NTSB investigators reported the cause of the crash as 'Controlled reboot into terrain".

Man, if only we could afford to use 64 bit values for things. I realize that transistors are simply too expensive right now; but perhaps, in the future, the miracles of science will make this possible...

I certainly have no useful information to add to the speculation about cause; but that is what would worry me. Having to reboot a system every 284 days or less is a nuisance; but not a terribly big one(especially since the system is connected to a giant mass of moving parts governed by comparatively strict regulations concerning maintenance, so it probably gets taken to the shop fairly frequently anyway). However, if there is some value incrementing its way up that eventually causes the system to crash; I'd want to be very sure that there is absolutely nothing else that might modify that value in a way that causes it to grow faster than expected.

Cue the "If they'd chosen Windows, it would be impossible for this bug to occur" jokes...

Those have mostly been unfair since the NT-derived era; but, in the spirit of the joke, there was a bug in win95 and 98 that would cause the system to crash after 49.7 days of uptime. It remained undiscovered for years.

"Really short mission" technology, while it simplifies many problems quite considerably, is pretty limiting...

Your mum's so FAT32...

I don't control the purse strings in this case, unfortunately. Though, if you have any particular favorites(relatively small scale, rack-level stuff, for the most part), I'd be delighted to try to put a bug in the ear of anyone who does. Please, do tell.

Not unless industry starts using batteries for storage as well. Currently, the peak power usage has very little to do with residential usage. Where I live, it's always the same as cheap overnight rates on weekends and holidays. Because residential users don't account for that much power. The real power draw comes from industrial and commercial uses.

Doesn't even sound like he was using a lot of stuff. Basically doing laundry and dishes while preparing a big meal. It probably woudn't happen every day, but I could easily see it happening.

I think that power companies should offer more incentives for people to have these in order to smooth out the electricity demand. Imagine if everybody had one. The grid wouldn't need as much capacity, and they would be able to use more renewables because the draw would be constant and people could store their own power. Many electricity companies are already charging higher rates during peak times. This is one way to get rid of the peaks. It's already a $0.05/KWh difference where I live. If the price of these gets low enough, it might make sense for everybody to install one, even without solar panels.

Anyone with some legal experience able to clarify this? Given that grooveshark wasn't...exactly...apologetic about their strategy(nor has it changed all that much), my assumption is that the sudden shift to grovelling-apology-mode has much more to do with losing than it does with any change of heart.

Do courts give grovelling apologies enough weight that this 'contrition' is a logical strategy to try to reduce any awards of damages? Are such apologies sometimes added as conditions of a settlement, presumably so that the victor can grind the vanquished further into the dirt? Is there some other advantage to issuing one?

The specs allege "92% round-trip efficiency". I'm not sure how much weasel wording goes into that figure; but if it isn't a lie-for-all-but-legal-purposes, that could easily fall within the peak/off-peak price changes in many markets.

According to the spec sheet, the battery bank itself is a 400VDC unit and does not include an AC inverter(though a locally appropriate inverter, if not already available from a solar install or the like, would presumably be something you'd include in the project if you wished to install one). You are limited by the peak draw that the battery pack allows; but you can do absolutely whatever you feel like, subject to local codes and keeping your insurance, with the output. Unless you live in some really, really, freaky location where inverters that match your grid's flavor of power simply aren't on the market, it should be pretty trivial to spec an inverter suitable to the location.

Also, unless you are in an area without gas service, or in a house built with 100% electric heat, winter tends to be somewhat favorable to electrical demand. Lighting requirements go up, since the days are shorter; but contemporary lighting efficiency has increased by leaps and bounds of late(and anyone buying a Tesla battery pack is probably already running LED lights, or willing to consider it); and the cold reduces air conditioning demand to effectively zero, while heating is often accomplished substantially by on-site combustion heaters, which impose negligible electrical load(typically a trickle to keep the thermostats and other regulatory electronics up; but that's peanuts compared to AC load).

An area with proper winter would make outdoor installs problematic(Li-ion is better than most; but batteries still don't do any better for being below freezing); but otherwise the situation isn't so bad. If anything, places with brutal summers are probably the harder case, since AC is absolutely voracious in its demand, and almost always electrical, and the modest increase in available solar power doesn't necessarily negate the substantial increase in cooling requirements.

I don't know of any FBI-specific issues with DNA work; but various crime labs have had issues with atrociously sloppy practices that tend to go unchallenged, or overtly hidden, for some years. The big FBI story is definitely the "yeah, we basically didn't do a single hair analysis right for two decades; also hair analysis in general is probably bullshit" issue.

In general, DNA-based techniques have the advantage that they are actually 'science', as originally developed by scientists looking for useful research tools and facing some possibility of falsification, embarassing retractions, etc. It requires some skill, and considerable attention to good standards of cleanliness, bench technique, etc.(especially if PCR is involved; that technique is practically black magic it's so good at picking up otherwise impossible to detect DNA; but it is equally good at amplifying your accidental contamination of the sample by a few orders of magnitude)

Much of the rest of forensic 'science', is little better than polygraphs and phrenology. 'Bite mark analysis', in particular, is a tragicomedy.