Slashdot sucks, Dice sucks, kids these days, get off my lawn.

Voltage drop. Get, make or borrow an IR scanner. (They are used to 'look through cloths', IIRC you can hack one out of a cheap camera.) The lose/dirty connection will show up as a warm-spot on a wall plate/fuse box. Make sure the light is on, install an incandescent for the troubleshoot. Do it when it's cool/cold and the heat is off.

Dude, put a good strong fart fan into your bathroom.

If you've got regular condensation going on, CFLs failing is the least of your problems.

No.

You have limited understanding of how electricity is generated (it's OK, so do I). Most of the first half of your post is correct. (It's the parenthesized part where you go off the rails.)

Not all power plants are base load (the ones you describe), the daily variation is taken up by 'dispatchable power'; plants with throttles. Those vary from hydro to combustion turbines (jet engines hooked to generators). Load following can't really be seen in hourly load graphs. It's all about instantaneous control and is a king kameahmeaha bitch. That's where you see the gigawatt resistors (at the end of transmission lines, to dump the reflection when it trips).

If base load is dumping power, a neighboring area almost always buys it. It happens very rarely, usually associated with very bad weather forecasting. Spinning reserve violations (not having enough extra power to cover any one plant falling down) are much, much more common then dump power. Solar helps with spinning reserve anywhere it makes sense (if you are winter/night peaking solar almost certainly makes no sense). If solar becomes truly economic it will change the peak for areas. Which will change power pricing. Lock your surplus power buyer into a rate if you can.

Pumped storage is fully utilized, most of the year. Usually regulations slowing them down.

They're building prototypes with motorized freight cars and gravel.

That makes at least two of us aware of it.

Pretty much all touch up solder/hobbiest solder has good wholesome lead in it. Silver solder for plumbing an obvious (and old) exception.

They should allow a little bit back into the oven solder. Just to cut down on tin whiskers as electronics gets old.

Never tried soldering electronics with silver solder. Anybody?

If there is a god, would she inspire you to write 'inerrant dogma' that correspond to local, very unlikely, miss-translations of previous 'holy books'?

Remember the premise of 'divinely inspired book': There is in fact, a god, who is sending the book. All you need to do is find one blatantly wrong thing and POP. (Bats are not birds).

Clearly, we currently have too many competent patent examiners. We should do everything possible to get them to quit.

The crusades were a response to the muslim's wars of conquest. Mentioning one as relevant, while pretending the other never happened is a huge distortion of history.

They're back to fighting each other. Which is the natural state of things.

At this point, all we need to do is ship a few weapons to whoever is losing at the moment.

Yes: 'I'm New Around Here' is trolling hard.

What else would you call only mentioning one side of a war?

As relevant as the Muslim wars of conquest.

They haven't suspended 'Habius Corpus' yet. Lincoln remains the most flagrant violator of the constitution.

The Koran is just like the Book of Mormon. It contains stories/passages derived from mistranslations of the christian bibles that were circulating at the time.

Basically they are both logically proven to _not_ be deviny inspired books. Of course if you believe in them, they are true and my not be questioned.

You might want to study a little of the history of India they don't teach in high school.

After Ghandi got control of India he ordered _many_ killings in the future 'Pakistan' and 'Bangladesh'. Non violence is for when you don't have the power.