Microsoft frequently uses the crack dealer business model. After all, this is how everybody got hooked on Windows and Word: by getting it for free (mostly stealing).

I was a high power radar transmitter engineer, and I've had to look for these coronal discharges in 40-50 KV power supplies, where the clearances were tight and corona starts a breakdown process. I had to sit in the total dark for several minutes until I could see it, guided by the sound and possibly smell.

The discharge from a big tesla coil is the same kind of thing, but high frequency AC. Faintly noticeable, unless you get a low resistance path to discharge it, like static discharge when you walk across the rug and touch a light switch. Or lightning.

If you walk next to a big power line you may hear the discharge. If it freaks out the deer, too bad. They can cross under the line away from a discharge point.

No. The beacon signal has nothing to do with the primary radar, except that the antenna is usually located on top of the radar antenna, and uses the same azimuth pointing information. The interrogator is transmitted in a short pulse, and when the plane receives it, it generates its own fixed amplitude response pulse which has its squawk coded into it. It is received back at the ground radar antenna and decoded and displayed, next to the primary radar return. The code gives the 4 digit squawk, plane altitude (which the radar can't detect), and other info like whether they've been hijacked or their radios are dead.

Obama can run it off of PV cells on the roof. Maybe he got some in the Solyndra liquidation.

copy.com (https://copy.com?r=Zv8zHi) and ubuntuone have clients that integrate with Linux file managers too.

I keep a few Linux ISOs at Microsoft's cloud, just for fun. Sky drive, or whatever they call it now.

... because of referrals. https://copy.com?r=Zv8zHi

Well, I am. And we've been through this before.
http://www.head-fi.org/t/41536...
What Neil Young "discovered":
Basically, don't run your music through crappy mixing boards, filter the good parts out, or compress the shit out of it, or use lossy compression,and it will sound better. You don't need gold plated cables or vacuum tubes.

They could move to Detroit (pronounced DEE- troit by hillbillies) where there's lots of roads, rail lines, empty factories and houses, and build wind turbines and solar panels.

Sure beats going into a hole in the ground to dig coal.

You could pay the greenies picketing your plants the $2B and maybe they'd go home.

You park UNDER them. And your car stays cool.

I still have one of those punches. Doesn't get a lot of use any more. Kids nowadays don't appreciate ....what was I talking about?

"....all the products of technology get cheaper every year except cars?"

And internet service. And phone service. Cable service.

Hmmm, protected monopolies.

My Mint menu has a start button (well, right now it says, "What is thy bidding, Master?"), and the menu is less confusing.

... has mountains, trees, and cows. My commute is 13 minutes through rural country. I cross country ski out my back door. Housing costs a quarter of what it is in Seattle. As for fresh water, I have 8 inches of it on my driveway right now, you can have all you want, just have to melt it first before drinking.

I toured Hawai'i in January (and enjoyed Molokai for a week), and yes it's a nice place to visit. I think the worst part of living there would be the isolation from the rest of the world. Honolulu gave me claustrophobia.