They'd probably commute from elsewhere, seeing as there wouldn't like, you know, be any houses for them there...?

So Shatner is looking for charitable donations to provide water to one of the richest regions on the face of the planet? Seriously? Is he going to back this campaign with a video of slow-mo shots of people suffering in the OC because their lawn is looking a little brown and the water level in their swimming pools is slightly lower than they'd like. "The people of Beverly Hills are slightly uncomfortable -- let's make their lives better."

Yes, but that's a different issue -- too much electricity in a local zone, rather than too much electricity overall.

Let's take water as our analogy. Water flows to meet demand in the form of open taps. But very few of those taps are strictly regulating, and the outflow is a function of how far the tap is opened and the pressure in the system. Put more water into the mains and the pressure goes up, therefore more water is delivered at the tap. If your house has pressure regulating valves, you won't see this, but the pressure is then further increased at someone else's house.

Put power into the grid, and it *will* be delivered somewhere. If nowhere else will accept the load, it ends up being delivered as heat in the transformer in your local substation. How do you prevent substation fires? Fuses/breakers on the transformers... but that just kills one part of the circuit, and the power ends up getting delivered to another transformer. This sort of rolling blow-out used to be a problem -- one substation blows, leading to another blowing and another blowing and so on, and various power companies the world over have put a lot of time, energy and money into developing systems to prevent it happening.

Have the Germans found a way to eliminate the need to "dump" electricity? Last I knew, every country in the developed world needed to connect their circuits to earth (en_US: ground) in order to bleed off the excess when demand suddenly fell (eg right after the advert break in a popular soap -- lots of kettles go on suddenly, and within three minutes everyone's back in front of the TV).

Well I'd certainly say it's the grid's responsibility to improve the infrastructure to a level on a par with the systems already in place in other countries. But setting that aside the claim that the installed infrastructure can't cope is technically true.

Except that if it was a free market, there'd be a film studio there already...

42!! (Oops.. wrong geeky sci-fi.)

There were plenty of games on the C64 with good graphics but shitty gameplay. They were usually also crippled by a horrendous multiload.

What I don't get is why you need dice for a computer game....

We'd get a different /. every year, and many of the existing assets would be incompatible with the new engine. John Maddening /. 2015.

That's "game engine" footage, not "in-game". The final release won't have the same rich colour-depth.

You shouldn't separate your vocative from the main clause with a full-stop, you idiot.

Ah, then you're talking about things that aren't part of a circuit, which is irrelevant. Damage from oversupply is caused to electrical items that are part of the circuit and end up receiving too much electricity from the grid.

If electricity was "free", people would be less likely to switch stuff off. Metering manipulates demand.

Nuclear plants need months to cycle up or cycle down. Traditional thermal plants take days to cycle up or down. Modern plants for flexible demand cycle up and down in a matter of hours. In all of these cases, the flexibility relies on predictability. Power cycles that fluctuate from minute to minute are impossible to predict.