Do you remember in the Matrix movie when the crew was getting chased down by those flying squid-like sentinels? Do you remember how they said their only weapon against their mechanized foes was an EMP, or an electromagnetic pulse? Well, now Boeing has developed a missile with electronic-killing EMP-like capabilities, knocking out computers and electronics as it flies overhead.

The good news is that the microwave pulses being blasted out from the missle are non-lethal, so it’s really just the computers and other electronic equipment that it’s killing. Boeing calls it the CHAMP, which stands for Counter-electronics High-powered Advanced Missile (I’m not really sure where the P fits into that). Considering how everything relies on electricity and electronics, knocking out the defense systems and computers of your enemies can be positively crippling.

“In the near future, this technology may be used to render an enemy’s electronic and data systems useless even before the first troops or aircraft arrive,” said Keith Coleman, program manager on CHAMP for Boeing Phantom Works. In the real world test, the CHAMP was able to not only knock out banks of PCs, but even the cameras that were being used to record the test. “We took out everything, it was fantastic.”

[Source via Boeing]

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Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you.

If you were in fact in the Matrix, how would you know? According to Silas Beane of the University of Bonn, there is in fact a test you can take to see if you are stuck living in a simulation.

How does it work? I don’t fully get the science, but the idea is that they can use some fancy ideas like the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit, quantum chromodynamics and lattice gauge theory to put it all together. The idea is that even the most sophisticated simulation would have limits that could eventually be hit. Supposedly these limits can be detected and there is no way around them.

Keep in mind that this is basing itself on the idea that we’ve seen these limits in our own computer systems— that doesn’t mean some advanced robot or alien life would be playing by the exact same rules does it? Interesting concept, but I’m not so sure if it would really prove anything for fact.

What the testing on the concept of virtual worlds does do is advance our own understanding of how a simulation would and could work. Eventually we could understand it so well that we make our own simulations. Then as we advance further we end up becoming more reliant on robots. They take over and put us in the simulation. All the while, it turns out that this world was already a simulation. This would mean that the robots are living in a world that was already a simulation created by someone else— isn’t the science and idea of simulation confusing? Maybe not “time travel paradox” confusing, but still.

What do you think? IF we really were living in simulation, do you think that our simulation controllers would even allow a test like this to work in the first place? Food for thought.

[ source ]

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Okay, so this might not exactly be an epic doomsday of Matrix proportions, but it seems Cisco claims that through its annual Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast it was able to draw some pretty interesting conclusions.

Just last year mobile data traffic doubled increasing to 133 percent, and based on the trend will grow similarly in 2012, climbing to 110 percent, and will increase 18-fold by 2016. By that year, over half of the mobile traffic will come from Asia Pacific and Western Europe, with additional large gains in Africa and the Middle East.

“Mobile data traffic will continue to explode,” Cisco’s vice president of service-provider marketing Suraj Shetty said. “This is a trend we don’t see slowing down.” Cisco attributes the growth to the ever-increasing selection of devices that have arrived on the market in recent years.

In line with Cisco’s predictions, CTIA said last fall that the number of wireless subscriber connections in the U.S. outnumbers the population. If CTIA’s data is correct, that means there are more smartphones, tablets, and wireless gadgets in the states than there are people. And this trend isn’t isolated just to the US as data and mobile use continues to grow at a rapid rate.

[ source ]

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