Could it be that his audio jacks are picking up EM interference given of by moving electricity through SATA cables? could the new SATA cables reduce the amount of interference they emit? Its plausible.

I could have gone into security but whats the point? Working for the government is not an ideal job (see posts about offices like caves and inane security clearance requirements). If you lucky enough to have gotten a job in the security industry instead of the gov't things tend to go like this: Any new exploit you find will either be (a) swept under a rug by the vendor, (b) accepted as an exploit but never patched, or (c) get the researcher sued by the vendor. If by some small chance you end up finding an exploit for a vendor that actually pays for such knowledge, the average is about $500 per exploit I believe. Not really worth a month of my time no matter how you look at it. If we want a security industry, we have to foster a security industry, not try and hide the fact that we need one (as most companies do now).

We all know how Apple likes to make sure all peripherals are Apple licensed. Couldn't a cradle be made (for cars for example) that used the antenna contact point to extend the antenna (thereby bypassing the need to license a Apple proprietary plug)?

But on the other hand if you restructure the code using different abstraction points (printf outside of the function call instead of inside of it, and looped outside instead of using recursion in the function for example) then this method will bet by most if not all code checkers. This also implies a level of knowledge of the program that is above that required to change comments and spacing. If I can't figure something out, I'll go find a solution, then understand the solution, then rewrite it. This could be considered plagiarism but in the end I still learned what was needed, where is the line drawn really?