For most people modern technology is a nightmare of impenetrable acronyms and standards. Does your phone have Bluetooth? Your laptop have Wi-Fi? Is your PDA GPRS-enabled? Does your car come with built-in GPS? Should you care? As long as it works, perhaps not. Often the only reason you need to know which one of these a device supports is to know if it can communicate with another one. But that may soon change. On the way are intelligent devices that can autonomously choose the best radio signal, based on the local conditions around it and on how busy each frequency is. Prepare to be rescued from the electronic Tower of Babel. This latest revolution is not just about neat gadgets for lay people. It will also force a radical rethink of who owns and controls the airwaves. To some experts it even paves the way for a complete overhaul of radio communications and instantly solves one of the biggest problems in radio communications: interference. "Radio interference doesn't really exist," says David Reed, co-director of the viral communications lab at the MIT Media Laboratory. "It is not a property of radio waves, but rather a byproduct of badly designed receivers."
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