I imagine part of it is a new public skepticism in the wake of vioxx and co. Nobody wants the public joking about their drugs being proven deadly by the state.

I'm just guessing, but I imagine 1 malfunctioning unit probably wouldn't be able to raise the voltage enough to trick the other units.

OTOH, in an area with a significant number of solar installations, I can easily see them creating an isolated network segment where the voltage runs near normal and so they collectively convince each other to stay on. That could create an interesting problem of how to convince that segment to re-synchronize with the grid when it's time to re-connect.

That's why the linemen say it's not dead until it's dead and grounded. They are supposed to bond the line to ground before working on it and that bond is supposed to only be disconnected right before the line is turned back on.

But since mistakes happen, it's a good thing that home inverters won't power a dead line.

The biggest danger to linemen (and has been for a while) is id10ts wiring their portable generators in or plugging them in with a "widowmaker" (A generator chord with a male end to plug in to the wall) and not disconnecting from the grid first.

Since "scientific evidence" is very persuasive to jurors, they'll be granting new trials to the ones they haven't killed yet.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAI crack me up!

Actually, no.

In the most extreme cases of improvisation, people have used rocks with a crystalline structure or a razor blade, a pencil, and a safety pin as a detector connected to headphones.

I was under the impression there isn't much use of AM radio in Norway.

You might be able to solve the problem(at the expense of a great deal of additional workload) by larding the caseload with samples specifically constructed to be non-matches; but then blinded and packaged the same as any other sample, to identify people who just lean positive; but that would probably require a lot of additional work to do in enough quantity to counteract the obvious pressure.

Why on parity?

In their capacity as (ostensibly) trustworthy, neutral, expert testimony, they both victimize the defendant and betray the public's trust in the criminal justice system and the duties of their office.

Punishment-on-parity seems like the absolute bare minimum, with no acknowledgement of the aggravating circumstances of abuse of authority, the corrosive effects on rule of law and public trust in the existence of rule of law, and so on. I am sympathetic to arguments that mounting their heads on spikes outside the courthouse might constitute a public nuisance, because of the smell of decay; but that would bring the requisite gravity to the situation.

Is there any reason, aside from the reflexive deference to allegedly legitimate authority figures, why they use the phrases 'gave flawed testimony' and 'overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors' rather than the more honest 'committed a fuckton of perjury'?

I don't know why anyone bothers, given that DJ spew is one of the most insufferable aspects of radio, without even the crass-but-compelling monetary justification of ads; but odds are good, on many channels, that there isn't even necessarily a DJ specific to that station. Once you can their obnoxious chatter, you can programmatically sprinkle it into the playlists of multiple stations in different markets. You only really need to be more specialized if the chatter is supposed to have some 'local' flavor, in which case you do need recordings matched to the appropriate market.

If you want to be pedantic about acceptable variations choosing something with such a long history and such wide use in various disciplines is a terrible plan.

"Percent" is probably the most common flavor currently; but 'per cent', 'per cent.', 'pct', 'pc', and likely others are still within the realm of accepted use. Hell, the '%' sign isn't even entirely settled, unicode has something like four defined variants. And that doesn't count the archaic, but historically used and still recognizable, specimens that cropped up between Latin and the present day.

I take it that you were exposed to basic literacy and only basic literacy, none of that messy intermediate stuff.

The trouble is usually that the broadcasters just hear 'extra channels!' and zone out. You can have higher quality and redundancy; but using those bits to squeeze in a bunch of extra channels and then pretend that the results are acceptable has a tendency to win out.

It also doesn't help that digital transitions are when broadcasters usually give in to the temptation to squeeze in a bunch of extra channels. When they get really greedy, the results are so bandwidth starved that they sound like horribly compressed crap(because they are) even under ideal circumstances. Even if they don't push it that hard, they haven't typically been very conservative about building in a lot of margin for degradation.

This probably has something to do with the fact that 'HD Radio' is a proprietary non-standard that is whatever iBiquity Digital Corporation say it is, and costs whatever they say it does. They obviously want it to be adopted, because they get nothing if it dies; but that's pretty much the only incentive encouraging them to cooperate on licensing or keep prices reasonable.

There is a pitiful veneer of 'standardization', courtesy of the NRSC; but 'NRSC-5c' is more or less a very lightly de-branded generic descriptions fleshed out by the incorporation-by-reference of the iBiquity documentation.

It makes the various MPEG standards and dealing with the MPEG-LA look like some kind of FOSS hippie commune by comparison.

In practice, it's a bit worse for digital. The decoders seem to lose sync easily and just go black for a bit where the analog would have given a couple frames of static and then a watchable image. If it happens frequently enough, you get a black screen and silence from digital where you would get a staticy but watchable picture on analog.

Multipath on a digital signal is a serious issue where on analog, you will actually stop noticing the ghosts after a few minutes.

On the old analog NTSC, the audio was on a subcarrier such that even if the video was an unwatchable mess, you might get decentish audio because of it's minimal demands on signal. Alas, in digital TV, it's all packets in the same stream and the decoder either can't or won't bother decodingh the audio if the video is lost. That's a real problem since is the video is disrupted, you can often follow a story OK, but when the dialog keeps going away you quickly get lost. Same problem if you're trying to get important weather information.

To top it off, as you say, they snuck the power down when the transition happened.