Let me explain how it works, shit-for-brains...

Ooo... Bad.

Of course it isn't completely flat but not worth doing peak vs off-peak. They are able to vary the output of the generators. They have their own generators for most of the power we use in our local utility. It comes off of solar, wind and largely methane from landfills which would otherwise be burned off or gas off to the atmosphere.

I'm just wary of the over complications. When devices become more complicated they use more power and break down more often having shorter lifespans. That's a big cost both in the budget and the environment.

Simple solutions are best.

Small coop utility.
Northern climate so no high summer or day demand from air conditioners.
Day and night demand for them is about equal.
He, the guy at the utility, is their expert on this topic and has been there for decades. Very knowledgeable.
I'm more incline to believe him than a random person on the net who doesn't know the local scene.

In any case, I'm still wary of adding one more 'smart feature' to appliances that is going to increase their energy consumption a little for that, increase their failure rate due to increased complexity and increase their price. We don't need more trash.

Yes. Generally such restrictions come into the culture slowly. I'm assuming, with some knowledge of these cultures, that these restrictions were likely pre-startup. Many of the aspects that are adopted by a religion actually originated long before it, sometimes thousands of years before it, as adaptation to local conditions. While you and I don't see a reason for that in this case there may have been some other intertribal strife that had caused that. And besides, 1,400 years is close enough.

The bigger point, which you're missing with the arguing over generational counting, is that such a change could cause different cultures to fail to understand each other on a very fundamental level. Lets not quibble over a few generations but rather try and think about why and how something occurs so we can better understand it and solve the problems of cross cultural misunderstanding.

Sorry but you missed the point. There is no peak power and no off power benefit. I've discussed this with our utility energy efficiency guy. He said they just don't see that around here. However adding this circuitry to the equipment is going to cause it to consume just a little more power. Multiply that little more times millions of devices and pretty soon that is a lot more power being consumed. The result is that the savings won't be as great as they think.

A fundamental problem with this is that there is no "Off-Peak" cheap power in a lot of places. We just have one utility rate, which is higher than anywhere else in the country based on what I hear from other people. Many people don't have an off-peak rate so this becomes just one more costly gadgeting of the appliances that makes them more expensive and use just a little bit more power to run, multiplied by millions.

This is an excellent idea and by rating volunteers the system can weed out the trouble makers who would steer you wrong.

Radio Shack stores used to be really cool places to find all sorts of great stuff. Long ago before most people here were born. They had parts. But alas, this was back before the Internet. Now we can find anything easily and Radio Shack seems to mostly carry phones and toys. It's a tough market.

It occurs to me that if you took a population and forbid explicit graphic representations depiction certain forms of art hundreds of generations you could actually cause a change of genetics, a fundamental alteration of the brains of the core members of that group which would result in the loss appreciation and sense of humor related to these types of illustrations. Individuals within this group might have a great deal of difficulty understanding that other cultures highly value cartoons. Selective breeding is a very interesting tool whether in the hands of man or Mother Nature. Evolution works, intentionally and sometimes not so intentionally. Be very careful what you inadvertently select for while aiming for your goals. World wars have been caused by lesser things.

Somewhat of a physical reality but also a problem of fiber being too sexy that they fail to use wireless methods which would be better for sparser populated steeper terrain areas.

We're not getting your tax money. We paid for all of our connection.

"The state laws laws restrict competition and give the major ISPs no incentive to invest and innovate."

True. And out in the rural areas this is far worse with far higher costs and far lower speeds. A lot of the existing infrastructure that could be used is hoarded by those who have control of it such as tower space and poll space. Vast amounts of money is spent on ultra high speed to urban areas while rural areas are left out creating more of a digital divide which in turns pushes more people to the cities which is a large problem in and of itself.

Actually, I've studied this extensively. I didn't say language was the equivelant of communication. Sadly you didn't actually read what I wrote but rather reacted without understanding. Just the problem.

I don't 'sit around and anthropomorphize farm animals' and you really should get out more. If you interacted with animals you would discover that there are other tool making and tool using animals that pass on cultural information. You fail to see it because you don't interact with animals in many generational large groups. I do. The result is I get to see a lot of things you're missing.

"f there's one thing that distinguishes humans from other animals, it's our ability to use language."

Wrong. People who say things like that just aren't listening and clearly don't have enough contact with other species.

Reality: Other animals have extensive languages of their own and some of them even take the time to learn ours so as to communicate with us.

We raise livestock. We have a multigenerational working dog pack. They have an extensive language of their own plus they have a pidgin language they use with use plus they know the languages of the livestock and use them to control the other animals. Some city person sitting in their ivory tower misses out on this because the dogs don't talk to strangers, they watch them warily.

The livestock also use language although much more limited. Wild animals like the coyotes, crows, ravens, bears and others all have language. Some of this language is innate - some human language is innate and across cultures if you look carefully - but some of the languages I see in our livestock, dogs and wildlife is also learned.

Humans are not as different as they like to think.

As to the "study" they did, I suspect they had additional flaws beyond their basic assumptions.

The forms are Free at IRS.gov so no need for TurboTax. I've stopped using TurboTax. It is simpler to just do the paper forms. I download them from the IRS.gov web site for ___FREE___ and fill them out as PDF files (use your favorite program such as Preview on the Mac, Adobe Acrobat, etc) and then submit them. Easy peasy. No fees.

This same problem is happening with legacy software all over the place be it from Google, Microsoft, Apple or other vendors. There are billions (YES! 1,000,000,000's) of devices out there that work just fine but can't use the latest operating system from the vendors so they aren't getting patched. This creates BILLIONS of opportunities for hackers, worms, trojans, scammers, etc all because the vendors are greedy and don't want to keep supporting hardware and software that is only a few years old.

They should be offering legacy support out at least a decade. It is very doable with conditional compilations to build the latest operating systems for the older hardware of even 15 years ago. It simply won't have some features like transparent windows and other eye candy. The software should gracefully fall back to fit the hardware. This is doable at the compile time which avoids having overly large software packages.