Better choice is #5. Ship a different, randomly-generated password on each device. Print it along with the serial number on a slip of paper that comes with the device. That way, there's a strong default passcode for people who won't bother to set a good one, and it isn't shared across devices.

If the filament is big enough, with low enough resistance, then sure. The point is that if the 8 AA batteries (12V, not 6) in series can provide enough power to run the bulb, you can safely switch to a car battery without burning up the bulb. (For a resistive load, the same voltage + more amperage = lasts a lot longer before the battery dies and/or lets you drive more bulbs.)

The more accurate headline on Slashdot and the UT San Diego website would be, "Study finds immunized siblings of autistic children not at higher risk of developing autism than immunized siblings of unaffected children."

No, the correct headline is "Study finds immunized siblings of autistic children not at higher risk of developing autism than non-immunized siblings of autistic children."

Additionally, this study says the precise opposite of what you said the headline should read, finding that siblings of autistic children were almost 8x as likely to develop autism as children who did not have an autistic sibling, regardless of whether those children were vaccinated or not.

Let's take water as our analogy. Water flows to meet demand in the form of open taps. But very few of those taps are strictly regulating, and the outflow is a function of how far the tap is opened and the pressure in the system. Put more water into the mains and the pressure goes up, therefore more water is delivered at the tap. If your house has pressure regulating valves, you won't see this, but the pressure is then further increased at someone else's house.

That analogy doesn't really work very well, for two reasons:

1. Water pressure is more closely equivalent to voltage, not amperage. Adding more solar panels increases the amperage, not the voltage.

2. Most electrical equipment is strictly regulating (ignoring inrush). Resistive loads consume a consistent amount of current regardless of how much current is available. That's why it doesn't matter whether you power a 12V bulb with eight AA batteries or a 12V car battery. The latter can provide a lot more current, but the bulb still draws just as much current as it needs.

I think a better analogy is to think of the voltage as the height of a water tower, and the amperage as its diameter. If you have a ten-foot-diameter tower that forms a 50-foot column of water, the pressure is proportional to the 50-foot height of the water column. An overheating condition would be equivalent to the pipe breaking because someone is sucking water out of the pipe faster than the pipe can pass it.

If you expand the tower to be thirty feet in diameter, the column is still about 50 feet high, so the pressure is about the same (assuming the sides of the tank are vertical and the bottom is flat). However, doing so allows you to add more pipes and/or larger pipes out the bottom so you can provide water to more houses without drawing down the reservoir too quickly (and thus causing... what, a vacuum in the water tower? This is where the analogy starts to break down unless you're talking about a battery).

Well yes and no. Overcurrent failures are not caused by receiving too much power, but rather by drawing more power than the wiring is capable of handling.

There's always orders of magnitude more power available on the grid than could safely be pulled through your house's wiring. However, your wires don't burn up because the actual current draw through those wires is always much less than they can handle, just like that filament I described, through which the current draw is near zero because the air has very high resistance and thus sinks very little current. Each house has breakers or fuses to ensure that you never draw more than the wires can handle (or at least not for a long enough period of time to damage the wires).

In a similar way, if solar panels on the roof are producing more power on the roof than is needed by all of the consumers, that typically shouldn't be a problem. It only becomes a problem when someone consumes that power through a circuit path that wasn't designed to handle it or when it causes mechanical generators to go berserk in some way.

And power flowing through an insufficient circuit path means that either the solar panels are allowed to produce more current than the house wiring was rated for (which should result in fines for the installer that put in the oversized master breaker without getting the line upgraded) or the feeder line into the neighborhood is actually too small to handle the all of the houses using their maximum current rating at the same time (in which case the system was designed dangerously to begin with, and the power company just got lucky before). Either way, the problem isn't specific to solar power generation being present.

By aluminum foil, I was thinking about the contents of a fuse—a thin enough and narrow enough strip of foil that it would burn up if a person were getting electrocuted through it.

And the idea was that the foil would be sticking out of one pole of an outlet, which effectively means that no current whatsoever would be flowing through it, because there would be no current sink on the other end of the foil. (Okay, so technically even insulators like air probably sink a little bit of current, but you get my point....)

The extreme case is if everyone is on solar and it's a sunny day. Everyone is trying to dump power into the grid, but there's no where for it to go. That's when you'll start causing overloads.

On those days, everyone will also be trying to run their air conditioning full blast, and although newer homes will be adding power to the grid, it probably won't balance out the extra usage from all the older, less insulated homes and businesses.

Besides, unless I'm misremembering my basic electronics, having extra power available is usually not a problem unless there is someone to consume it (*). I can hook up one side of a 110 volt outlet to a piece of aluminum foil, and until someone is stupid enough to touch it, it won't burn up. Overloads are caused by demand exceeding the available supply as it passes through some resistance (the wiring, for example). If all the houses are producing way more power than they need, that's not a problem, because the current isn't flowing anywhere. It becomes a problem when some business that normally draws power through some massive feeder lines from a cogen plant starts drawing power from all of those houses through wires that weren't designed to allow that much current draw.

Basically, the utility companies are mad because for the most part, they used to be able to ignore residential usage of electricity, because it almost never involved enough power to require precise monitoring. Now that they're suddenly able to produce power that might be consumed elsewhere, the wiring has to actually be big enough to potentially carry all the current that their rooftop systems might produce, and that requires a little bit more safety planning, and in some cases, limiting the number of solar installations and/or increasing the size of wires and transformers.

