It's not possible to slide your finger in to touch a half-inserted live blade on a NEMA 5-15 plug. The blade does not become energized until it is inserted too far into the socket.

Because we are talking about AC power, there will not be a dangerous arc when you yank the cord out of the wall. A 60 Hz live wire crosses 0 Volts 120 times per second. You can't pull a cord very far in 1/120 of a second. High voltage DC (solar panels) is a different story (switches are always overdesigned and may include blades to break the circuit in multiple places).

Do you have much experience with electrical work? The NEMA and BS plugs are pretty much the same. Do you prefer the left side or the right side of the road? Obviously, the plug designs must differ in order to maintain incompatibility. The only significant difference between the two systems is price. Why don't you avail yourself of the luxury of buying 30 cent duplex receptacles? Get a big pack of them at Walmart. Instead of bending and rebending your blades to see if they stick properly into your 30 year old wall socket, get a new one. All of a sudden, your heavy transformers will stick in the wall instead of falling out. Using up-to-date, fully functional equipment, you may just find that the system is not so bad after all.

Memes or no memes, let's think about what it means to declare that evolution is dead.

Suppose that 50 years from now, one or more companies develop in-vitro superbaby products. We might have 100,000 children across Western Europe, Japan, China, or wherever the world's elite may reside. These children will have a money-back guarantee against Parkinsons, Down's Syndrome, scoliosis, nearsightedness, male pattern baldness, early salt and pepper graying, and a whole host of other traits that we wild-type children have to worry about.

What about the other 6 or more billion people on Earth? Right now, the world's poorest women might average 3-5 children in their lifetimes. As members of the wealthy elite, what do you think the fertility rate of superbaby women would be? Remember that the replacement rate for population stability has to be >2.0.

Let's think about the male superbabies. Suppose that when they turn 18, they all look like Calvin Klein underwear models. They don't speak with stutters, their superior engineering prevents pit-stains in their white dress shirts, and they all have perfect eye color based on years of focus testing. For argument's sake, we'll say that these amazing men are able to spread Y chromosomes as successfully as Genghis Khan.

This is something akin to taking a Siberian Husky and breeding it into a population of 100,000 wolves. The only distinguishing feature of the dog is its lack of genetic diversity vis-a-vis the wolves. It has been carefully selected by man over thousands of generations of inbreeding to become man's conception of what a wolf should be. After a single generation, the offspring would regain much of their lost heritage and be not dogs, but slightly watered-down wolves.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we won't be able to take the easy way out. We all wish we could take our millions from our tech company IPOs and buy the world's best children. However, the real answer is to learn to talk to women. This involves personal grooming, learning to play guitar, going to the gym, and figuring out how to properly hold a knife and fork.

If you don't like the responses, maybe you should be browsing at +4 or +5?

There are many serious responses to this question that have already been posted. The good ones seem to cluster around the power issue. Which power supply sounds more reliable? A PC transformer is 3 pounds and $30-$70, a router transformer is 3 ounces and $3. Many slashdotters are software people, so the usual strategies of "blame the OS" or "blame the user" might be employed. The problem probably amounts to a hardware inadequacy.

I would never use a router without plugging it into the cheapest UPS I can find. Voltage fluctuates. The refrigerator compressor kicks on and the cheap Linksys transformer hiccups.

I've purchased many different versions of Linksys (some old, some new and crippled), Buffalo, Netgear, etc. They ALL go dead after a certain period of time if plugged directly into the wall. The WRT54G 1.1 transformer is physically larger than the 5.0 version. It probably burns more electricity, but it seems to be fairly reliable. I keep one upstairs as an ethernet bridge (no UPS and it has done fine).

Whether you're talking about routers or cable modems/DSL modems, the only way to ensure reliability is to fix the power supply. Are you running 12 gauge copper on a dedicated circuit to your router/switch/modem? Or just buy a UPS for $20-$30 and you can discontinue your daily or weekly reset of your cable modem. Your wireless access point will actually be on when you go to use it. And you can use your laptop or VoIP during a thunder storm.

No, I don't work for the battery company.