The standard would probably be 48V. Easy to step down, keeps current down to manageable levels, and plenty of 48V equipment is already available.

Electric vehicles use DC for charging. They either have their own rectifier on-board, or for fast charging can take a direct DC input. My Leaf will take 400V/100A DC for charging, for example. So, there are devices that could make use of a direct DC feed.

At the time it made sense to use AC, because high efficiency solid state DC-DC converters didn't exist. Nowadays high voltage DC transmission lines are used all over the world, with conversion to AC at the destination.

For home use it is a little trickier, because you still want high voltage until you get close to the device. Maybe you could have a DC line direct from the battery pack to your car or a central air conditioner or something, if you could keep them physically close together. You won't want to 48V/50A to your appliances that are tens of metres away from the source though. You could step the voltage up but then it might as well just be AC...

Externalization is a thing. Line maintenance, customer support, equipment purchase or replacement, and other overhead costs... Selling at wholesale is moronic.

Your house consumes electricity if you are not in it.

I believe you will find none of that stuff you mention is actually free with a strict definition. According to the last time I read dumblaws.com you could still take your cattle or sheep to graze on the Boston Commons on Sunday. I should move there for six months and get me a herd of sheep and test this. I might want to wear a sandwich board that shows the law's title. Boston cops are often huge and the State cops are big AND dumb. Also, off-topic, you are supposed to carry a rifle or shotgun to church on Sunday in Portland, Maine and you are allowed to kill the natives if there are more than one on horseback according to the above site a few years ago. I think the Memorial Day parade is a good place to start. I am not going to be on horseback so I do not have to shoot myself.

I most certainly would not normally do this but...

"What we have here is a failure to communicate, some men you just can't reach..." And, "What's so civil about war anyways?"

-The first and last line of Civil War by Guns and Roses

Your point of something being retarded is aimed in the wrong direction. "Securing" would mean that they originally owned it, but they didn't. They purchased Sun and immediately started legal actions which Sun was never going to pursue because they knew they had open sourced Java. In fact in the Google vs. Oracle case numerous messages from Sun came out expressing exactly that, which is why the first Judge ruled for Google. The Judge also understood the sheer idiocy of Oracle claiming patent and copyright on things like function names and how arguments get passed to them, and all the other crap that Oracle claimed was stolen by Google.

I still have no idea how the first decision was overturned.. oh wait.. money and Larry's personal lobby group.. nevermind.

Or the pesky part that at relativistic speeds hydrogen atoms rip through the ship as if it was tinfoil.

The Laws we have in place are the same as we had back then. The main difference today is that people holding public offices tend to flaunt their pay-for-play status, where back in the 80s/90s they were still attempting to hide it. The biggest harm to IT took a while to get precedents set, but really started almost immediately with "ideas" being patented and copyrighted (you can thank the first Bush for that lovely patent reform).

As an example, Athena (X) was developed mostly by DARPA funding and grant money. Yet we had to see 32 screens worth of copyrights just to start the Xserver (okay, 32 is an exaggeration but the point remains). Some of these were to Universities like MIT, Berkley, and Stanford. Many others though were to Novell, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, etc.. etc... And no, these were not "credits", but copyrights. This is why Linux started with a pretty old version of X and basically had to reinvent the wheel. Linux had 1 crappy pay-for version of CDE because some schlep company ended up buying copyrights to extort money from people.

There are a lot of fake liberals there. I am not saying this with political motivations. Vermont is not as liberal as people think. They are, well, slow but the quality of life is good, the policing is lax, and the weather is probably a bit tamer actually as I have been to both in the winter.