You make a good point, but there's two things I don't think you considered deeply enough: 1. It might not be a noticeable difference. Phones don't need much power. It could be millimeter depressions that generate this energy. 2. People, especially in this country, voluntarily get on treadmills to make their leg muscles use more effort. This can certainly be a win-win situation.

There's no absolute concept of time anyway - it would not be more or less correct to say a few hours rather than a few million light years because it all depends where you are in space-time. Their frame of reference is clearly the earliest at which we could have observed the explosion. Still incredible given we were not expecting it and it's not something that people can just observe without lots of equipment.

An abundance of links makes sure that in the event you don't find the service you're looking for, you have leveraged /. to gain an audience with lots of wallets worldwide.

Ok, in any standard supply-demand analysis, you will find that if a company is attaining non-zero profits, in a competitive environment, another company WILL sprout up out of nowhere to snatch a percentage of that, possibly by selling the same products at a lower cost. This reduces the sum total profits attainable by both companies. The reduced value goes into the pool of money that customers get to KEEP.

However! There is a catch to that. It's called barriers to entry. Examples include: patents that the first company holds that are required to produce the product, infrastructure required to deliver the product (think ISPs' fiber, cell towers), and marketability (if you wanted to sell an OS in the mid 1990s, your company name better be Microsoft). There is a huge (debatable in terms of fairness) advantage the market gives to the FIRST guy to succeed in a certain line of business.

So in your examples, it's not in 100% of the cases in small businesses, they give up profit out of a sense of misplaced altruism. It's simply that they don't have anything that can command a higher profit. For companies that rise up again and again in the news (Microsoft, Apple, AT&T, Verizon, the list goes on), they DO have the chips to play. They understand that barriers to entry prevent Joe Shmoe from writing his own OS or making his own smart phone or building his own cell network and compete successfully with them. They understand they are not in a perfectly competitive environment and can thus act monopolistically or oligopolistically.

This is all not to say that analysis involving assumptions of a competitive environment is purely academic and impractical. In this case, the best action for any governing body to do is to try to increase the competitive potential of the market. This is why they allow certain mergers. The standard case is when two small companies merge to better compete against a bigger one (see Thompson-Reuter vis-a-vis Bloomberg). They will/should never allow a merger that is purely or mostly for eliminating competition (which is the case that was leaked here).

Yea uh... I am Chinese. I watched those doomsday movies with my Chinese relatives. And I read about general sentiment regarding these movies online.

I think it's interesting that in most doomsday asteroid scenarios, the US is the one to launch a mission to save the earth. Granted, part of that is because Hollywood wrote those scenarios, but generally the rest of the world doesn't think twice when watching those movies because US is the de facto leader in most things. I think this is a telling inflection point in the history of nations.

Um something something and your high horse... Nobody's coddling the kid here. If you actually read the article you'll see he's thought through all the points this thread has made. They're not just rewarding him for effort, but for an actually useful find.

If you read the article, he used the same number. Also he explained that though you can use tracking for flat arrays, maintenance costs discourage most people from doing that. So his experiment concluded an improvement for the static array arrangement.

Law 1: not true. In a competitive market, the corporation that can give customers the most value will keep the most value for itself. What you say is only true in monopolistic and (sometimes) oligopolistic environments. In this case, however, the market is pretty much an oligopoly. That's why the government has to step in to determine if this merger is something that allows AT&T to compete better and provide more value to the customers or if it's something that will altogether transfer more value from customers to AT&T.

Uh... that's not how it works. Just because you get a cut doesn't mean you'll get an infection nowadays. Granted, that assertion comes as a result of other pieces of modern society like clean water and soap to wash away a wound, but penicillin itself is not directly responsible for the quality of life we enjoy. Most in the US for example don't ever critically need to use penicillin for much of their lives.

What does this have to do with what I wrote? I'm pointing out that the parent to my post is assuming something based on his faulty understanding of history. Yes fiction strangely predicts reality in certain cases, but that's a different topic altogether.

With the existence of auto-immune disorders as a warning sign, I can see that this will have lots and lots of trouble getting approval.

Did you even read that? That's wiki's list of fictional medicines.

We've had etch-a-sketch for years now. The most of the point of printing is so that it doesn't get erased.

As mentioned, android is not bundled with every google search you perform. This is not leveraging the monopoly, merely running a side business. I think ideally google would like to see android generate revenue for them in non-search arenas.