I live in a suburban area just south of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Following the Great Ice Storm of 1998 (Vermont and northern New York were also affected), my home was without electrical power for 8 and a half days. No lights, no water (electrical pump in well), and no heat (oil-fired furnace in those days). But the copper-wire twisted-pair telephone worked fine almost all of the time. There were several outages of a few hours at a time but otherwise we could call friends and relatives, and 9-1-1 if we had needed to. It was very reassuring despite our other challenges. Today I have a small back-up generator, wood stove, and cell phone, but I doubt I will ever give up my twisted-pair telephone.

No one EXPECTS the DHS.

Our weapons are ... irrational fear and ...

That's alright, Mozilla. You make your choice and I make mine. For a long time now, I have blocked ALL 3rd party cookies. Sure there are a handful of sites that I can't use, like my local city's newspaper site, but I don't really need them. I believe that no one should have to accept 3rd party cookies to use a website. If they insist on 3rd party cookies, then I won't use it.

Publishing your research on BBC television? Is that how it works now? Do the comments, questions and rebuttals have to appear on BBC TV also, or can they appear on someone else's TV show?

All electronic devices emit EMI

Not all electronic devices emit EMI. A crystal set (simple type of radio) is an electronic device but it will emit nothing unless a strong external RF signal is already present.

Yeah, a poor analogy on my part.

The Ford Motor Company has reprogrammed all recent model Ford cars and light trucks to prevent them from being refueled from Texaco gas pumps. Film at eleven.

Is there any other major country in the world that does not already use the metric (SI) system officially for everything they do? Think of it - all of your major trading partners have to convert their measurements to what is in effect the "american" system before they sell them to you. Maybe they could sell those products to you more cheaply if they didn't have to change all the labels etc before shipping them to the USA.

If they are setting up communications transmitters in a foreign country, shouldn't Google be asking that country's national telecommunications administration which channels are clear to use and which are not? It probably never occurred to Google that every country in the world has its own version of the U.S. FCC, and for the same reasons that the FCC exists, that is to regulate such things as frequency allocations, exact channel assignments, transmitter powers, emission bandwidths, etc etc. Many countries have different regulations than the U.S.

Exactly. To their great credit, the protons have never raised their debt ceiling. So while the universe around them inflates out of control, the protons stay the same and still prosper. (There's a lesson here somewhere but the type on my screen is now so small that I can't read it anymore.)

...go to a library, read a book a day...

What the hell does one get out of just reading a book, especially one per day? Learning requires study, analysis, comparison, debate, experimentation, more analysis, more comparison, more debate. I'm not saying it is impossible to learn stuff on your own simply by being exposed to ideas, but a well presented and managed college or university course can accomplish a lot more than simple exposure to an idea. My country (Canada) is badly enough run now by people who think they know everything they need to, but don't.

... for a fraction of a second this article became more interesting. Then I re-read it and the feeling subsided.

Ha!! Premature satisfaction!

Insensitive clods! I live in Canada. We had our Thanksgiving last month.

Yeahbut, electricity at what voltage and current?? Enough to power a cellular telephone, enough to light an LED, enough to run a small refrigerator, enough to deflect the needle on a galvanometer, enough to recharge an electric vehicle so we can all go out drinking again?