If the Apple Retina display is already beyond the point a human eye can resolve - what's more resolution going to get you?

Bigger numbers. Also, it is beyond the resolution that the human eye can resolve at a typical usage distance. That doesn't necessarily mean that you can't see the difference if you're holding it wrong.

Or, to make the obligatory joke... Wait, watt?

Easy. 1000 hours. Wait, what?

I like to explain it in terms of humans. A watt is an instantaneous unit of power. It represents a resource that is available to do work at any given point of time. In much the same way, a company has employees. They are resources that are available to do work at any given point in time, and each employee can do roughly a fixed amount of work in a given period of time. If a company has ten employees working during the day, assuming an eight-hour work day, it gets eighty employee-hours of work done. If it needs to get more than that amount of work done, it must either increase the number of employees (the wattage available) or increase the period of time over which it does the work (longer hours).

Sadly, this explanation fails to account for folks who reply that they can also make the machine more efficient so that it does more work per watt—work smarter, not harder, and all that—at which point most people end up working longer hours and fudging the hours on their timecards. But I digress.

... it's not about finding a magic bullet, it's about helping cut back on (not eliminate) the need to use coal or nuclear power.

Only up to the point where all the daytime power needs are covered by solar. Given the slow ramp-up/ramp-down times for nuclear plants, they're pretty much suitable only for providing base load (24x7), so either you're using it all day and all night or you're not using it at all. In other words, solar power, if deployed broadly enough, could make nuclear power economically infeasible.

Why buy now when you can wait six months and buy a controlling stake for less than a burger and some fries?

Actually, ESPN forces cable companies into an all-or-nothing situation: either all their customers pay for ESPN, or nobody gets to watch it. They are doing the same thing to ISPs, so it is not as if moving everyone onto the web will somehow help us escape this practice.

Yes. And when advertising dries up and it costs $200 per customer, the cable companies will nearly simultaneously tell them to get bent. They can get away with it now (barely) only because the cost is not insanely high.

The last time California made a labeling law, the soda vendors changed their formulation. I see no reason why the reaction to this proposal would be any different.

Besides, knowing California, the law will probably require a prominent label that says, "Warning: This product contains genetically modified food. Some genetically modified food is known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm."

The downside is channels like SciFi will no longer exist.

It is far more likely that it would still exist, but would air more reruns and less new content. I wouldn't expect the older sci-fi reruns to be significantly more expensive than any other old TV show or movie, and it doesn't take a big audience to make airing such content profitable.

In fact, if Sci-Fi (I refuse to call it SyFy) aired a wider variety of older content, I think it might attract a wider audience. Its biggest problem is that it doesn't have a lot of variety, focuses too much on what I would argue crosses the line into horror, and generally isn't interesting to the average viewer, even among people who enjoy science fiction.

Then cable and satellite channels will no longer be subsidized by ads and will get more expensive.

Perfect. Then the cable companies will be forced to offer many of their more expensive channels a la carte, and I'll no longer have to subsidize all the folks who watch networks like ESPN that I don't care about.

Even better, we, the subscribers, will have more of a voice when it comes to the content, and it will no longer be profitable to do stupid crap like airing wrestling on the Sci-Fi channel just to bring in more ad revenue.

I fail to see the downside here. Instead of hidden costs that we pay by buying products from companies who have to make up for all the money they spent on ads, we'll simply be paying those fees directly to the entertainment companies. In the long run, the cost should be about the same; it will just be easier to see the bottom line.