I imagine part of it is a new public skepticism in the wake of vioxx and co. Nobody wants the public joking about their drugs being proven deadly by the state.

I'm just guessing, but I imagine 1 malfunctioning unit probably wouldn't be able to raise the voltage enough to trick the other units.

OTOH, in an area with a significant number of solar installations, I can easily see them creating an isolated network segment where the voltage runs near normal and so they collectively convince each other to stay on. That could create an interesting problem of how to convince that segment to re-synchronize with the grid when it's time to re-connect.

That's why the linemen say it's not dead until it's dead and grounded. They are supposed to bond the line to ground before working on it and that bond is supposed to only be disconnected right before the line is turned back on.

But since mistakes happen, it's a good thing that home inverters won't power a dead line.

The biggest danger to linemen (and has been for a while) is id10ts wiring their portable generators in or plugging them in with a "widowmaker" (A generator chord with a male end to plug in to the wall) and not disconnecting from the grid first.

Since "scientific evidence" is very persuasive to jurors, they'll be granting new trials to the ones they haven't killed yet.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAI crack me up!

Actually, no.

In the most extreme cases of improvisation, people have used rocks with a crystalline structure or a razor blade, a pencil, and a safety pin as a detector connected to headphones.

I was under the impression there isn't much use of AM radio in Norway.

In practice, it's a bit worse for digital. The decoders seem to lose sync easily and just go black for a bit where the analog would have given a couple frames of static and then a watchable image. If it happens frequently enough, you get a black screen and silence from digital where you would get a staticy but watchable picture on analog.

Multipath on a digital signal is a serious issue where on analog, you will actually stop noticing the ghosts after a few minutes.

On the old analog NTSC, the audio was on a subcarrier such that even if the video was an unwatchable mess, you might get decentish audio because of it's minimal demands on signal. Alas, in digital TV, it's all packets in the same stream and the decoder either can't or won't bother decodingh the audio if the video is lost. That's a real problem since is the video is disrupted, you can often follow a story OK, but when the dialog keeps going away you quickly get lost. Same problem if you're trying to get important weather information.

To top it off, as you say, they snuck the power down when the transition happened.

Further, analog radios can consume next to no power (in some cases, actually no power) and continue to work to some degree even when the batteries are practically dead. That can make a big difference in an emergency.

I have two or three extras they were giving away at a trade show.

It *SHOULD NOT* be less that 192kbps, but is it?

Or perhaps we're actually living in the Twilight Zone and God is a 6 year old boy.

Too bad the new organisms don't get a few years of safety study.

*IF* that pesticide has no biological mechanism of interacting with humans, being scared of it is stupid.

The pesticides in the plants we eat now other than the GMOs have had a thousand years of human testing. Further, if they were at all inclined to cross with some wild non-food species to gain something more toxic to humans, they more than likely would have by now.

Compare to something that has had zero years of human testing and in some cases no animal testing.

That I find more believable and far less serious. Some of the comments here make it sound like he's telling people to replace insulin and heart medication with lettuce or something.

Another inarguable point is that the plants bred a thousand years ago have had a thousand years of human testing.

Name a bacterium that infects both jellyfish and corn and has a habit of swapping genes with it's host.