I've seen those small solar yard lights using some kind of polycarbonate like stuff 'protecting' the silicon - it becomes milky white & powdery with exposure to the sun in just a few years.. And... I picked up this 70W/20V panel on ebay once that worked for a while until the sticky plastic backing wrinkled up (which wreaked havoc on the delicate layer of silicon it was supposed to protect). So yeah, they can and will make crappy solar panels. Although that really doesn't change the fact that solar panels could potentially last for hundreds of years with a little effort, they are still very delicate.

If you need the book for reference, then DRM will be an issue..

I know people like to say 'its the current that kills', but how does this apply here? If I touch a live wire, nothing is going to happen to me unless/until I ground - from that point the shock I receive will be a circuit and will have a certain amount of resistance.. If the voltage is double, then won't twice the current flow through that part of the body?

oops, thats 4.4.1 gcc, but still..

It's running GCC4.4.2 & linux-2.6.31. That's pretty hardcore.

what about periodic dumps of an LTS wikipedia release.

or if Mooninites try to attack our bridges again.

I'd like to think he would have managed somehow without his MIT degree or whatever, like for instance, by presenting his theory instead of asking people to believe it.

I really hate the Yellow Pages because of this.

How are you going to trust the enamel on the wire after a short, and how do you splice thick copper wire repeatedly (even once) and have anywhere near the same number of turns - you have to get it back in the canister.. Because it's spooled up - when it burns you're going to have discolored/salvageable stripes along the length, thick bumpy kinks everywhere. I think it would take an awful long time and resources just to to make hacked up ork transformers. Time better spent making new ones.

All panels will need glass and frame, even $2,3,../watt ones (assuming they didn't achieve $1/watt by neglecting to calculate the rest of the manufacturing cost!). Some people just mount them flat on their roof - this is why the price per watt is such an important factor, they need to become cheap enough to justify using twice as many to double the output instead of using complex mounts/trackers.

What about one of these?

Oh well, when I actually thought about solving a mathematical problem that needed hundreds of cycles... I realized why, lol.