Steve Balmer is jumping up and down on his beach chair.

http://i2.listal.com/image/4300557/600full-jenny-mccarthy.jpg

It was the SATCOM system of the plane itself, which has the capability of transmitting health and positional data of the entire plane's system for analysis by third-party service and maintenance providers. Airliners have the option to purchase service plans for that but Malaysia Airlines chose to only purchase a separate plane related to data the engine's themselves can transmit (from Rolls Royce, the engine's manufacturer).

Even though Malaysian Airlines didn't have an online service monitoring plan for this specific plane, the plane still performs periodic searches/connections to satellite data communication providers - akin to an unregistered cell phone searching and connecting to a cell tower but without licensed service. This periodic connection occurs approx once every hour on the plane, and by counting the number of attempts (4), authorities believe the plane was either flying or in-tact for at least 4 hours from the last secondary radar ping.

It's defined as someone admitting your money has been stolen.

Until Amazon can build out their warehouse network to support same-day and next-day shipping using local, low-cost couriers. Also why Amazon gave up their fight against internet taxation - with warehouses in every state they'll have to collect sales tax anyway.

That all depends on how one prefers to be robbed. The transparent, libertarian way is to have your money stolen in front of you. The opaque, governmental way is to have it stolen in 3% to 5% increments every year via government-mandated inflation.

Is there an individual or species's intelligence that will ever compete with the collective intelligence of the billions of individual evolutionary processes occurring around us? Does nature consider the impact of these processes before allowing them to occur?

Yes our success is likely dependent on the survival of species around us. No we aren't smart enough (yet) to comprehend the permutations of possibilities and outcomes to conclude whether a particular action we take is ultimately helpful or harmful to us as a species.

We don't mess with nature. We are nature. The fact that our actions come about via volitional acts of cognition makes them no less natural than any other observable behavior from other species.

Fair enough, but animals (like humans) are supremely adaptable. So the question remains - why is it a big deal if animal behavior is altered?

And calling humans an invasive species discounts our role in nature. We have survived through the evolution of our intelligence. The application of that intelligence includes altering nature to the full extent that we're able to in order to support our success as a species. All species do this to the full extent that they're able.

Oh the irony.

Does everything humans do that affects animal behavior need to be altered or fixed? In this case the "impact" is simply that the animals stay away from the power lines. There are countless naturally-occurring things in nature that have similar kinds of "impact".

I wonder what Apple would charge if Samsung agreed to using square corners instead.

Try googling "satire" and "sarcasim" next time.

"An unfortunate wave and harmless radiation that inconvenienced a small group of our citizens"

Spinning rotating mechanical disks to store data? Is this 1960?