Light-based “LiFi” is stunningly fast, notably fragile—and now standardized

Burstar , 11 months ago

Light is almost certainly the fastest thing around. So it makes sense that “light-based wireless communications,” or LiFi, could blow the theoretical doors off existing radio-wave wireless standards, to the tune of a maximum 224GB per second. [Edit, 2:40 p.m.: It does not make sense, and those doors would remain on each rhetorical vehicle. As pointed out by commenters, radio waves, in a vacuum, would reasonably be expected to travel at the same speed as light. Ars, but moreso the author personally, regrets the error. Original post continues.]

JFC is this really where you want to get your technology data from? Authors that clearly have no grasp of even the basest fundamentals in the physics involved? Really?

BrikoX OP , 11 months ago

It’s a news site, don’t expect them to have science degree and them adding an edit note after they were corrected shows more integrity than 95% of other news sites.

Burstar , 11 months ago

shows more integrity than 95% of other news sites

Nah, there are many news sites that post corrections. This one was just so blatantly egregious that they had to put a stop to it before their entire corporation became a laughing stock. This isn’t just a ‘news site’. It is a Technology News Site. They had one job and they f’d it up. They shouldn’t even be hiring writers without a science degree let alone one that flunked highschool science.

rikudou , 11 months ago

They shouldn’t even be hiring writers without a science degree

As you mentioned, it’s a Technology News Site, not a Science News Site. Sounds a little arbitrary.

Burstar , 11 months ago

You know this whole post is doing absolute wonders for demonstrating exactly how reliable this particular Community apparently is. Seriously, posters linking articles with blatant ignorance of the subject matter, defending that choice (and their choice to link it demonstrating their lack of knowledge on the subject matter too), getting crazy up-votes from people who obviously don’t know any better and then your comment of ‘muh, Science vs Technology is an arbitrary distinction and totally not something where both rely on each other intimately’.

[Slow clap] thanks guys. Good to know if I ever need to cite how unreliable this community actually is I’ll forever have this exquisite reference.

rikudou , 11 months ago

The author didn’t know radio waves travel at the speed of light. So he made some good-sounding intro based on incorrect assumptions (which made the whole intro a little cringe) which they apologized for. Yeah, shouldn’t happen, but we’re all human, we make mistakes.

You know that if you go deep down enough, everything is maths? Does it mean everyone should have a maths degree to do anything? Technology isn’t science, technology is practical application of science. So you need to be a scientist to design such technology, but you “only” need to understand the high-level to convey to people how it works, because no one* is really interested in how it works.

• That’s a hyperbole, I don’t mean “no one” literally, you sound like the type of person that would reply with “muh, not no one”, so I’m clarifying in advance¨

I hope you remember this reply of mine every time you make any mistake. Or any time you don’t know something you should know because you for whatever reason missed it (which, again, happens to all of us).