One must always tie one's Faraday Cage to earth...
as often as one can... :-]
Why?
It will build an electrostatic charge up for one thing.
HUH?
That has nothing to do with a Faraday Cage.
Nor does it follow.
Bullshit. ALL ESD protection is drained to earth ground at some
point. Faraday cages have more functions that the ONE you seem to
think it ONLY has. It has several functions.
(You should have seen Flash, the god of flashlights ...)
"The voltage will float off to who knows where."
Things can be "grounded" but suppress nothing much.
Bullshit. "Things" can be grounded, but a full "cage" which is
grounded diverts electrostatic buildups to ground, so there is none.
ANY electrostatic accumulation is typically referenced to ground,
and can be balanced to "zero" via grounding. Earth IS the reference.
Any conductor whether it be a wire or even a sphere cannot hold an
electrostatic charge if it is in contact with ground. It has to be
supported free from contact to build a charge. Said charges are the
bane of modern circuitry. Earth ground is and has always been the
reference. Static charged build on insulator surfaces, but can also
build on conductors that are isolated from a drain.
Lightning strikes & EMP pulses (perhaps worse) are another matter.
They are YET one more function of the reasons for caging a circuit.
Lightning SHOULD hit a pole, and travel down the grounding wires on
each pole, but it can and does hit the cable bundles themselves as
well. Hell, and ungrounded bucket truck can build a HUGE ES charge if
it isn't grounded. If you are not familiar with this effect, you
shouldn't be in this discussion.
In this case, twisted pair bundles cancel some noise but not ALL
noise. So they get shielded. The sheathed cable runs are for yet one
more small protection against noise injection, and also stop inductive
taps from being feasible.