Well basically when you modulate a carrier (AM is modulating the amplitude of the carrier with the data signal) half the energy ends up in the carrier signal, and the other half gets split up between to sidebands that sit to either side of the carrier on the spectrum. The sidebands are mirror-images of each other.

There's techniques to suppress them (meaning you don't waste half your transmission energy on redundant signal) but broadcast AM/FM radio doesn't utilize it. Other advantages mean a more efficient use of the spectrum (ie, a whole other signal can sit where the other sideband used to be).

This article should lead you down the rabbit hole ;)

Interestingly, if you use that modulation mode specifically (AM, single sideband suppressed carrier) and tune the oscillator a hair off the mark, you sound just like the X-Wing pilots in the original Star Wars movie...

Mmm true - or even just use a consistent "rotation" to do it, in that the rotation is a waveform itself that the other end can sync to - then there's no negotiation to be worried about!

Or you can send bursts of a signal (along with such a scheme or just periodically) and the other end can know what was sent (prearranged?) and with some simple subtraction it has a noise profile

Sorry. I enjoy thinking about this kind of thing. Can you see the sidebands around the AM tower as well? Or is the resolution not good enough to differentiate it from the carrier?

Nope. The most useful thing they have ever done for me is serve as kindling.

By the time I began to care about what was going on in the world, the internet was already well on it's way to murdering newspaper.

Oh, I never get what I want! :)

The noise-cancelling scheme sounds interesting. The hardest part though is figuring out what exactly is noise - so it sounds like they would have to either invert the intended signal to cancel it out on the path to the noise measurement, or they would have to periodically turn the signal off so they can get a clean measure.

&safe=active? Really? Why is that on there still?

I expect the headline to be short, accurate, and noninflammatory.

Artificial limitations pushed down by the vendor. That's not the technology's fault, it's part of the problem.

Speak for yourself. I can't write my way out of a bag but I can understand most that I've looked at, that's not using some syntactical sugar I'd not seen before.

That would be a valid point if it was the same person or small team doing them all, which is false in almost every case.

Also, you don't need to sign your posts, we know who you are.

I think you're probably being obtuse on purpose, but just in case: It uses the Internet for managing your content licenses and pulling down content you have a license for but do not have a local copy. It's also got a store for said licenses, which requires Internet access to function.

It is. Alcohol isn't what makes it beer. ... not that you don't have a good point besides :)

So you mean the only times that my GPS is active, when I'm navigating somewhere, doesn't actually need my position?

Right, I think somebody has been watching too much TV...

Gee, maybe you should use a cross-platform one! Let's have a list of some possibilities off the top of my head: Java, Python, Perl, Ruby. That's a decent sized list for a non-programmer to be able to pull out of his rear, and the first two are pretty damn powerful and there's no reason the environment to support them can't be present on these systems. That you can force the 'web' to do it doesn't mean you should and is not an excuse for their leaving embedded systems poorly equipped.