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.

No it doesn't not for everything or even most things. You're over-thinking things and conflating the important with the unimportant, the big things with the little. Stop sweating the little things.

I used to get more worked up about things, like you apparently are, but then in late 2005, after 20 years together, my wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died, literally in my arms, just 7 weeks later. I heard her last breath, felt her last heartbeat and learned what the word "forever" means.

So, having my NYT or /. connection encrypted isn't really that important - my banking connection, yes, but I try to keep everything in perspective. The scenarios you've described lack some of that.

I'm not "intellectually lazy" I just know what is and is not important - for me anyway.

Also, entities like Google are not encrypting their connection to protect your privacy, it's to protect their revenue stream, so third-parties cannot skim ad/search information w/o paying Google for it.

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 movie and recording industries use those for accounting purposes.

I disagree that Everywhere is a great idea. Seriously, does it really matter if an NYT article or /. is delivered securely, or 99.9% of search queries?

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.

And now you see why "contains gmo" is a bad label.

Sounds like you're just a brainwashed zealot against GMO not interested in the science or validity of what some crackpots on TV say.

In every example you've given, there are valid reasons behind wanting to buy something. There's no other product where we pick an arbitrary component (that some people find scary) and label it with that - especially when that component is meaningless for making a decision.

And I do know people don't care if foods are GMO because they can't name any valid reason for it other than it's labeled GMO. It's like if people didn't want food in red boxes.

As I said earlier - give people ALL the information - give them the exact species of the food they are eating. Telling them "GMO" does not give them information.

Would you be behind a movement to label all foods that contain "Chemicals" with a label that says "Contains Chemicals"?

What about a "Contains poison" label for anything that contains anything that is poisonous given enough of it?

But they are also in the search business since they can't receive money from their advertising customers if they don't receive screenspace from their searching customers. Just because their money comes mostly from advertising, does not make them an advertising company.

According to Google Drops Plus Sign from Search Operators

But there's no valid decision a consumer could make with a GMO label so it's not an issue of education. To make a valid decision (one that has some scientific backing) they would need much more information. The only reason is people heard GMOs are scary. If enough people demanded it, I'm sure some labels could add "GMO free"...for a price. That's essentially what role organic food fits into so that seems like a valid solution. Since no company has jumped in to provide GMO-free labels on all their products, there's clearly not a market for it.

It's not GMO-free food (or I guess food with GMOs) that people want, it's the labeling. Since consumers can see what foods are labeled with, they have the information to make a buying decision.

If you're saying it's a market decision, then the market will work it out, right?

On the other hand, if you're saying we need to pass regulations to label everything that a few outspoken, science-illiterate, talk show hosts and bloggers say we need to be afraid of, then that's where we have a problem.

It's not like a label "Contains Asbestos" that would signify a clear ingredient with a clear health disadvantage. Putting "GMO" on food would just confuse people even more since they won't know what sort of GMO is in it. It could be one that makes the food less healthy or it could be one that helps stop cancer.

Forcing food to be labeled by the FDA should only be done if there's a scientific reason to do so.

That's entirely correct. Scientifically, there's not reason to label GMO's differently than other foods. Should we label every scary thing in the future? If some one starts a crusade against food grown with manure, do we have to label that? What about food grown from cuttings rather from seed?

The issue isn't that people want to know about what's in their food - the issue is a few nut jobs want to scare people into thinking there's a problem they need to worry about by using terms they don't understand.

As a compromise, why not put the exact species of all foods on the label? If food is made with natural strain CQ94F corn then put that, If it's made with GMO strain CQ94G corn, put that. People that ACTUALLY care can research which strain they like best, while other will continue buying what they normally do. That's much better than the blanket "GMO" label that doesn't say anything useful about the nutrition or quality of the food.

Yes, they could market it differently as "custom corn" or something, but the GMO haters want it to be called GMO. That has scary words like "Genetic" and "Organism" in it which people will be afraid of, same way they're afraid when you tell them their pie has "Chemicals" in it.

Thanks Chris Hardwick - FTW was fun. :-)