In ATSC8VSB 0.5% of the power is in the pilot tone, the rest is spread over the entire bandwidth as subcarriers. Analog TV put 70% of the signal into the single frequency of the carrier. Add in doppler shifts from planet rotation and the perspective from space of seeing all stations on all the channels, and you would be left with a sight rise in the background noise, not a detectable signal.

An average lightning bolt generates 1 megawatt of radio frequency energy. The earth has 40 million lightning bolts a day. This planet has 500 times that many. That is a lot more energy than any radio signal man has ever created. I'd guess more than man has created in 100+ years!

In our experience of a single planet, we can see a greater reason. We have passed the peak of our detectability to outside civilizations. While we still radiate some narrow band signals, there are fewer than there were a few decades ago. The first world countries no longer beam out carrier based television signals. The current methods of TV transmission would be undetectable without prior knowledge of the details of the modulation methods. Our navigation no longer uses the powerful narrow band LORAN, the replacement satellite based systems would also be undetectable. Sure, a hundred-odd years past the invention of radio we still send narrow band AM/FM broadcast radio signals, but will they be there in a hundred years? If this is a typical trajectory for technology, there might only be a couple hundred years, of the 3 billion plus year history of life, when earth would have a detectable radio signature.

Guess the guy isn't a ham. We have been sending texts through satellites, including our own small satellites, the space shuttle, MIR, and ISS for decades!

As he slides ever deeper into irrelevance, his cries for attention become ever more desperate.

When the battery dies the power chip gets confused.

My iPhone 6 needed a battery replacement just short of two years and had the same symptoms - the battery indicator would show plenty, but at some random point it just turned off. I was trying to limp along like that until the 7 came out but it continued to deteriorate. $65 and an hour at the Apple Store and all was great again, and now I'll wait for the iPhone 8. I use the phone heavily and often charge during the day, it was up over 700 load cycles when it failed, so I'm not too upset. I've had iPhones since day 1 and never had any trouble before.

I doubt they were really so deluged with orders they had to bring new servers online after the MBP launch, but they certainly need them now that they got such a lovely fluff piece on Slashdot! I've been an Apple user for 27 years, and I'm less happy with them now than ever because they are going too far in the consumer market with the computers. But their market and System76 has a tiny overlap. But kudos to System76 for getting this marketing published on Slashdot!

As others have pointed out the sample size is too small to be scientifically valid, but even if you want to draw conclusions from it, how about the astronauts that went into deep space lived 11.9 years LONGER than those that did not fly, and 9.2 years longer than those that made LEO? Plus many of them are still alive in the 70s and 80s.

I laugh when people call this a thin laptop. No one seems to have imagined how that kickstand and floppy keyboard would work on a lap! Maybe it is a new category, since you need to place a board on your lap before you can use it, they've created the first "board-top".

Exactly. Design by committee, more is better. That is the same way they design everything. Compare Excel to Numbers on the Mac. Microsoft throws in a thousand features almost no one needs, making it much less usable for the 99%.

The Intel version has a great novelty to it. I can see it becoming an executive fashion accessory for a while. People that really need mobile computing will stay away. It looks great sitting on a desk, but imagine how it would work on your lap. You would need to put a briefcase or a board on your lap to provide a stable surface. And, since they said nothing about battery life and there is no battery door, you can count on it running for an hour or two of serious work. So the two unique features (integrated keyboard and kickstand) are of no use unless it is sitting on a table. However, sitting on an executive's desk it screams "I'm too important to have a computer that does real work". They will sell a few.

As for the ARM version, they need to get developers onboard. No tablet developer will abandon the iPad or Android based on Microsoft's promise to execute better this time than they did with Zune and Xbox. Developers won't pick it up until Microsoft has sold a lot of them, and people won't buy a lot of them until there are a lot of apps.

The rushed, shoddy presentation of a future product proves they still haven't figured out what makes Apple successful. It is not surprise announcements, casual clothes, or trendy staging. It is highly usable devices that ship today. When Microsoft gets that their deep pockets may make them a competitor. Not today!

A lower price for an ebook is not proof, or even an indication, of price fixing. If an ebook costs more than the physical book it need mean only that people who read ebooks are willing to pay more. People with ebook readers are probably more affluent and more appreciative of convenience and/or technology, and therefore willing to pay more. Publishers and retailers have every right to charge what the market will bear for a product. If the ebook version of Dune is worth the $3 difference to you, buy it. If not, buy the physical book. Or just check out either the ebook or physical book from your local library for free! But either way you are not getting screwed, you are making a value decision. And if no one wants to pay $3 extra for the ebook, then the publisher can decide to drop the price.

The margin numbers I give are on the whole company. Amazon does not break out the ebooks separately, but the vast majority of its businesses are not on the agency model, so 2012 is applicable. And I'd also point out these articles point out the problem with following percentage numbers which headline all the articles you quote. So Amazon profits climbed 71% in a 2010 quarter: they went from 225 to 384 million. On the other hand Apple's last profit was only up 51%, from 6 billion to 11.6 billion. Amazon was better by 20%. Yea, except Apple made an additional $5.6 billion vs. Amazon's increase of $157 million. When a company operates close to break-even, small actual gains result in large percentage gains. My point is you need to read carefully, even between the lines, and think about what the numbers they choose to give actually say. Read an Apple earning statement- they push the profit. Amazon pushes the revenue. That's why I own Apple stock and not Amazon stock.

Ooops- as soon as I hit submit I realized that in my bookselling example the initial gross margin is 50%, not 100%.

I am not making it up. Look closely at the statement amounts for the last quarter. Amazon only states they are making a ton of _revenue_ off the Kindle, not a ton of profit; they do not break out the numbers to pinpoint where their meager profit comes from. Search the web for sites that give estimates of what the Kindle costs to make vs. what they sell it for and make your own decision. The actual numbers are not reported, so the estimates are the best you can do. But something that cannot be hidden is the actual margin for the company. See the NYT discussion of Amazons last quarter:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/technology/amazon-profit-dropped-35-percent.html

The article brags about the GROSS margin (profit minus cost of goods which is 24%) but the net margin is their take-home pay. (You can tell if a site is pro or con Amazon by which they report.) To explain the difference, imagine that for $20 including shipping I sell you a book I bought for $10, and it costs me $10 to ship it. My gross margin is 100%, but my net margin is 0%. Amazon's net margin is the total cost of their doing business, including web infrastructure, salaries, real estate taxes, shipping, and everything else that actually costs them money. Amazon's net margin is 130 million profit/13.18 billion revenue or 1.01%! By comparison, Apple's last quarter numbers were 47.4% gross margin and 28.3% net margin.