I'd hate to think of just how much extra copper I'd need in my walls to distribute ample power throughout my house and not suffer resistive losses. A 15A 110V circuit would become a 330A 5V circuit. The wire that carries the 15A @ 110V circuit is about the thickness of a pencil lead (about 1/10"). The wire required to carry 330A would have conductors the size of a garden hose (about 1/2"). (Note: The table linked above only goes up to 302A with a thickness of 0.46"; 330A would be larger still.)

There's two main sets of losses, as I understand: Resistive losses and radiative losses. You can get into other issues, such as power factor and phase error related losses. The two biggies that hit you almost before you get started are resistive and radiative losses, though, if you just consider a single transmission line driving a resistive load.

You combat resistive losses by going up in voltage, so you can send more power with less current. Since resistive losses are proportional to the square of current, each doubling of voltage reduces your resistive losses by a factor of 4. That's why long haul transmission lines are high voltage.

Radiative losses are different. Whenever you accelerate a charged particle, you generate an electromagnetic wave. With respect to wires carrying current, that corresponds to changing the amount of current. (Current measures the rate at which electrons flow, so changing current means accelerating or decelerating electrons.) That's how radio transmitters works, for example.

In an AC system, that current is continuously changing, so those transmission lines are continuously radiating away some amount energy. But that's not all. If there are any conductors nearby, those E-M waves can induce a current in those conductors, and the resulting E-M waves from that induced current can drag on the AC line further. This mutual induction is how transformers work. But, along an AC transmission line, unwanted coupling results in transmission losses. So, an AC system has a built in, inherent source of losses in the alternating current itself.

In a DC system, with a fixed, perfectly resistive load, the current doesn't change, so there's no radiative losses. In the real world, though, the loading on the system is continually changing, so the actual current demand on the DC system will vary over time, and some energy will be radiated away. To some extent that can be filtered, but that's limited by the amount of storage you can put near the ends of the transmission.

The reason AC won out over DC in the early days is that we didn't have practical means to step DC voltages up and down. But, we had just invented the first practical transformers, and those can step AC to higher and lower voltages trivially.

HVDC is practical now since we've had 100 years to develop better technology for converting DC voltages on the grand scales required.

NO. That will not happen. Power equals voltage times current. To deliver the same power load at a lower voltage would require higher current, and household wiring is already designed to carry as much current as it safely can. Lowering voltage would thus require new, much bulkier wiring, which can't easily be retrofitted in older structures. Conduits would be able to carry far less of it, so those two would have to be overhauled. Last but not least, wireless charging and better batteries will eliminate much of the need for the lower-power wiring in the first place. There are very few things that I can confidently predict about the future, but one of those things is that mains (110-220v) voltage is not going to change drastically anytime soon. I'd be willing to bet every single powered appliance in my home on it.

I chose my iPhone because I have a Mac and it plays nicer with my software like iTunes & iPhoto, etc. So yeah, the OS of the phone was central to my purchase. If there was a cheaper clone that sold iOS based hardware, I might have bought one of those instead.

Comcast disables fast forward on some OnDemand content, but works for DVR recordings.

This is one that really irritates me. Usually if we rent a new release video, i don't mind watching the trailers to see what new stuff is coming out. However, for the movies I buy, I don't want to have to watch them at all if I don't feel like it. Taking away the skip/menu capabilities on privately owned discs is pretty messed up.

Don't give them any ideas. although it would seem to be difficult to implement, since the TV & the media player are typically two different pieces of equipment.

I hear this all the time, but it doesn't seem to make sense to me. How exactly is space expanding, and what exactly is expanding into? For instance, a hot air balloon's surface expands by blowing air into it, and it expands into the surrounding atmosphere. But space itself is not a substance. It is not matter or energy, it's just the gaps between everything else. Likewise the area outside the expansion of matter in the universe should be space as well. Not trolling, just trying to gain a better understanding.

So you prefer a world with patent trolls? That seems to be what your nonsense argument is implying. The system you appear to be in favor of allows the use of the courts by bullies to intimidate anyone they don't like.

Can they make Compaq's reverse engineering of IBM's BIOS illegal retroactively, and take back much of the PC revolution?

Note, I have yet to meet anyone who calls them "Freedom Fries". Most Europeans probably understand the difference between a publicity stunt and reality.

No it isn't. This would be like a malware company going after Norton or Kaspersky because it hurt their distribution model, or if ammunition manufacturers sued bullet-proof vest manufacturers because it makes their product less effective. Yeah, the good guys win, but they ended up having to spend a lot of money to defend themselves unnecessarily.

+1

Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.

Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.

The bad news is that they had to defend themselves in the first place.