Erm....

Doesn't it cause blindness? Isn't it the reason for fibers to have power sensing mechanisms that detect broken segments, for safety reasons?

Is this valid only for rooms without windows and without people?

From the FAQ, in the bottom line: "the initial bid is set at the last sale price"

the surprise is that developers are concerned with latency, not bandwidth, unlike the members of many other net neutrality discussions

Actually, this is no surprise at all. Maybe most people only focus on the raw speed - i.e., throughput. However, for many applications, the latency - and the lack of sudden latency variations - is more important. These apps are called "inelastic", because they don't tolerate changes in the latency. For example: In a real-time VoIP application, sudden changes in latency make delayed packets useless and the voice gets cut. Yep, you can use a buffer, but that will add an anoying delay in your conversation, so in general the application is highly sensitive to latency changes.

The same happens with games. If you are playing against sb else, your latency can determine if you live or die. AND, the main problem is that the only solution comes from QoS mechanisms that tag, segregate and priorize different flows of traffic. What, I believe, is somehow against net neutrality.

Actually... NAT is WHAT prevented IPv4 from exhausting several years ago.

From TFA: "The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat's brain,"

This reminds me of the Spinnaker project, that pretended to simulate a brain (ok, a smaller one, say a fly's brain) in real time. According to their calculations, the processing power of each neuron is very small, so a simple ARM core could handle some 1000 (correct me, this is what I remember) neurons in real time. The complex point was the interconnections between neurons. Obviously, this is much more powerful, despite the 100x slowdown: A much larger brain, and not using specific hardware.

The headline is wrong. The news is not that "there is the right to have 1Mbps Internet access". Actually, the Universal Service in Spain is intended to provide the same services to all the citizens, independently of the location of their home. This means that, when it gets approbed, rural areas will receive at least 1 Mbps, no matter how far they are from the nearest service provider, and with the same cost as the largest cities. Current services covered by this "Universal service" are plain telephone access enabled for low-speed internet access, telephone guides and availability of public phones prepared for the disabled. More information can be found on Spanish in the Wikipedia.

This service has a cost, which is paid by all the citizens. To this extent, there is a "Universal Service Fund", whose incomes are paid by all telecom customers. One company (Telefonica, the former monopolist) is forced to provide this "Universal service", despite not being profitable. The monetary cost comes from the fund.

Actually, it's quite common; I studied that at the University on my Ms. It is an effect of the signal dispersion in the fiber, which is increased with the distance. Therefore, the speed (bits per second) decreases with the distance.

Also, note that neither 9V (voltage) nor 18 Watts (power) are energy values

Every pixel in the image is actually divided into 9 "light sources". These 9 "points" are in a convex (or is it concave) line, so they target different locations in front of the TV. A micro-lenses system makes that only one point on each group is seen at a time from a given angle, and the viewed point depends on the horizontal viewing angle. With such mechanism, our two eyes receive different information (from different pixels in each group of 9) and there you get the 3D effect.

drawbacks? you need to be at a given distance (too far and both eyes get the same image), you cannot lie down on your side watching 3D TV... But you don't need any silly glasses!