stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively
when run, you must cause it, when started running for such
interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an
announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a
notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide
a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under
these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this
License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but
does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on
the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If
identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program,
and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in
themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those
sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you
distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based
on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of
this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the
entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest
your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to
exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or
collective works based on the Program.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program
with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of
a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under
the scope of this License.
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily
I find it unlikely that we wouldn't be able to understand an alien message within a few months. Such a discovery would have many people working on it. Assuming they use some sort of rational broadcasting method the format should be easy to decode within a few weeks at the most. The only issue we'll have is with the content, and that won't matter because we'll probably just fire off a message that is designed to be decoded and as understandable as possible, then listen to their broadcasts for the next couple hundred years trying to figure out their content.
And as to the question of what we'll be able to do with it - just knowing there is other intelligent life within communications range will be doing something so monumental that it might be more important than anything the ETs have to say.
Finally, no matter where they are in the galaxy, if we were to focus our broadcast to just transmit to them, we could reach them with radio. Right now we broadcast to the whole sky, and restricting that range would improve the broadcast strength by hundreds of dB's certainly, maybe more.
What's a Slashdot story without an anti-American post?
Since that has never occurred, it is hard to say. But the prophecies speak of a Duke Nuken Forever Gone Gold article with no trolls, everyone RTFA, no in-jokes, and no slashdot effect!