I can't. Do you know why? Because there is virtually no aspect of our lives that ISN'T subsidized by the government in one way or another.

Maybe if we didn't blow such huge amounts of money on every asinine project that a congressman can tack on to a bill as pork, we'd have money to spend on roads.

... it's to start spending less. Individuals get that. Why don't governments? Oh, wait. It's because their citizens want the government to take care of them, so that they don't have to do it themselves. I forgot.

The first reason why DC voltages are usually limited, in small-scale installations, to less than the mains is that of safety. Touch an AC wire, you do a short dance. Touch a high-voltage DC wire, you can stick and sizzle. There's a world of difference between an undersea cable and a wire underneath someone's desk.

If I'm not mistaken, both of the DC stations you mention are for trans-oceanic transmission, because those are some of the situations where it DOES make sense. But wiring in a computer lab isn't one of those.

The other problem is that even in cases where the conversion to DC actually does result in some economical savings, in most situations, you can get larger savings for less cost with other means. It's only when you get to really big, obscene cases where DC really starts to pull ahead.

"AC suffers from several effects that make it less efficient and/or more expensive over long distances"

The article isn't talking about long distances. It's talking about a computer lab.

"AC circuits suffer from the skin effect where the power travels more on the surface of the conductor"

At the 50Hz and 220V of the mains in the UK, skin effect is not a factor in this type of setting, assuming you didn't contrive an exaggerated, insane way of installing the wiring to MAKE it a problem.

"but the power delivered to the load is only Vrms * Imax * cos(phi), phi being the phase angle between the voltage and current."

Most modern PSUs have active PFC, and keep the angle between V and I extremely close to zero, so that's not a factor either.

"you must insulate for Vpeak, but you only get Vrms * I power"

Insulation is cheap. Wire for use in 120V installations (170V peak) is insulated to 600V. If you're worried about cost, copper is by FAR the largest expense in making wire. And since high-voltage DC is more dangerous than high-voltage AC, presumably this system is at a lower voltage than the mains. That means... vastly greater wire cost than any triviality with insulation.

This topic comes up every few years, when someone thinks they've discovered something new, and it never sticks. People have tried it over and over, and it almost never works out economically.

Washington has laws against such things.

Maybe they should have passed two or three more laws against them, so the guy wouldn't have done it.

The natural enemy of fiber... a backhoe?

Fiber has been the "You should do this for future-proofing" for over a decade. But it never quite comes true... copper keeps being sneaky.

I would just run a few cat6 lines to each room, and call it good.

Does accuracy matter? They got you to surf and comment, didn't they?

Here you go.

"So you might like the characters.... you know, if you're stupid."

Funny and smart. This guy is good.

Touche!

It could have been. Or it could have been that the city of Chicago is synonymous with ghettos, corruption from top to bottom, gangs, and crime. Tough to say.

Yeah, you sound like one of those wacko types that don't fit in here.

You sound like you can understand the likely outcomes from making certain decisions... around here, we just believe in entitlement. Go back to your own country, freak.

"My baby didn't do nuffin!" or "But I wasn't doin' nuffin!" are all too common. Nobody says "Oh, yeah, I really deserved that."

"He was just asking them questions" can just as well be "He ignored thirty seven requests to get back in his car, and ten additional warnings."

Before I jumped to any conclusions... I would want to know what really happened.

I used to be swamped with requests for free tech support from my immediate and extended family. 4 nights out of the week, I would spend working on others' computers - nearly always at their house.

Finally, I told everyone that I would continue to provide tech support, but it would be the first and third Tuesday of each month, from 5 to 10, at *MY* house.

Evidently, all of their problems which were massively urgent before stopped happening... since it would require them to go to the length of driving their computer to my house, I have only had TWO INSTANCES of doing tech support since then.