The police stay in their cars for one simple reason: revenue generation. There is no additional safety in having a police car cruising around with the cop inside staying on the lookout for an errant driver to slap with a $$$ ticket. See, he's too busy looking for that revenue than to be concerned about the area he's supposed to be patrolling.

Some municipal services exist and run at a loss for the benefit of society IN GENERAL, meaning, NOT specifically you. The costs are spread around to minimize any one segment of the population being disproportionately penalized. Things like subways are a perfect example; ticket sales alone to riders could possibly rise above the point where its feasible for those riders to cover.

You are paying for a functioning society. If you don't want to, please feel free to go off in the wilderness and stop taking part in OUR society, thanks.

Please explain how water, roads and electricity companies can "advance over time" in any similar way to Internet access?

It would be best to stick to the car analogies that Slashdot is so fond of if you're going to draw incompatible comparisons.

Bad analogy, while this exists.

Why would telecom companies exit the ISP business when in no way would they be prevented from servicing those interested in higher bandwidth and lack of content filters? A government funded service would compete with existing services. When Netzero and Juno began offering free service, you didn't see the RBOCs throw up their hands and say "free internet, we can't compete with that, lets pack up our DSL networks and go home!"

I shouldn't feed the troll, but..

Who said they wanted to download the movie via BitTorrent and watch it without paying? I think every comment in this thread consists of consumers who want to watch a PURCHASED movie in the media format of their choosing. Strawmen sure are easy to knock down, aren't they?

Because to some "conservative" voters, pork is defined as any spending at all, especially any spending that doesn't directly enrich them personally.

Most out-of-band/backup management used by the likes of AT&T and Sprint use and serial multiplexer with a phone line. You would hook this to the console port of the computer and/or the 'lights out' card. There would also be a APC MasterPower PDU (power distribution unit) that allows turning outlets on or off including sequencing and timer events. These PDU have a serial port that would connect to the same serial multiplexer. This gets you a command line, BIOS level access and hard booting ability. Of course, you can script or command almost anything on windows using the WSH (Windows service host) or on *nix using your favorite shell. For those trickier 3rd party apps you can use software like AutoIt to command the GUI from the command line. For easy access to services, registry, tasks, etc you would use PSTools by SysInternals now maintained by Microsoft.

All of the above works very well over intermittent connections as it was designed for dial-on-demand connections. For complete control over the GUI (in windows) you can use the highspeed connection with the built in RDP or terminal services. RDP will give you the 'monitor' view like you were sitting there and TS will give you a separate login with your own session. I prefer RAdmin for an RDP replacement as it has better security (logins can be completly seperate from the OS users or you can use the same windows user accounts, but providing more fine grain control over rights), it can be configured for slow links (I have used it on 42k connections by setting screen updates to 5/sec all though this is somewhat painful), it is cheap (about $10 for each client/server pair), and it has very useful file management tools (bypassing the need for telnet/ftp and even the GUI) as well as chat tools for when multiple people are working on the computer at the same time.

i think that about covers it.