That is a common saying but highly misleading and therefore dangerous.

What kills is current through the heart and to some extent the duration of that current. Since we can't really be sure what path current will take through the body during a fault we have to consider current through the body. That current is determined by

1: the impedance of the source
2: the open circuit voltage of the source
3: the impedance of the body

A very high impedance source or a source with minimal total energy available can have a very high open circuit voltage and yet not present a hazard. This is what we see with static electricity.

However when we are talking about shocks off the mains the impedance of the source is negligable. So the important factors are the voltage of the supply and the impedance of the body. A 230V supply is more likely to deliver a fatal shock than a 120V one. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that things like shuttered sockets and plug cavities/pin insulation are the norm in much of the EU.

The advantages of the higher voltage are efficiency and lower fire risk.

I would think a kettle would be fine.

With a motorised applicance it will depend on the type of motor. Universal motors will generally be fine (maybe a bit less powerful due to the higher inductance but the design would have to be pretty marginal for that to be relavent). Motors running off DC supplies (e.g. everything you will find in your PC) will be fine too unless the PSU is very marginal. Induction and synchronous motors are more likely to fail.

lower voltages mean much higher wiring losses or much more expensive wiring (or likely a combination of both). DC at a given voltage is substantially more dangerous than AC because it is prone to arcing.

20% conversion efficiency is pretty shit by modern standards

http://www.apcmedia.com/salest... is an interesting read, it's aimed at datacenter UPS systems but many of the arguments would apply equally to a house battery system.

As for the posters mention of living in a caravan a house is much bigger than a caravan (though admittedly smaller than a datacenter). So the wiring losses are less of an issue.

With homes having high load devices with large motors(washing machines, compressors in heat pumps, etc) and the large resistive loads like electric heaters, stoves, etc DC just is not the answer. Even with DC there would be a need for DC-DC converters which work by converting to AC... So given how easy it is to move AC voltages around and up/down I would think the question would be how do we optimize the losses in conversions. Maybe we need 5KHz instead of 50/60Hz.

The only sway the GPL has here is due to copyright law, so if the GPL is in force in my example then that means the API is considered to be copyrighted...

No copyright issues means no GPL restrictions.

The Supreme Court asked the government to comment, and so they did.

Doesn't the Linux kernel group hold a very similar stance in that you cannot use the kernels internal APIs without breaching copyright and thus falling under the GPL as a derivative work?

Your box is now a Debian oldstable box.

Debian stable (jessie) has 3.16, debian testing (stretch) also has 3.16 right now though i'd expect it to get 4.0 in the not too distant future. Debian unstable has 4.0.

Utter nonsense. Please don't spread such misinformation.

Bulk collection may indeed be unconstitutional, but the court said nothing about that. What they said was that section 215 did not authorize bulk collection, so if Congress wants to authorize bulk collection they have to pass a law to say so. If Congress does that, then the court will eventually have to rule on constitutionality.

People should keep that in mind when they argue for non-free browsers over Free Software browsers such as Firefox, GNU IceCat, and others. Being free to control your Internet experience is critical, being free to decide what you want to take in is never totally in your hands when you run non-free (proprietary, user-subjugating) software. The proprietor always has the upper hand even if they don't use that power right away or in ways you don't see or understand.

Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.

Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.

Without any programming experience it's not likely you'd get hired. While specific language doesn't matter, you have to have sufficient knowledge and ability to be able to have a detailed discussion about solving problems in software design and implementation, and prove that you can write clean, accurate code, and do it quickly.

My recommendation is that you first spend some time working through many of the problems provided by Project Euler, or the Top Coder challenges, or similar. Or maybe one of the coding interview books, like this one.

When you're comfortable that you can take on a not-completely-trivial software problem, design an algorithm to solve it, accurately characterize the big O time and space complexity of your solution (not prove it... though you should be able to prove it, given more time), explain why there aren't any more efficient solutions, code it up on a whiteboard, and explain how you'd go about testing it, all in the course of a 45-minute interview, then you're probably ready.

These two posts are like reading a technical treatise written by Lewis Caroll.

At $45 a foot per cable.