If you and all your neighbors were producing a surplus, the substations would need to be backfeedable. Most aren't, and would either need to be upgraded, or local storage would be needed.

Inverters force energy into the grid by raising voltage. In the situation where everyone is producing and nobody consuming, the lines will become overvoltaged and the solar collectors would be shut down by the inverters. Near 0% efficiency in the primary solar hours isn't a good thing.

That's the degenerate case. It won't happen because we're smart enough to see the issues. This is exactly why we need storage and backfeedable substations. We could have 100% wind and solar adoption without issue if the storage and distribution issues are solved.

I've been posting about this, and the spin some politicians are pushing is reprehensible. Recently, Arizona allowed fees to charge rooftop-based solar energy producers for the privilege of selling or donating electrons to others for use. A few incredible or insane politicians are trying to spin it as if solar adopters are leeches despite the fact that they already pay for interconnect fees and all the excess energy they use.

The alternative, of course, is to go completely off the grid using your own batteries, which will end up costing the power companies (and the politicians in their pockets) even more.

But it's not all without a shred of truth. There are definitely some costs associated with high adoption rates of solar, and the breakdown is pretty easy to explain:

• Substations convert and distribute 220 to your neighborhood, from high tension wires from the power plants.
• Substations convert one direction only -- from the high-voltage to the line voltage.
• High usage is generally in the warm daytime, through early evening.
• Solar covers most of the high usage times. Some companies charge more for energy use during these times.

This works great for the power companies when a few people on one substation have some solar power generators, because they feed it back into the grid for use by those without solar. As a result, the power company can charge the full amount for the electrons used (often at higher prices), but they don't have to transfer it long distances which inevitably carries loss due to capacitance and resistance. And they get all of this without investing in the cost of increased production at the power plants.

This also works great for the solar generators, because they reduce their use during the most expensive times, and usually push themselves into a lower usage tier due to overall reduced usage. A household that uses 500kWh might only draw 100kWh net from the grid over a month, and the first 100 are usually very cheap. Some places pay for excess electrons put onto the grid, others do not.

But here's the limitation: if all your neighbors have solar, it will exceed consumption during times of bright sunlight. In other words, the substation will send out no energy (nobody needs it), and in fact cannot backfeed it to other substations. This can cause a real issue when there's a surplus. Line voltage may even go up from 110 to around 130. This is when they need energy storage. Batteries are one method, but flywheels can work well, too. They could spin up a flywheel to consume the excess energy, then release it later as-needed (e.g. a dark cloud). In fact, they can spin up a flywheel at nighttime, too, when they have excess production, to smooth out daytime use. It's not just for independent generating stations, but this infrastructure will smooth out their plants for normal use, too.

Some unscrupulous legislators are trying to saddle solar generators with the cost of those who choose not to use solar. They claim exactly the opposite, that the solar producers are driving up costs. Really, they're making a needed upgrade more obvious and in any case, there is literally no way they are "driving up costs" by reducing their own usage. That fails the basic 5th grader test.

Localizing the storage is far more efficient than sending it hundreds of miles, plus it future proofs the obvious issues of people inevitably moving away from coal and natural gas generators. These local storage solutions or backfeeding substations should be pushed by all, even those without solar generation.

"plant the Hammer and Sickle flag on the surface that will enslave the world in Communism"

Command of space ( not necessarily the moon, but earth orbit for certain ) would be a huge strategic and tactical advantage.
If the Soviet Union had managed LEO or the moon, do you think they would have not used it?

Finland, 1939
Poland, 1939
China, 1941, 1945
Support for NKorea, 1950
Hungary, 1956
Support for NVietnam, 1961
Czechoslovakia, 1968
Afghanistan, 1979
One can argue Crimea, 2014, but that isnt "Soviet Union".

"But those developments were still the result of commercial companies"

At least with respect to WWII, commercial companies produced the aircraft, but it was military and government leaders seeing a possible need for more advanced aircraft that lead to the advancements. With the possible exception of the B-17, industry was asked for the advancements, mainly to meet what the Germans ( and English ) were doing ( what the Japanese had managed came as a sharp surprise )

The first mistake is assuming your opponent has the same goals as you.

Actually, it's believed that the killing of cats (by Christians) lead to the explosion of the rat population that allowed the plague to kill so much of Europe.

Cats are pretty clean creatures.

Who/Where can we donate to help get basic supplies to the doctors in Africa; without 98% of it disappearing into 'overhead'?

Plague is easily treated today. It's just a bacterium, and it doesn't even spread from person to person without blood exchange. That's like one of the dumbest things I've heard, only interesting because plague once killed many people.

I'd be far more worried about smallpox, an easily created virus that has few people immunized these days.

Bionic limbs should use standard USB chargers.

That is almost certainly illegal. If nothing else, it'd be tortuous interference, clearly designed to harm. Using burner phones is contributory evidence to fraud by showing mal intent.

It makes a mockery of the idea of journalistic integrity. The beheading video is billed as an ISIS propaganda piece, so does anyone actually think that adding more propaganda would legitimize it? Methinks not.

There is simply no good from adding corporate enforced! bias, for funding or whatever. The objectionable parts are not the news, nor a beheading. The objectionable part is the context, which includes things like trolls or even auto-starting videos on facebook. I've dropped people for less, for sharing auto-starting gore videos.

Consumers should have a choice to watch or not, Editors should use discretion, Newscasters should add context and background for proper interpretation.

But for all that is holy and truthful, forcing propaganda into news just to be broadcast is the worst idea I've ever heard.

Agreed. It should have a PSA preceding it talking about the annoyances of tangentially related tech news on a tech news website.

A counterexample would be skill levels (3,1,3,3,7) with a median of 3 and mean above 3. In neither of those definitions are half below average, being 1 or 2, and 4.

Simple math would say at least half would be less than or equal to the median.

Of course, simple math rarely works here to quantify except at the extremes. People have different abilities in different areas, and gray matter is plastic. It changes, and even that rate of change matters.

What's relevant for learning to program might not correspond to what's currently being used.

Teach a man code a a language, and he's relevant to a small market. Teach a man to program, and he owns them all.

The point was to provide a sandbox, among other things. That freed up a lot of issues with security (although we know how that story ended) and issues with operating systems.