Profile: The Jedi Alliance - Qui-Gon Jinn

Personal background
Well, my claim to fame is creating a source code generator, modification system called "Slice and Dice" (http://www.sliceanddice.com). It's both free and opensource. While designed with Visual Basic in mind, it works equally as well to create C , Java, HTML, XML, or any text-based programming language known to man.

Obviously, I'm a computer programmer. I've been rated #250 out of over 70,000 Visual Basic programmer around the world. I'm fluent in 10 programming languages across 5 platforms and have over 14 years of programming experience.

And this is starting to read like my resume.

Unfortunately, there's not much else about me that's remarkable. I'm one hell of a computer programmer, and just an ordinary guy outside of that.

I love computer games and especially love the way Massive Multiplayer games are moving, with the ulitimate still in our near future, Star Wars: Galaxies.

I'm into philosophy and have developed a meta-philosophy I apply to computer programming which I have dubbed "Chaotic Programming". Visit:
http://www.sliceanddice.com/cpp.html

if you're interested in reading a primer on it.

Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
To paraphrase a great man,
"The question isn't whether life exists outside of Earth,
but simply where it exists."

Unless we encounter a civilization greater than our own with far superior technologies that is hell-bent on destroying us, I feel the benefits far out weigh any potential harm. Life from deep in the rain forest is curing disease and delivering new medicines and discoveries every day. Imagine what we'd find in the forests of other planets.

I don't believe we should transmit a sustained beacon until we find a better way to transmit. Currently we're broadcasting everything from every channel, radio station, and other radio souce on the planet. That should easily be enough to draw whatever listeners there are out there within range of hearing us. What do I mean by a better way ? Couldn't tell you, I only know the chances of anyone ever hearing us are pretty minute.

I run SETI@home because I'm a computer programmer and realize the "next great thing" in programming will come not from a single program but from the gestalt of many thousands of programs. A pervasive program like SETI@home sets the stage for distributed computing on a scale only dreamed of before the Internet. Today's statistic quoted that more than 1000 years of processing time was performed in that day alone proving exactly how powerful a process pervasive computing can be.

I also run it, because I know there is something out there, and I want to help find it.

As a suggestion, I'd wonder if there wouldn't be some way of using the Earth's magnetic field to amplify signals so we could listen to more remove signals. Baring that, I'd recommend throwing a (very large) listening post out into space, not unlike Hubble, but for radio signals to avoid any dilution the Earth's atmosphere is having on signals we receive... Okay, so I don't know what the hell I'm talking about... ;)


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SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.