Scientists and those who understand science: "Yep, that's how science works. No matter how exciting a new finding may be, if later analysis finds that its conclusions are flawed, it's out the door."

Popular media and pundits: "See? Science is a sham! They just make stuff up to get the big research bucks! Why are we wasting money on this, instead of spending it on something that matters, like welfare or fighter jets?"

I don't think so.

I am out of my depth here somewhat, so I may be completely wrong. But I think that any frequency band of a given width has the same information capacity as any other, given identical signal/noise. That's what the first equation on the Wikipedia page you linked seems to state -- there's no separate term for "base frequency" of your channel. There are fairly simple techniques for transforming a "passband" (a band starting or centered at a higher frequency) to a "baseband" signal (starting at DC, or 0 Hz) -- and, of course, vice-versa.

You seem to be saying that the band from 1 GHz to 1.1 GHz would give you half the capacity of the band from 2 GHz to 2.1 GHz. I'm pretty sure that's wrong, and that the two bands, each 100 MHz wide, have the same Shannon capacity (again, given identical signal/noise).

Yep, that's one of the higher-order issues, along with interference from adjacent bands, broadband noise from power electronics, atmospheric propagation differences, cost of components capable of operating in the target band, and lots of other stuff.

The space between 100 MHz and 165 MHz would constitute 65 MHz of spectrum. So would the space between 1 GHz and 1.065 GHz, or 1 KHz and 65.001 MHz.

According to this US government source, this auction was for 1695-1710 MHz, 1755-1780 MHz and 2155-2180 MHz -- a 15 MHz band and two 25-MHz bands, totaling 65 MHz.

To a first approximation, 65MHz of spectrum gives you a fixed amount of capacity, regardless of its start and end points.

As others have already noted, this is an old, old tactic. I'm a bit surprised that you can correlate enough of the broadband scream produced by a modern laptop to tease out keystrokes reliably, but not that suprised.

It's only "crazy" if you're spending disproportionate time, effort and money to conceal your boring, inconsequential data. And in these days of big-data sieves and ubiquitous surveillance, "boring" and "inconsequential" aren't what they used to be.

I'd love to think that you're right, but to paraphrase the old Sidney Harris cartoon, I think you need to be more explicit in your last step. Even if we could stitch up the whole brain with safe and robust wires and sensors, knowledge encoding is still largely a blank map.

Of course, broad- and fine-scale read/write hardware interfaces to the brain will give us a big boost toward figuring out the harder stuff. But that's going to be a massive undertaking, and outside of hand-waving "superintelligent machines will take care of it for us" daydreams, it's going to take a very long time.

I'm pretty confident in this prediction, but it does occupy a place of pride in my display of "things I'd really love to be wrong about".

That subsidiary appears to be managing cash assets. Now, last time I checked, Apple was sitting on an absurd pile of cash, and I'm sure income from it is non-trivial. But it's still likely a drop in the bucket compared to total corporate income, which IS taxed at significantly higher than 0%.

Bottom line, Apple paid corporate income tax equal to 26-odd percent of their pre-tax income. Feel free to argue that they should be paying more, or less, or exactly that amount. But if you're trying to imply that Apple "doesn't pay tax", or that all (or even most) of their profits are "taxed at 0%", you're just sowing confusion.

Oh, for...

A corporate tax filing reports corporate taxes, not "income taxes paid by employees".

It looks to me like you've got this wrong.

According to this Forbes article from 2013, Apple routes all non-US sales revenue through Ireland. That's sketchy on the part of both Ireland and Apple, and offensive to all the other countries that get no cut from Apple's sales within their borders.

According to this financial statement, Apple paid $9.48b in current US income tax in 2014, $2.15b in current foreign income tax.

Pooling everything, in 2014 Apple had pre-tax income of $53.48b, $13.97b total income tax, for a net income of $39.51b.

I don't know how those numbers compare to other large corporations, or "socially responsible corporations", or whatever you want to compare to. But claiming that Apple routes US sales revenues through Ireland, or that Apple doesn't pay tax on its profits, appears to be completely false.

If I'm misinterpreting these numbers, please post corrections.

You can buy a 1TB thumb drive (Kingston HyperX Predator), but it will cost you around $1K.

You can buy thumb drives for $20 per, but they'll be 64GB, maybe 128GB if you're lucky and don't mind dodgy manufacturers.

You can buy a "1TB thumb drive" for $40 or so on eBay, but you'll find that it "redundantly" stores the last few gigabytes you wrote across the entire drive. In other words, it lies about its capacity, and just trashes existing data once you exceed its real capacity (likely 8GB or less).

Of course, if you're just trying to save "important documents", you probably don't need anywhere near a terabyte, or even a gigabyte.

They may be thinking of using one of the Lagrange points -- geostationary and stable. But, yeah, at least one component (I'd guess the small one) will need some sort of station-keeping propulsion. Ion drive with a big fuel tank?

Actually, a half-mile disk would get some significant thrust from sunlight/solar wind. I don't know whether they could use that for station-keeping, or whether it would just be one more thing for them to fight.

Did your job have you spending a lot of time staring up at the sky?

If so, were you using an image intensifier, or something else that lets you see things too dim for the naked eye?

I agree that it's silly for CNN to encourage non-enthusiasts to go out and look for this. It won't be hard for any amateur with clear skies and a small telescope, but for anybody else, (a) they're likely to miss it, and (b) they're likely to be underwhelmed if they do see it.

But "believe in this crap"? Do you think asteroids are some sort of Illuminati lie designed to keep us in line?

In the same sense that I'm getting closer and closer to Alpha Centauri.

Yes, yes, I'm sure you can imagine any number of situations where your lightning reflexes, superb judgement, and superhuman driving skill will produce a better outcome than some dumb automated system.

But even if you are much more skilled than the average driver -- and it does seem like 80-90% of drivers are quite convinced that they're "better than average" -- you're still likely to do dumb things behind the wheel more frequently than you do brilliant things behind the wheel. If you have a human brain, you're kind of stuck with that. There are a million things that can distract you, impair you, or confuse you, and any one of them will knock you down from that pinnacle of performance.

There will certainly be times when an automated system produces a worse outcome than a skilled human driver. But those times will be overwhelmingly outnumbered by the times when it's the other way around. It's really, really hard to reason objectively about risks like this, especially when there's a perceived loss of control involved. But if you don't let objective reasoning drive policy, you're going to end up with more dead and injured people.

When I was a kid, the debate was over seat-belt laws. There were an amazing number of people who absolutely refused to wear them. "I remember this person who was trapped in a burning (or sinking) car because they couldn't get out of the seat belt!" "I'm too good a driver to get into an accident where I'd need a seat belt to save me!" "If I'm wearing a seat belt, I can't be thrown to safety, so I'll be trapped in the collision!" Yes, I'm quite sure that some people have died because of seat belts. But that number is absolutely dwarfed by the number of people saved by them. It's cold consolation to the handful of seat-belt victims, I know, but you're still an utter fool if you let those few tragedies convince you not to use the belt.

Please don't let fear of a few extremely unlikely scenarios block a robust solution for an entire class of common problems.

The good news: we've got a fix ready for deployment.

The bad news: this fix will force a system restart.

There's some Flash content I still want to view. But I want to look at content, not fight to focus my attention away from screaming, flashing, pulsing, squirming ads on every side. If you want me to run your program, make it worth my while. Especially when the platform on which you want me to run it might let it infect my machine.

Static ads are still fine. I don't much care if you track me and focus them. I'll even click through them occasionally. But I won't let you run down my battery and my brain with animations. I don't care if your marketing macaques say they get more clicks. I've made my choice. I'll never see them.