If the summary is accurate, they're promising sixteen times the typical benefit. That's well beyond exaggeration.

Exclusively locking a subscription service to a platform is not DRM

You're confusing the ends & the means. The end goal is platform lock in, the means to do that is DRM.

If there was no DRM, you would just be able to save the streamed file, this is unlikely to be the case.

The world's population is currently more than 7 billion. The population hasn't been able to fit into 32 bits since about 1978. (Amusingly, that's about when IPv4 was developed.)

I believe it may also be somewhat impacted by the type of building. What I have seen is in industrial buildings, office buildings and malls. I have seen the 208/120 wiring you described.

One particular building where I used to work had 208/120 in the data centre, but most of the building's lighting was 277. 277 was also available in the data centre, as was 100 and 240, because we were frequently hosting our customer's computers, which came from all over the world. I don't think I ever saw the 277 used, but the 240 and 100 were provided by small single-phase transformers in a side-room.

Yes, it is. I've known that for years. It's not the solar that's being claimed infeasible, it's the idea of wiring your house for low voltage DC.

Yeah, I don't think it's happening.

The heavier wire is to reduce the resistance, which reduces the voltage drop and the heat generated.

For a more thorough and slightly more technical approach to the same subject, check out the Usenet Physics FAQ's article "Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible?". Here's the conclusion:

To begin with, it is rather difficult to define exactly what is really meant by FTL travel and FTL communication. Many things such as shadows can go FTL, but not in a useful way that can carry information.

There are several serious possibilities for real FTL which have been proposed in the scientific literature, but these always come with technical difficulties.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tends to stop the use of apparent FTL quantum effects for sending information or matter.

In general relativity there are potential means of FTL travel, but they may be impossible to make work. It is thought highly unlikely that engineers will be building space ships with FTL drives in the foreseeable future, if ever, but it is curious that theoretical physics as we presently understand it seems to leave the door open to the possibility.

FTL travel of the sort science fiction writers would like is almost certainly impossible. For physicists the interesting question is "why is it impossible and what can we learn from that?"

The Doors were the ones to pretty much break the two minute barrier.

Ray Charles kind of did, too, with What'd I Say, but he kind of stood alone with that one. The Doors made it stick.

This is largely what I was thinking.

As it currently stands, commercial buildings often have 277V lighting circuits (this is in the US) because it involves installing less copper in the ceilings.

From this, one can intuit that lowering the voltage will significantly increase the amount of copper, but let's take an example and make it more solid.

Let's say, for the sake of example, that we were considering 48V DC as an alternative to 120V AC (I personally would not want to consider anything lower than 48V in a home environment). If you need to deliver 1200W from point A to point B, it will require 10A at 120V, and 25A at 48V.

That 10A could be safely delivered on a 14 ga. wire in most domestic contexts, but will probably be delivered on 12 ga. For 25A, however, you're going to need 10 ga.*

A 250' roll of wire is ~$43 for 14 ga, $95 for 12 ga., and $138 for 10 ga. See the problem?

For the next challenge, you will also need to use different, more expensive switches and circuit breakers, or drop back to using fuses. This is because an AC arc self-quenches in half a cycle or less, and won't re-establish until the contacts are brought close enough together. The DC arc, on the other hand, is continuous, and requires additional effort to quench. Just for the record, there is an arc every time that a circuit breaker or switch is opened under load. This is the reason why you will often see switches and breakers labelled "AC Only".

Now, this is not to say that these problems won't be overcome or that a different variant might come about. Who knows? Maybe they'll gravitate towards 120V AC or some such, in which case it will be 1915** all over again.

(*For the non-Americans and uninitiated, US wire gauge is backwards: larger numbers are smaller wires. 14, 12 and 10 gauge are ~2.1, 3.3 and 5.3 mm^2, respectively)

(**There is nothing special about 1915, but I live in a house that was built in 1915 and was electified from day one. It would have had DC delivered to it in those early days, courtesy of Mr. Edison's various efforts in my current home town of Schenectady.)

That would explain songs like All by The Descendents and Art by Nuclear Assault. You could play both songs, back to back twice in fifteen seconds. No, I'm not exaggerating. Okay, maybe sixteen seconds. Art is at least funny.

It's not the state getting into your "business", it's your business getting into the state. Marriage predates nation-states by millennia. And as a practical matter, I'm glad I didn't have to get a lawyer and sign a 500-page contract in order to get married, and I'm glad that other people don't need their own lawyer to go over such a contract in order to recognize my marriage.

Cheap and good can be done together. I am in upstate New York and my car is insured with GEICO. I switched to them for the reason they typically advertise: it's cheaper. The delightful surprise is that their customer service people are super-polite, sufficiently trained, sufficiently empowered, and on the two occasions when I have filed a claim with them, they have been fast about getting things back in order.

On a side-note, I've been to the Philippines. I think their English is more EN_ca than EN_us. I'm sure that's a lot like arguing EN_au vs. EN_nz, but there are some little bitty details that stick out if you are a native speaker of either. I've heard a lot of both, having lived in a border town.

Drivers need to be able to do things like hear breaks screeching, feel the thump when they lose a retread from their tire, feel a flat tire pulling them, etc.

The sensors for these problems are already pretty well available and many of them are even common. Every modern consumer car has TPMS on it (Tire Pressure Monitoring System) that tells you if your tire is low. If the retread flies off of a tire, it will get low right away because inward pressure on the inner tube will fall. Measuring engine temperature, oil pressure, oil level, coolant level, fuel level, etc. are also things that are already done by consumer vehicles. The auto-drive will already be gathering the data necessary to determine if there is an alignment problem or something else causing the vehicle to pull, and this can be identified by computing the trend of any adjustments it makes to its course. Transmission temperature is a no-brainer, using the same general tech as used to measure engine temperature. Brake and bearing temeratures are the only thing left that I can think of, and you just need to look to the railroads for a solution to that one, involving inexpensive infrared thermometers (though in this case, they would likely be traveling with the vehicle rather than stationary on the road).

You are TOTALLY right. Black people in America were equal the SECOND slavery was repealed. Great insight.