A sister company did recruiting, and a then colleague said "I asked for a MVS and Unix person in a particular state with experience in a package", and got hundreds of names, none of whom knew all those things". The didn't know the difference between "and" (3 candidates) and "or" (3000 unqualified candidates). I still get requests for things I only ever did once, with co-requisites of things I've never done...

I'm not entirely sure you're not trolling, but I'll bite anyway.

The US Constitution states that the purpose of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", artists and inventors may be granted a (temporary, limited) exclusive right to their work. Anytime copyright comes up among my group of friends (who include a large number of writers, musicians, and graphical artists, in addition to programmers) copyright is a fairly contentious issue. I tend to like to argue the position that any "common", mass produced work that is unavailable for public purchase for longer than one year has outlived its' salable value and should lose copyright protection. (This is particularly true in the age of digital distribution, where "shelf space" is a non-issue.) Fine art (where only one copy of the item ever gets created) clearly requires a different definition for copyright term, but for the things which usually are referenced in these debates online -- CDs, mass market books, newsclippings, etc. -- a strictly limited term is far more beneficial to keeping works available to the public.

Methinks DAB is going to need to market itself to phone vendors, to go along with it's sucking in governments, or it might not succeed in forcing everyone to buy a new radio (;-))

I think you'll find that electricity won't flow out of the solar supplier if the voltage in the line is at 120v, as there's nowhere with a lower voltage for it to flow to. Anyone who draws current from the system creates a region of lower voltage, and current flows toward them until the voltage is the same everywhere. Think of it electricity as being rather like water in a sealed watertower: no more flows in if it's full, plenty flows out if someone lowers the pressure by opening a tap.

Therefor the spike from all the solar installations just offers more power. If no one takes it, current doesn't flow, the solar folks' ammeters don't budge and they don't get paid by the power distribution company. If somebody turns on a light, current flows, and some supplier's ammeter moves, usually a supplier close to the lightbulb. Ditto the consumer's ammeter, what we call the "electric meter"

To connect a power source to the grid, there has to be a cutoff that disconnects it when the grid voltage drops to zero due to, for example, a tree falling and shorting it to ground. If there isn't a cutoff

• - the grid sucks all your power and probably blows your fuses and/or rectifier diodes, and
• - the hydro guy who expects to be handing a dead line suddenly has it jump to 110 or 220V, the instant he lifts it off ground.

Linemen don't like becoming part of the circuits, so they successfully called for the disconnect-if-zero laws.

Power companies (at least in Canada and large parts of the world) already have equipment to deal with the fact that the power can flow both ways. In fact, claiming they don't have equipment is only true IFF the power companies are the ones who like electrocuting their employees (;-))

The stations are going to stay, just the protocol will change. Almost a perfect contradiction to the headlines (;-))

Many stations have emergency generators, as people use radio to get information during natural disasters (;-))

Which is sort of the *opposite* of open anything (;-))

I don't think I dare look at your link right now, but your question has been answered. To quote from that Wikipedia article: "The lead plaintiff was Frank Ricci, who had been a firefighter at the New Haven station for 11 years. ... Because he has dyslexia, he paid an acquaintance $1,000 to read his textbooks onto audiotapes." (Emphasis mine.)

Make whatever noises you like: just because a person is part of the privileged class in the two most visible categories of discrimination (race & gender) doesn't exclude them from being a member of any other legally protected class.

False. Since you specifically mentioned New York, here's an article about how that technology developed. Specifically, it states that "To encourage growth in this new electricity infrastructure, New York, like all of the other states, protected the utilities’ investment by granting them an exclusive right to serve customers." (Emphasis mine.) Believe what you want about the importance of monopoly busting, but the sad truth is that for every common example people give of "natural" monopolies, the government had a hand in why the service in question is a monopoly market.