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 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.

They're also not knee deep in Libertarian mumbo jumbo.

is why it is turned off

if the question were "why should a phone add all this expensive hardware for negligible benefit" then the answer should obviously screw FM radio

but if the functionality is already there, why isn't anyone angry that you are being denied something for free simply so your phone carrier can squeeze more cash out of you?

i look at the other posts here and their priorities and their rationale, and i can't understand why this thought doesn't rank higher

and while we're at it, get us a tv tuner too, like in japan:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Androi...

why aren't television and fm radio industries banding together to demand inclusion on smartphones? nevermind as a safety feature, you can make arguments for that, but even if you think that's a contrived concern, do it simply because it's a fucking industry of content, that you can get FOR FREE

Yes, words can lead to death, and Goebbels propaganda is a rather good examples. And once again, he wasn't just a guy writing posters, speeches and press releases he was a senior Nazi who knew about the Final Solution, and when the Final Solution was finally wetr in motion, pushed for Berlin's Jews to be among the first to be moved.

You are assuming that they care. But what they're probably regretting is that they haven't killed all to ones convicted on fraudulent evidence.

O, wait, you said "people". You didn't mean officials.

N.B.: The laws are made and enforced by organizations composed of people who hold power. They *like* holding power. And they are quite willing to kill innocent people to keep it. Some of them would cavail at mass murder.

You left out 1 1/2 considerations:
1) Most of the antibiotics in use are essentially identical to antibiotics long existing in soil bacteria, and so there will have been a long development process where bacteria resistant to the antibiotic mechanism will have had an evolutionary advantage to compensate for the extra costs (which don't usually appear to be excessively high, probably due to long refinement).

another half) Most bacteria can freely share genetic mechanisms for things like coping with environmental stresses. So when one strain of bacteria develops a capability, it is likely to soon get widely shared with other quite different strains.

So, yeah, keeping resistant bacteria from appearing is going to depend on developing antibacterial mechanisms that there isn't a long history of pre-adaptive mechanism development. And since some of the adaptive mechanisms are pretty generic (like pumping out a wide variety of chemicals that you don't expect to have in your body [think kidneys]) this is likely to be quite difficult.

You find it hard to condemn a guy who was given the job of justifying murdering six million Jews?

You do understand, I trust, that Goebbels was more than just a propaganda writer, but a senior minister and, for a brief time, one of Hitler's chief heirs. But even the propaganda itself was horrifying in its vileness and evil, and even Goebbels had never done anything else, that would still make him one of the evilest men in hisotry.

And who exactly did any of the senior Nazis kill? Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and the whole senior gang were the directors of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Are you seriosulyt asserting that they did nothing wrong? After WWIz I don't think Hitler actually killed anyone personally.

They don't have nearly as much to offer if they can't do launches quickly. I'm sure they would make that a feature of their offering.

TL;DR: The upside of being under continuous surveillance is that everyone else is too. It is the same argument as, "Because terrorists might get caught."

Here's just one example of the downside: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and similar will all have zero attendance as soon as employers stop hiring people who have been seen at an AA/NA meeting. That will be a reality within ten years, as private license plate tracking databases come online.

Doubt it? Ask yourself this: Would a typical "profit over everything" manager hire someone he knew was in NA? That guy is going to abuse these databases as they come online. That is reality.

They can carry about 110kg to LEO, compared to the Falcon 9's 13150kg. That's 0.84% of the payload capacity. A launch is estimated to cost $4 900 000, compared to the Falcon 9's $61 200 000. That's 8.01%. That means cost per mass to orbit is nearly an order of magnitude worse.

Yes, this is a really small rocket. If you are a government or some other entity that needs to put something small in orbit right away, the USD$5 Million price might not deter you, even though you could potentially launch a lot of small satellites on a Falcon 9 for less.

And it's a missile affordable by most small countries, if your payload can handle the re-entry on its own. Uh-oh. :-)

so, indeed, you're affirming the insult

you're telling me you see no distinction between science and business

why are there so many fucking morons in this world?

are you against music because people can copyright songs?

that's exactly as stupid as what you just wrote

there is science

then there are corporations

you do understand those are different topics, right?

because the ignorance you just wrote suggests otherwise

Many, many years ago I was a temp doing data entry for the sub-sub contractor for military night-vision goggles. the company was making the high-voltage power supplies. they had a QA spreadsheet in Lotus 123 that the results of QA test failures were supposed to be entered into, and because of bad 'programming', only the first 20 tests failures were tabulated, giving them results which showed a lower failure rate the more units they made. I pointed this out, was ignored, complained, was fired, tried to blow the whistle, got no response. But the company has since gone out of business..ha ha ha, they deserve worse.