For a more thorough and slightly more technical approach to the same subject, check out the Usenet Physics FAQ's article "Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible?". Here's the conclusion:

To begin with, it is rather difficult to define exactly what is really meant by FTL travel and FTL communication. Many things such as shadows can go FTL, but not in a useful way that can carry information.

There are several serious possibilities for real FTL which have been proposed in the scientific literature, but these always come with technical difficulties.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tends to stop the use of apparent FTL quantum effects for sending information or matter.

In general relativity there are potential means of FTL travel, but they may be impossible to make work. It is thought highly unlikely that engineers will be building space ships with FTL drives in the foreseeable future, if ever, but it is curious that theoretical physics as we presently understand it seems to leave the door open to the possibility.

FTL travel of the sort science fiction writers would like is almost certainly impossible. For physicists the interesting question is "why is it impossible and what can we learn from that?"

It's not the state getting into your "business", it's your business getting into the state. Marriage predates nation-states by millennia. And as a practical matter, I'm glad I didn't have to get a lawyer and sign a 500-page contract in order to get married, and I'm glad that other people don't need their own lawyer to go over such a contract in order to recognize my marriage.

She's better known for her book Lean In and the associated social movement, which encourages women to actively pursue their careers. Her name has come up on Slashdot before.

Her name is Sheryl. It's fairly well-known. How do you screw this up when the correct name is in the first sentence of the summary?

That's better than the U.S./India time difference.

You're quoting A Tale of Two Cities, not War and Peace.

I used to think that way, but my whole working life so far has been the opposite experience. Many, many technically competent people simply don't put any effort into reading and writing. They might have passed the tests in school when they were being graded, but their emails, specs, and source code comments are not up to scratch. Very few people are *good* at writing, of course, but most people don't even proofread.

I was talking about the suggestion that California uses enough water to have a significant effect on Pacific sea levels. My back of the envelope estimate suggests that lowering the Pacific by one inch would take at least ten thousand times as much water as California uses in a year.

All right, I give up. I can't figure out whether you're serious or whether this is a parody. Help me out?

If your primary security concern is a federal subpoena, you have already made far greater errors than picking the wrong email provider.

ALPS keyswitches work well for gaming and they're much less noisy than buckling springs. You can find used Dell AT101Ws all over the place.

Kilobyte-quantities of EEPROM are cheap enough that the package is probably a non-trivial part of the cost. The die cost is not the only lower bound on the price of a memory IC.

Those were generic examples. A better one for a mobile device might have been that the contacts on the charging port wears out. Based on the rest of your post I'm skeptical that you know anything about the components used to make Kindles, but I didn't design it so I won't speculate further.

I apologize for the LCD/E-Ink confusion. But it doesn't make a difference because neither of them are designed to last for 100 years. According to the company, they expect that "over 90% of E Ink displays will last more than 10 years with typical usage", where "typical usage" is defined as room temperature. Kindles are rated for operation between 0 - 35 C (32 - 95 F), and discussion on Amazon suggests that this is a real limitation. That range is similar to what LCDs can handle. I suspect that both are limited by a chemical breakdown process (which would happen exponentially faster at higher temperatures) but I don't know enough about displays to say for sure.

If you think that a space probe is in any way comparable to a consumer e-reader, then I'm afraid you don't understand anything at all about electronics or engineering. Had you kept reading on Wikipedia, you might have found stuff like this:

Voyager-1 was designed from the ground up for reliability in a hostile environment. I can't find a price for the hardware itself, but you can bet it was a more than $100, probably by several zeros. And even so, it's looking like the power supply will fail before it turns 100. A Kindle is nowhere near that level of reliability. It doesn't need it and nobody wants to pay for it.

Many thanks to you and blueg3 for providing a better summary. These terrible analogies for quantum mechanics are always more confusing than helpful.

On what do you base that statement? Consumer-grade electronic devices are not designed to last that long. Electrolytic capacitors leak, electrodes corrode, copper in IC traces migrates and shorts out, batteries wear out. I don't know about LCDs, but I'm sure they have long-term failure modes too, especially if they're exposed to sunlight. The whole device will be exposed to temperature extremes due to the lack of air conditioning in a survival situation. I'll buy 20-30 years. But 100? No way.