In order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), England’s Telegraph newspaper asked readers to submit what they would like to communicate to aliens before the visit Earth. Expecting wonderful, uplifting notes extolling our virtues as humans, the Telegraph was shocked to discover the opposite, with the overwhelming majority asking for aliens to please put us out of our misery.

For what would he learn about mankind? First, that we are vicious, creatures who have already done a great job of wrecking our home. “Please kill us now … have no mercy,” urged a gentleman from Indiana. “We are evil and you must defend yourself.”

“Keep away from this planet,” agreed Pamela from Sicily. “Mankind is only intent on depleting, abusing and destroying [it]. They will do the same to yours should they find it. Mankind is the worst virus in the universe. You have been warned.”

Nick from Calne was equally blunt: “If you manage to work out how to travel to us, don’t bother, as we’ll probably probe you, try to blow you up or worse still, steal your technology and invade… Have a nice day.”

Rob from Georgia, meanwhile, was prepared to throw the rest of mankind to the lions: “Dearest Aliens, If you choose to conquer Earth, please do not kill or enslave those of us who can name all 12 men to have walked on the Moon. We are the ones worth keeping around.”

Seema from Elgin had a compelling reason for ET not to bother with us: “If you’re planning to visit our planet, please know you will need to remove all metal from your person, take your shoes off and submit to a full body scan, carry all liquids/gels/aerosols in clear plastic bottles no bigger than 3.4oz, surrender all cigarette lighters and batteries, pack all jams and jellies (but pies can be carried on)… Oh, yes. Welcome to the Earth!”

Ubisoft’s misguided and universally despised Digital Rights Management system proved itself a complete failure over the weekend, depriving rightful owners of Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 the ability to play the very games they paid for.  It would appear Ubisoft’s servers failed, an event everyone knew would happen sooner or later as a perfect illustrative example of DRM nonsense that harms no one but the paying customer.

Ubisoft, is all this bad press really worth these daily articles? Can you truly say you’ve sold more copes of Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 because of your new DRM scheme? Or have you pushed away even more customers and alienated loyal fans? It’s not too late to call the whole thing off and return to creating stable, relatively bug-free games that merit a purchase.

Over the weekend, two statements were issued from the UK Community Manager:

Ubi.Vigil (UK Community Manager): I don’t have any clear information on what the issue is since I’m not in the office, but clearly the extended downtime and lengthy login issues are unacceptable, particularly as I’ve been told these servers are constantly monitored.

I’ll do what I can to get more information on what the issue is here first thing tomorrow and push for a resolution and assurance this won’t happen in the future. I realise that’s not ideal but there’s only so much I can do on a weekend as I’m not directly involved with the server side of this system.

Ubi.Vigil (UK Community Manager): Due to exceptional demand, we are currently experiencing difficulties with the Online Service Platform. This does not affect customers who are currently playing, but customers attempting to start a game may experience difficulty in accessing our servers. We are currently working to resolve this issue and apologize for any inconvenience.

If you happen to own a PS3 or Xbox 360 and are looking for great media-streaming software, then TVersity is a worthy option. It’s fast, stable and free, my three favorite words when it comes to media-streaming. While it doesn’t support as many formats as Java PS3 Media Server, it does benefit from having a simple design, making it more accessible for your average consumer.

TVersity has just been updated to a new beta version and with it comes some pretty cool new features.

Download Version 1.8:

Pro edition

• Completely new off-screen browser, based on Google Chromium: runs out of process for increased stability and solves all the known issues with premium content (it used to occasionally fail to start on some systems).
• Premium content site are now defined in an external file (osb.xml), advanced users can easily add their sites.
• List of supported websites can now be updated without requiring a new release, so expect many new sites to be added and pushed to you from now on. (Advanced users should send us their additions since from time to time we overwrite your osb.xml automatically).
• New premium content sites:
  • CNN
  • Food Network
  • HGTV
  • Snag Films
  • YouTube Movies and Full Episodes

All Versions

• Update and expand YouTube support to include subscriptions, favorites and playlists by user (in addition to user video uploads which were previously supported). Also support adding YouTube content by search queries (replaces the “by tag” category which YouTube has obsoleted).
• Various minor bug fixes.

The California Institute of Technology has announced the invention of a new type of solar cell, one that is way beyond current technology.  Better yet, this new solar cell is comprised of 98% plastic and only requires 1/50th of the semiconductor material used in convention solar cells, meaning this new CalTech invention will be incredibly cheap to produce. Even better…CalTech’s new technology runs at 90% efficiency, which is a remarkable 4X greater than existing solar cells.

“Our technology uses 50-100 times less silicon,” he said, “in the form of a sparse array of wires. And that sparse array of wires has exactly the same light absorption and electricity-collection properties as the conventional silicon wafer cell.”

The tiny silicon wires stick up from the base, or substrate, looking something like a microscopic hair brush. And because the key component of solar cells is an expensive, highly purified form of silicon, there’s a real economic benefit to this design.

“So what that means is, in terms of cost, is you can use 100 times less silicon. And that’s potentially very significant.”

But the silicon is what converts light into electricity, so you might think using so much less silicon would reduce the electrical output, but Atwater says that’s not the case.

“The light comes in and is both directly absorbed by the wires, and some of the light bounces around in between the wires. And that bouncing around or multiple scattering in between the wires results in dramatically enhanced absorption,” Atwater explained. “In fact, the absorption enhancement that we see is in the range of 20 to 50 times the single-pass absorbance.”

Source