I suspect that SuddenLink is fudging its usage numbers, but my router doesn't do usage accounting. Even if it did, I'm sure the reaction from the ISP would be "We don't trust a user device to check our figures." What we need an an Internet odometer, a single-purpose traffic counter that plugs into the Ethernet between modem and router, and is sealed so the user can't tamper with it, and which would track the total time it was in-circuit so a user couldn't evade the count by just temporarily disconnecting it while downloading every Simpsons episode.

Does such a device exist, and do any ISPs trust its use as a check on their own accounting?

An example of a phallacy is: "You can tell by looking at his shoe size."

Neutrino detectors have been around for some time, including a large one at the South Pole. Others are located at Tsukuba, Japan and Lead, SD. What has prevented those detectors from finding solar neutrinos?

Two years ago, my street was torn up between the main highway into town and the CenturyLink switch, so that large-diameter orange cable could be extended to it. Yes, fiber! Fiber that could solve our area's ISP duopoly problem, where our choice is between CenturyLink's poky 10M service and that nice fast SuddenLink 50M service that is near-useless because of a low usage cap.

I checked, and CenturyLink has no intention of using that fiber to offer faster service anytime this century.

Forget the happy horseshit about super-safe robot cars. We don't have those, and they won't work when we do. This is about the ability to track all the vehicles in the world, either by private entities who will backdoor the info to government and political groups, or straight-up security force tracking. Not just here, but all over the world. We are building turnkey police state infrastructure. If you can't grasp this, you might want to contemplate how privileged you are not to ever feel endangered by cops or polical opponents like Scientology or the Moonies. Do not give the monkeys the key to the banana plantation. Once you are in a worldwide prison, there is no escape.

"Trains". Those are called trains.

You can't turn it off even now. The GPS tracking is built into the circuitry and there is no way to diable it. And no, tapping the "please don't track me" option won't work. Its lying.

The criterion should be: if your geoengineering process can't run away, no problem. A legal procedure would be adding nutrient to areas of the ocean to produce carbon-eating algal blooms; the process runs only until the nutrient is consumed. An illegal procedure might be engineering a plankton organism that eats carbon, feeding on existing oceanic nutrients; such an organism could run away and consume all atmospheric carbon, freezing the world and killing most land plants.

Germany wishes it could start reducing the number of coal plants. To do that, it would have had to keep its nuclear plants open, and eventually build more of them. But in getting "environmentalists" to defend strip mining, and for the dirtiest mineral ever dug up, and in the green hills of a crowded continent that values its open space, and directly in the face of their own fears about carbon-induced warming, I'm not just after neener cred. I'm pointing to a real and emerging problem of energy sprawl.

A high-density energy plant might be controversial to install, but low-density energy occupies a large amount of ground. Replacing a nuclear reactor with windmills means having hundreds of them twirling away across the landscape. Lignite has not much more unit energy than wind, but in the absence of nuclear would be Germany's only 24/7 power source. Photovoltaic can be installed on existing rooftops, but what does a cloudy country without deserts do when that diffuse energy source needs large arrays of ground-mounted panels?

Furthermore, sprawling renewable sources require a whole new generation of transmission lines, routed in different ways than the traditional grid. The transmission lines for Engergiewende are already eliciting protests:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02...

Something tells me that the closure of the rest of the nuclear plants will never take place. The high cost of small-source energy can't be concealed in subsidies forever. At some point the ratepayers and the taxpayers are going to revolt.

Having a TV cable company provide Internet service is a technical natural, with a fast network of last-mile cabling in place, but a legal horror because having one provider for both services represents a conflict of interest. Much usage throttling is prompted by cable companies' fear of cord-cutting. This may require a separate antitrust decision to resolve.

Cable TV is heavily regulated, AND in effect regulated by cable companies themselves. Look what happened to Aereo. It implemented a delivery system all its own, which the SCOTUS ruled was a cable service, after which lower courts prevented it from being the very cable service the SCOTUS mandated it was.

Horror stories like this are what cause people to fear any sort of regulation on the grounds that it will servce some hidden corporate interest. If Net neutrality is to succeed it must be pursued as an individual right. The public WILL support regulation if it increases individual freedom.

This argument does bring up a point: is there a single, clear set of standards that define Net neutrality? Of course there are aspects of it that given people involved in the cause promote more than others, but is there a core set of features that everyone who says "I'm for Net neutrality" agrees on? Many technically oriented people do argue as Parent does, that neutrality would mean that no service may be offered a lower latency than any other service.

Germany is switching its baseload from nuclear to coal, which has meant digging the world's largest strip mine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
covering 48 square kilometers. Think of it as an anti-nuclear exclusion zone, like Fukushima but getting bigger instead of being cleaned up..

But when all the nukes are phased out, Garzweiler won't be enough. This even bigger lignite pit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
will top out at 85 sq. km when fully developed. Lignite has the approximate energy value, and pollution profile, of damp firewood.

We can also develop energy uses that can tolerate fluctuations in supply. Have your offshore windfield deliver desalinated water instead of varying amounts of power, and you have near-free local water (after construction costs) for coastal cities, every liter of which is a liter that doesn't have to be delivered from a thousand miles inland.

The best place for solar PV is on our vast acreage of low-rise rooftops in sunny parts of the country. A 2000-sqft home occupied only by a retired couple in the right place can cancel out all its daytime power consumption by using solar. If you have a few children, PV can still mitigate your grid draw.

But now look at a city highrise apartment or office. Its roof area, tiny in comparison to all the people and businesses inside it, cannot hope to generate enough power to service its inhabitants. Then there's the problem of high-energy industries that smelt steel or fab silicon, the industries that provide jobs for thousands of people at once. These all need high-density energy sources. If you want city people to ride transit and drive electric cars, add that to the demand.