That's exactly what urban legends are. Anecdotes don't trump authoritative studies.

Nice rebuttal.

So the voltage drop is so rubbish, the utilities have to overcompensate...

To be clear, the voltage drop is not predominantly from too-small wiring, but from other appliances on the circuit drawing lots of power.

It's all relative. European 230V isn't even quite double the voltage of the US' ~125V, so you still get plenty of voltage drop, yourself. Someone else could come along and say 230V is rubbish, and everyone should have gone with 420V or so, when we both had the chance... Of course the US' lower voltage has the advantage in lesser risk of electrocution, too. The higher 60Hz frequency incidentally gave us better TV...

Even though the common NEMA outlets are 120V, and that's unlikely to ever change, the wall outlets don't need to for big loads... any house built in the past 50 years probably has 240V available at least the electric box, as they get 2 opposing phases of ~130V from the power company. Big appliances like electric stoves, electric water heaters, central air conditioning, and larger split-system heat pumps or large window air conditioning units, ALL are run on 240V here in the US.

Big industrial customers make up 75% of electrical demand, and they're different beasts all together. 277V (single-phase) is pretty common in US industry, particularly for lighting and what not, while big electric motors run on 3-phase 480V or so. Wherever higher voltages are beneficial, they're available.

I forgot to mention that generators typically output over 130V, too. Since they're not going to be located INSIDE your house, they have to similarly compensate for being at the end of a long extension cord out in your back yard.

rough service lights at designed to be handled roughly, and a heavier duty filament that is rated for a higher voltage allows it to be banged around a lot, not because you can hook it up closer to an electrical box

False dichotomy... it's designed for BOTH purposes.

The only time I've see > 125 V is when helping someone who bought a very cheap generator, that could easily have been out of spec for 240 too.

That's your own lack of perspective. I'm an EE, I went through the training and could get an electrician's licenses if I so desired. I do electrical work on my own properties pretty often. At work I'm primarily responsible for monitoring the incoming power for our hundreds of servers at our data centers and our office server rooms, etc., and designing and ordering upgrades as they are needed. I also have friends who are licensed and working electricians with lots of experience. etc.

I just tested the wall outlets in my nice new apartment, a good long distance from an electrical box, and I've got 124.1V everywhere right now. That's not abnormal at all, but completely typical.

It is some kind of a hardship because you still have to figure out which emails are legit - I'm not going to go log in to my bank every time I get a phishing email. When the vast majority of emails claiming to come from my bank are phishing mails, I'm pretty much guaranteed to miss legitimate ones unless the bank give me a trivial way to know that they're legit - MIME signed emails would allow that, but no banks seem to be interested.

Did YOU look at the graph? The bars are comparing all of 2013 against the first half of 2014 (obviously, as the second half is in the future). So the fact that IE already matched last year's record is where the 100% figure comes from - it's another way to say "doubled". Unless the second half of 2014 has a lower exploit rate then the conclusion will be correct.

Or they train them with exactly the opposite of good behaviour.

Case in point: a few years ago my (at the time) bank sent me a marketing email (and yes, I confirmed it was legit). It wasn't from the bank's normal domain name and it contained lots of links to product descriptions that were also on an unusual domain. It said that I could verify it's authenticity because it contained the first half of my post code (i.e. something that's trivial for anyone to find out). I complained to the bank and the regulator - neither of them would do anything. The bank's excuse was that none of the pages linked from the email asked for my bank credentials so it was ok. This kind of thing trains people to expect that their bank will legitimately send them emails with clickable links that don't go to the bank's main website - the distinction between a link that asks for your credentials and one that doesn't is going to be lost on a lot of people.

Similarly, my Paypal account is currently suspended because they sent me an email telling me I needed to "verify my ID" (by sending them a scan of my driving licence)... this email went into the bin along with all the phishing emails asking me to "verify my paypal account", so when I didn't send them any ID they suspended the account.

Now, banks _do_ need to communicate with their customers, and I can't discount email as a viable method for them to communicate, but they really really need to start providing a sensible method for people to authenticate the legitimacy of the email - why the hell don't they MIME sign the messages, for example? At the moment they are sending out emails that are indistinguishable from phishing messages and then blaming the customer when they get phished.

As someone who takes the Gospel more seriously than pretty much anything else, I have to ask for specifics on where you think I'm off course.

Denying that the Nazis and Soviets claimed Socialism would be akin to rejecting Pres'ent Obama when he refers to "my Christian faith". I don't know precisely what he means by that formulation, to look at his record, but I have to own the fact that, by his words, at least his lips are "saved". I'm certainly lacking the divine database to evaluate the claim, and thus must take the Nazis, Soviets, and Obama at face value.

I'm wondering WHY they're asking for permission. Seems ludicrous to do so when everyone's already giving it up for free. Making it legit?

They're collecting all that information, but they have to keep it under wraps. They have to get permission, like this, to be able to release (sell) all your vital information to 3rd parties.

The public and our representatives don't care about privacy, much. But after the free-for-all is on for a while, one case will break-through in the media... Something about a violent criminal buying the information from Verizon, using it to figure out exactly when little Jill comes home from school every day, and how long she's there by herself before her parents get home. When cases like that get publicized, then in a sudden tidal wave of popular think-of-the-children support, we get a bunch of privacy laws passed.

I was getting so much LinkedIn related junk that I stopped using LinkedIn and sent all email from them, or purporting to be from them to trash. If LinkedIn isn't putting in the effort to find their attackers, why should I use them?

That's a nice job. Of course, the only original part is the case. Coneniently, there's someone who sells a board with buttons designed to fit in a GameBoy case and bring out the buttons for emulation purposes.

If you 3D printed a new case, you would't need a Game Boy at all. I wonder if there's a decal set for that.