Well yes they are actually. Earthquakes are the result of underground movement due to stresses at faults overcoming the forces holding the ground in place. If you lubricate joints to reduce the forces holding them in place the net energy caused by underground movements remain the same, the only difference is the release is small and often vs large and rare.

The problem is that everytime someone does something that would make them guilty of that they are usually legally covered by a size 1 font disclaimer in the cover of the book or at the bottom of their website with the colour code #FEFEFE that says this is not a medical opinion and to seek a doctor.

Heck you should have seen the backlash against one of the stupid fuckwit paleo chefs in Australia by the medical profession. They had to move mountains to get Pete Evan's book withdrawn as it contains recipes potentially dangerous to newborns and they only did that by directly lobbying the publisher to stop working with him.

Yes and no. It needs to stop being put on the insane pedestal that it currently sits on, but it definitely shouldn't die. There's stuff to be said about not doing the stupid shit we currently do, such as colour oranges orange to make them look more like oranges instead of the natural oranges that grow on trees. Or coat Apples in wax. Or load everything with ludicrous amounts of preservatives to that they last for 4 years.

It's like the global warming debate. People who thing that global warming isn't man made are typically caught suddenly off guard when I start giving them other reasons we should stop polluting the world like something as simple as making the city smell nicer.

Actually you are very wrong about that. See the many cases where people were locked up because they knew they had diseases and spread them around by not taking basic precautions. Someone already linked you to Typoid Mary, but what about the constant cases of people being jailed for unsafe sex while knowingly carrying HIV.

We have a right not be infected due to stupidity / malicious intent; anti-vaxxers fall under both.

Indeed. That it's a penny pinching problem puts us in even more of an agreement.

That's not "not clear", that's just an engineering problem. Heck every digital device on the market has a "local oscillator" many devices have multiple local oscillators. Getting a passive receiver complaint with any kind of standards is orders of magnitude easier in both requirements and solving engineering problems than a transmitting device, and even those are quite easy; case in point: every mobile phone or $30 UHF radio.

That and the fact that it's a known engineering problem with a known engineering solution which has been implemented many times before. The Galaxy S had FM, so did the S2, so did my old Saegem dumb phone, so did my not iPod, and my Sony Walkman. Oh and so does my $30 UHF radio.

It is not a problem, the only reason these devices aren't used because there's very little market for it. Heck even in my car I use Pandora via phone instead of FM. Most of commercial radio is a joke, and for the odd occasion when I do tune in I use a digital radio which gives me a far wider option for radio stations locally then the usual shit (40+ stations instead of the 10 or so local ones). FM in the phone is dead because people in general don't want it.

What makes you think the modern dumb TV will last any longer?

We apparently have a smart TV. I don't know exactly I've never actually pushed the button that starts the supposed smart bit, but to me the smarts in a TV is like a centre console in the car. It's just part of some cars, I never use it, and I couldn't care less if the car has it or not.

Erm no you're not. Bluray discs have keys updated constantly and the require constant updates to software players only.

The only thing that would require an update to a hardware player is a change of standard (such as moving from Bluray 1.1 to 1.2) or if the device specific key is added to a revocation list, and I can't find a single example of that happening to a hardware player so far. Plenty of software players have had their keys revoked the most high profile of which was WinDVD, but that's about it.

So you are saying that standards are somehow immune and then citing an example of where a standard service stopped working? There is no immunity when you're consuming content from a 3rd party. Standards have nothing to do with it what so ever. You are relying 100% on someone offering something to you in a format that they choose in the hope that the format provided is something compatible with your equipment.

Posted from a web-browser because no one supports Gopher anymore.

Oh that is clear. There's very little. FM must not transmit (and I don't think any mobile chipset does), and it just has to receive in a certain frequency band which is mostly common throughout the world with no further consideration to interference. An analogue radio receiver is about the least regulated radio device you can build.

The same argument as batteries applies here. Become an expert or you'll be replacing them often. In many parts of the world depending on grid design, wiring and transformer design the transformers definitely do not work both ways just fine.

Systems designed to handle backfeeding do so just fine. Many are not, the majority of those who are not are the ones close to the residential connections.

A lot of that is to do with install programs. Many of us effectively rent our roof space to a 3rd party for a few years with the promise of future cheap electricity and no initial cost.

Here's some inside information for you: The grid hasn't melted (everywhere, it has actually melted down in some places, or rather burnt down) down because of the efforts of upgrading equipment pro-actively to handle the changes. The end result is the general public pays a small fortune for electricity to fund what ignorant politicians and headline grabbers call "gold plating" of our national grid.

But don't take my word for it, just go drive through the local suburbs where roof-top solar penetration is high and look around at various substations which somehow magically all have much larger and shiny new transformers now despite the net energy usage going through those transformers being smaller.

There are some very real issues which need addressing in various expensive ways (energy cost has gone up by 60% since 2009 for continuous bulk use, and 900% for peak demand) since 2009, and fault induced power outages have gone up 50% in the same time (50% isn't actually much our power grid is actually very reliable despite what people say) .

There's a lot to this claim. The other people have mentioned control schemes already but there's also electrical earthing schemes and wiring schemes to consider. These aren't consistent across the world but whatever the designs are areas must compensate for it. For instance in Europe Delta-Star wiring of transformers is common where the generation side has each winding of the transformer connected phase to phase, and the user side has each winding phase to neutral with the neutral connected to earth by some kind of a load.

A lot of design work goes into grids assuming transmission from one side and not the other. Things change if you start back feeding transformers such as the windings which excite the magnetic fields in different ways, or the original safety calcs assuming the maximum power the transformer can supply and the fault condition across the earth load.

That's not to say you can't design grids to transmit in both directions, just that historically they haven't been, and in my area we've had at least one high profile fire as a result of solar which has triggered a multi-million dollar refit of about 10 11kV submains in our city including the beat up rust pile down the road which has now has two very out of place looking shiny new transformers.

Yep all grids are 100% the same, yessirreeee.

There are definitely grid designs out there which can NOT handle micro generation. Transmission across transformers is not equal in both directions and many control systems were originally designed with only one direction in mind.

We have had a power outage here for a few hours as a result of the local utility burning down a transformer which was massively backfed due to amount of solar power installed in our area. The specific cause in this case was unaccounted for transformer losses heating up the secondary when backfed and the fans never switching on as they don't measure the secondary. End result was a fire, a poweroutage and then a week with reduced redundancy on our grid.

But that's just one of the issues. If you look at many grids around the world you'll see that the primary side and the secondary side of transformers are not wired the same way. Micro-generation causes problems in some countries and not others due to different electrical codes, different earthing and transmission schemes, and different utility and facility wiring. And god forbid somehow only every 3rd house in the street decides to install solar, the resulting phase imbalance will ensure a steady stream of power outages for the local area.

But hey at least Hawaii is okay.