(*) There is an exception to this rule. When you have mechanical generators, having excess power is bad, because the generators have to run within a certain speed range, both to prevent damage to the generators themselves and to stay in phase. If the draw is too low (or too high) for the amount of mechanical energy going in, you could have a serious problem unless the generators have built-in governors. Of course, this problem can be solved by shutting down generators that aren't needed. More importantly, power companies have to do this anyway in response to varying load throughout the day, so the presence of solar doesn't change things very much except for possibly making the fluctuations more or less frequent and/or more or less severe.

On the other hand, even with that single password, it's still either memorable, therefore easy to hack, or it isn't, in which case you turn again to the sticker on the monitor.

In relative terms, it is still a lot safer. Right now, cracking an average person's online accounts merely requires you to buy access to a botnet and use it to brute-force the account from a distance. By contrast, you can't readily do a brute-force attack on the login password for someone's laptop unless you either have stolen that laptop or have otherwise compromised it somehow.

So even in the worst-case scenario, you're replacing one weak password that the user uses for a hundred different sites and can be cracked remotely with another weak password that the user uses for a hundred different sites that can't easily be cracked remotely. And in the best-case scenario, the user is using a biometric sensor in combination with that weak password to lock the device.

The point being that humans shouldn't be creating the passwords, nor should they be responsible for remembering the passwords. They should have a password for their computer, and that's it. All other passwords are superfluous.

ASCAP and BMI both pay about 85–86% of their intake to the composers and publishers. Yes, they're skimming a little bit off the top, but they're also handling the reporting and distribution, hiring lobbyists to advocate on behalf of composers and publishers, and so on, all of which at least in theory benefits their members. So in the grand scheme of things, at least from what I've seen, they seem to be doing a good job.

I have no idea about SESAC.

Unlimited storage, provided you don't mind manually clicking and dragging everything you want to back up, and waiting for it to transfer immediately. That's a backup in much the same way that the flash drive I carry around in my pocket is a backup. It's a quick way to temporarily store a handful of files just in case my laptop dies while I'm traveling, but I can't viably back up a server's hard drive to it.

BTW, has anyone ever tried to upload a few terabytes to see if it really is unlimited, or just "unlimited"? :-) I'd try it myself, but it would take years over my 640 kbps uplink.

Oh, yeah. That's the other problem with cloud storage: ISPs with pathetically slow upload speeds. *sigh*

This. In fact, I would have probably said "there's your problem" after the second word in the summary, or at best, right after the first comma. The flaw is that users are creating passwords at all. Humans create passwords that are easy to remember, which almost invariably makes them terrible passwords. This is why pretty much every modern browser out there has the ability to create and store passwords for you.

The real solution is twofold: First, beat it into the heads of users that they should always let the browser choose a password for them. Second, beat it into the heads of website designers that it is crucial for their sites to work correctly when using that feature in modern browsers (e.g. never, ever ask the user for his or her password without asking for the associated username). In relative terms, both of those tasks are a whole lot easier than somehow training users to come up with good passwords on their own.

In theory, yes, sampling tends to result in large errors for small values, in both directions.

In practice, I think the sampling mostly covers large stations in major markets, so I'd expect it to skew away from low-play bands a lot more often than it skews towards them. But that's just a gut feeling; I could be wrong.

All you people who believe cloud storage is unreliable, how often have Google, Amazon or Microsoft lost data that customer have stored with them? Or how realistic do you think it is that any of these three will suddenly go bankrupt without any prior warning?

How likely is it that any of those three will provide cloud storage that is actually affordable? S3 costs a small fortune. My home backups span... I think fourteen terabytes of fireproof hard drives. Assuming I'm doing the math right, it would cost me a whopping $5,040 annually to store those backups using S3 standard storage. And if I ever needed to restore from the backup, it would cost me an additional $15,120. So backing up for a year and then recovering from one hard drive failure would cost me as much as a new car. Even if I used glacier storage, it would still cost $1,680 per year, plus $1,330 if I ever needed to fully restore that backup.

At those prices, Amazon's cloud storage only makes sense for your most critical data, or for data that absolutely has to be available quickly from around the world (replication for performance reasons). It is completely impractical as a backup medium. Ignoring the fireproof aspect, it would be cheaper to buy new backup drives every three months than to use S3 glacier storage for backups. It would be cheaper to throw away your backup drives every month than to use S3 standard storage. That's not cloud storage; it's sky-high storage.

Those are licenses, not royalties.

You are technically correct—the best kind of correct.

Radio stations pay licensing fees to ASCAP and BMI, who in turn pay the composers and publishers proportionally based on the percentage of airplay (and concerts and other performances) that their songs received. They do not pay the artists or the record companies, so the article is correct in that regard. But yes, they most certainly do pay the composers and publishers, albeit indirectly. That's the whole reason those performance rights organizations exist.

There is a caveat, however. Not all radio stations are considered "reporting stations". I know our college radio station diligently logged our plays for reporting purposes, but when it comes to actual royalty payouts, those organizations use a random sampling of radio stations, rather than tallying every song on every station. If your music is played only on a small number of radio stations, there's a good chance you won't get paid because you won't show up in their sampling. Now over time, they're getting closer and closer to full reporting, so this is becoming less of a problem, but it is something to keep in mind.

In any case, I would say that the summary is just plain wrong. In effect, radio stations pay royalties (indirectly) to composers and publishers, but not to performers and record labels.