You may have a 50 amp service. So might your neighbours. But if you and all your neighbours actually pull 50 amps at the same time for any significant duration, the local transformer or supply cable WILL fail. It's not designed to do that.

No electricity system on earth is designed to provide the maximum rated supply to everyone. It would be ludicrously expensive.

To keep the costs down, certain assumptions are made about the diversity of the demand (i.e. you almost certainly don't need 50 amps all the time). The existing system was designed to fit with those assumptions. Electric cars change the demand pattern, resulting in localised overloads in certain circumstances.

Uh huh.
If you check your history, you'll find that America's economic power prior to independence (and right through to Edison's era) was *founded* on ignoring the copyrights & patents of other nations. Guess what? Americans may not have invented everything you think they did.
America was a developing nation once. Try sticking that fact into your neat economic hypothesis.

Cheap, no contract, available over the counter almost everywhere as a SIM only or including dongle:
http://www.medionmobile.de/index3.htm

Enjoy the trip!

And that, my friend, is the most eloquent argument I've read in a while for avoiding anything from Microsoft at all costs.
Thank you for your honesty.

No matter how much they might pretend otherwise, when a company's core value becomes "It's all about the shareholders; fuck the customers!" then there is very little incentive to purchase anything from them. Doesn't matter if it's cheap. Heck, doesn't matter if it's good.

If your sole aim is to screw me, why would I even consider talking to you?

You may well be right.

This is the first time I've heard any major outage blamed on "hackers".
Ususally such blackouts are caused by combination of lack of investment and/or lack of knowledge (but that's another argument).

Is there any evidence whatsoever that hackers were involved?

Physical or absolute separation of the various networks is a good idea in theory.
In practice, separation is exceptionally difficult to maintain:

1. There's always non-critical data to collect. Long term trends, maybe some environmental data, some trial project for some new tech. This stuff is (quite rightly) kept away from the mission critical networks and usually goes over the internet.
2. The mission-critical guys then find that this non critical data is useful/relevant to what they do. Maybe it's just a weather forecast, something like that. So they end up having access to the non-critical information. It's usually too hard/too expensive to make intangible data sources available through the mission-critical systems (changes are expensive and you don't know what the benfit is until you try it...). So, they'll get access in informal ways. It starts with printouts, then a "separate" screen in the control room, then maybe an info display on their main screen and before you know it, you've started to breach the separation. Still, nothing too disastrous at this point.
3. The next stage is that this extra information proves so useful that the idea of automation comes in. "Hey, look: if we merge this data source with this data source, we can have the system make a decision for us and it'll ease the workload of the mission critical people". At this point, you've now got mission critical data and other data all routed into the same decision box, running *unsupervised*. No-one really knows what's going on (in real time) and this is where the hackers can start to play.

I'm not sure what the solution is. The message is "Don't rely on separation to protect you." It *will* be breached. The day-to-day business processes in a utility will take care of that...

Because when the line breaks/falls down/gets struck by lightning, you lose your vital communications right when you most need them.

It's usually a good idea to have the control channel physically separate from the thing you are controlling...

Maybe. Your argument is fine if there's nothing you need to supply with electricity any place between the two end points.
Transmission systems usually need to provide tap-off points along the way - something that is difficult and/or expensive with DC.

There's no major bias or ignorance involved; when DC is cheaper, they use DC. It's just that in the majority of cases, AC is the most appropriate solution.

Agreed. But nuclear is somewhat useless without a fairly large electricity transmission system. You've gotta get rid of all that energy somehow.

Nuclear plants are only happy working 100% day and night. You can't just turn these things up & down like a coal plant.

It's like the problem of managing wind power, only reversed...