If Michael White is that stupid then it explains a lot. The Direct TV UI is completely horrid in every way. The guide sucks the menus suck, the remote sucks. It's better than the garbage that Comcast has, but only marginally. All of the Cable or Satellite providers have the crappiest UI possible on their boxes. Because they refuse to spend any money on them so they have the box engineers simply slap one together for the least possible cost.

Apple is going to wipe the floor with them. If apple finds a way to have a $45.00 a month subscription to most of the desired channels out there but in a On demand form, They will utterly destroy Dish and the others.

The people that voted to pass it never even read it.

In Texts a Cactus can practice Law. That is the state where a lot of the really bad lawyers go as they are incredibly lax on their requirements.

If it does not load perfectly every time, you failed.

for example? Any of the Gawker Media websites, some times you have to reload t hem 3 times to get the fricking hyperlinks to work.

any usability bug is an epic fail.

dude, unless your tooth is 250meters in diameter, I'm already talking that.

And no they DONT get a signal well above the noise level, not at 20Ly out.

http://www.antenna-theory.com/basics/friis.php - start there to learn about path losses.

A 10,000 Watt signal into a 70DBm antenna and assuming the receiving side has a sensitivity of -124Dbm Like that of the equipment at Arecebo, I'm not assuming super spaceman unobtanium.

The signal at arrival after only 1 light year will be -161Dbm -170 is considered the noise floor on a super clear frequency in the Ghz range.

This is Basic RF stuff here. Do you not know this?

It does not matter, even if they were 10 lightyears away they can not detect any of our radio signals...

The 50 Watts from a GPS Sattelite that is 20,000Km away will only have about 2.3e-16% of that signal arriving at the antenna. Radio signals don't go on forever at full power, they drop off really fast.

http://www.antenna-theory.com/basics/friis.php The Friis Equation is used to calculate this. and if you calculated out a 1Megawatt TV station transmit power to cover even a small 1 lightyear distance... Unless they are intently looking for the signal, and we transmitted at the quietest frequency in the galaxy (Low background noise) ther estill have a very good chance of never seeing our signal.

So at 20 Lightyears, all hope is lost trying to get any TV or FM radio... the only chance is a tightly beamed intentional ultra high power signal in hopes that the target will be listening in 20 years and they have the same technology and frequency range. You have a better chance of getting hit by lightning from a thunderstorm in china while you are in Iowa.

Even if we beamed our strongest transmitter at them and used the entire planets power to send a 200 giggawatt signal into a 56db gain dish array at them. The signal that would arrive at their location would be barely above the background noise. and that is using a incredibly tight directional antenna, Hope we get it right for the motion of their star in relation to ours.

" This result isn't surprising, as the likelihood of us stumbling across intelligent aliens living in the Gliese 581 system transmitting radio"

They mean Transmitting on frequencies that WE use. They could have had a different technology evolutionary path, One where they let their Nicola Tesla do a power distribution system like Ours wanted to do here. That kind of system would have made RF of limited use here. So they may have went to Masers or other technology. Maybe even higher frequencies that attenuate faster.

They also may have had a far higher IQ and never created the technology Plague like we have with the Creation of Television.

Just like how the Viking probe looked for life and only found sterile soil and we called Mars dead. When you look for evidence looking down a very narrow tube you will never see anything that is outside of that tube.

The ipad data plan is data only. and you can take that sim and put it in a iPhone and use it data only.

Did the AT&T guy even know what his company offers?

I have always though that Hollywood executives were completely Idiotic Morons with an IQ around 85.

And this guy has proven it without a shadow of a doubt.

Please hollywood, keep hiring and showcasing complete idiots like this guy. It means you will not see the end coming and will stand there off guard and blindsided when the bitter end whips and smacks them in the face.