It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

The *only* reason we don't have a la carte pricing is that the carriers refuse to provide it. The carrier may be required to "buy" ESPN 2-54 if a subscriber has ESPN 1, but I've never seen where the subscriber must "pay" for ESPN 2-54. They could still be a la carted with the prices proportional to the cost. The carriers suspect it would be a poor model, but nobody actually knows, they just refuse to try.

Don't be ridiculous. The dinosaurs lived long before the GNU utils were written. They would have been compressed.

In many cases... yes. The most expensive phones have an up-front cost in addition to the two-year commitment, but if you get the most expensive phone you can without an up-front fee, then there is no price difference between that one and the cheapest phone.

Yes, this is ridiculous.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

That would be a nice quote, but it contains an implicit assumption which is seriously wrong: That there is any distinction between humanity and nature.

It's not surprising that we tend to see ourselves as distinct from the rest of nature, because we are dramatically different from all other forms of life around us, and not just because we're self-centered, or even because we're objectively hugely more successful than any other species. We're dramatically different because we're the only species we know of that is capable of creating explanatory knowledge, of conjecturing and criticizing ideas, individually and in collaboration, to understand how and why things work. Many species on Earth are capable of learning, but as far as we can tell it's all "behavioral" learning; understanding merely that specific behaviors cause specific results. Sometimes the results of that level of understanding can be quite sophisticated, as in the animals who can create and use tools in complex sequences to accomplish goals, but it's still on a completely different level from the ability that humans have to deduce deep explanations of the structure and nature of the universe, and how to manipulate it.

Regardless of the temptation to view ourselves as separate from nature, though, we're not. That doesn't mean we won't benefit from applying our understanding of the rest of nature to maintain the elements of it that are beneficial to us. Obviously, we're better off if we don't make the world a worse for ourselves -- the flip side of that is that we are better off if we make the world a better place for us, so stasis is not the goal. That's really good because stasis (aka "sustainability") is impossible.

The price may or may not be reasonable, depending on your budget, though it definitely is for a non-trivial number of people, but the Tesla Model S fulfills the other requirements today.

My Nissan LEAF doesn't, though it's still a very practical car that easily manages all but a small fraction of my driving.

"Failure to comply with the orders" of a flight attendant, gate attendant, or just about any other airline employee while in any area they "control" (e.g., the airplane, the gate, etc.) is a felony in the US.

So, yeah, it's "police state stuff", because these people know they have that kind of power.

Do you seriously think that she would have reacted the same way (pull him off the plane and ask him to delete the tweet) if she had let the kids join him and he tweeted positively about how great she is at customer service?

The situation would be identical in that she would be named personally and an opinion would be stated about her. Just because that opinion might be a "bad" one doesn't give her the right to use her very real authority to attempt to bully him into retracting the post.

So if he had named her in a tweet full of praise, it would be OK? Wouldn't she then feel threatened that wackos might want to propose to her because she's such a great person? He's not responsible for what other people might do in regards to a truthful but opinionated twitter post, regardless of whether that post is positive or negative.

I would be OK with your idea if she only requested that he remove her name from the post, and explained her personal discomfort. If she then also offered contact information for her supervisor so that he could complain about her personally if he wished, that would have been just about the perfect way to react. But, none of this should have involved pulling him off the plane. That was done solely as leverage to get her way.

As others have pointed out, "failing to follow the instructions of a airline/TSA/whatever employee" when at an airport is a felony in the US. Thus, if he refused to remove the tweet, he technically could have been arrested.

Whenever the government says "you can't do X" and "X" is exercising one of your inalienable rights, it's a Constitutional issue, which in this case is 1st Amendment.