Hopefully reduced caps would have reduced prices. Typical low-volume (2GB) internet costs are around $20 per month for ADSL2+ and $30 per month for 3G. 250GB would cost $70 for ADSL2+ (plus line rental), and 200GB is $100.

The comparison with energy isn't all that valid because the capacity of the powerlines & generation is much much more than what someone can consume from home, but a neighbourhood running ADSL2+ flat out would saturate the upstream link of an ISP.

But is it reasonable to expect that someone using the internet to mix music and going through 5-20GB per month should pay the same for access as someone that is lucky to use 1GB per month?

I think this is called 'tiered access' in the US. While bits themselves are free, more use results in more congestion and providers need to build out more network to cope. I think this is why I get a chunk of data to use at night when there is less demand (just like off-peak power pricing).

If use more electricity or water then I pay for it. Why not the same for the internet? At least the internet is flexible and slows down rather than just stopping (as an overloaded power grid does).

A dirty cheap ISP that has too much congestion and squeezes too many people onto its uplink will loose some customers, but not all. People that are reading email and news online might not notice, but gamers and online video viewers will, and are likely to go elsewhere. Of course this depends on competition which from the sound of it is sorely laking with US ISPs. Here in Australia the copper network is mostly owned by Telstra who lease the ADSL spectrum to ISPs to communicate with the ISPs' equipment at the exchange. The ISPs are then responsible for getting data to the internet. This means that two neighbours can be sharing the same multicore cable back to the exchange, but have dramatically different performance. The same applies with resellers of 3G/UMTS internet. It is common spectrum to the carrier's switch and then the ISPs' responsibility to get it to the internet. I think the UK and NZ (and probably the rest of the world except the US) operates similarly.

Cool use for the internet -- wasn't aware of that use.

Is it common for people to do this where you are? It still is only 0.252Mbyte/sec, so to go through 5GB would require 5.6 hours of tracks.

By 15 tracks, do you mean there are 15 drum tracks on each song, or that there are 15 songs on the album? How many hours of playing would you get from your other band members in a month?

Oh noes the dredded capz!

People in most of the world haven't had 'unlimited' internet because US carriers have always charged for external connections. We pay to access US websites and we pay to have US customers access our websites.

36GB is a heck of a lot of data. People in Australia were getting by with 5-10GB per month, and only recently have 50-100GB plans become available. I have 130GB, with 60GB to be used between 0800 and 0100, and 50GB to be used between 0100 and 0800. People watch ABC iView (unmetered on some, but not all), use VoIP services and play with Linux. Not having Netflix and Hulu probably keeps data down, but we still catch up on missed TV episodes using video on demand from the TV station (Ten are very good for this).

If you are going to choose your OS on the basis of your internet connection then you well and truly have your cranium implanted in your rectum. Cut out the bit torrent and streaming video and then try to justify legal consumption of more than 5GB of traffic a month ...

Air gapping (as others have mentioned) is a great idea, but not always feasible. Remote access to plants is sometimes needed for emergencies.

Have a look at the Computer Security Resource Centre. NIST IR 7628 covers cyber security for the smart grid, and much of that is applicable to water and sewerage plants.

The report, 21 Steps to Improve Cyber Security of SCADA Networks, is also worth a read.

My opinions, based on power station and substation SCADA are: don't use one vendor for everything, have two levels of firewall from different vendors at the remote site, turn off or block services that are not needed from every device, have reporting and audit trails that are reviewed, and if management want reporting, do it through a one way connection to an intermediate system (one way Ethernet, RS232, RS485 or read only shared storage).

When I read cases like this I appreciate even more the Telecommunications Act 1997. This overrides council and state rules and lets communications put towers where they need to. There are some requirements to meet, and there are protests where the court of public opinion is used to change locations etc. The law also prevents telecommunications facilities from being resumed by local or state government, and allows carriers to install equipment in 'common areas' in commercial buildings.

If places like Hempstead make it too hard then the wireless companies should just pull out, and as soon as the council's CEO or Mayor finds their blackberry doesn't work anymore things might return to normality.

There was a case in Christchurch NZ (yep, shaky town) where the council ruling on a cell site on an old movie theatre was that there was 'no detectable emission' at ground level -- which made the installation completely pointless.

Plants will only make O2 if there is enough light of the correct wavelength. Working under gro-tubes wouldn't be much fun, so probably best to go with the plastic plants.

Right .... and how well does the latest OS run on that top of the line PowerPC laptop? My five year old Sony Vaio runs Windows 7 very nicely, but for PCMCIA support I am running XP on it. This is a PentiumM 1.7GHz with 1.5GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. It wasn't cheap at the time, but it runs well.

My main laptop is a Fujitsu P1620 ultra-lightweight - 1.0kg with battery. I can cope with the small keyboard and can read the 9" screen. It is 2.5 years old and runs Win 7 Business like a charm. Comparing Mac laptops to cheap PoS PC laptops is hardly a fair comparison.

I went back to university this year and I was surprised to see how few macs there were and how many netbooks running XP or Win7 were around. Admittedly this is at a technical university, and the design students are at a different campus. The one place I have seen more mac laptops than PC laptops is at the IT helpdesk with dead harddrives. Must be something about the all black Macbooks ...

My local council pays for aerial photography to identify pools that have been built without permits and to detect trees that have been removed illegally (can't cut them down if there is a vegetation protection order on them). I guess some of the cost is recovered by making the images available to Google Earth. Yes, the data goes the other way to that in the story. When I access the council GIS the photos are two years fresher than the ones on Google Earth and are higher res, but that might be due to the photos getting better every year.

I've used aerial photos from other councils in South East Queensland for my work and these were also better than Google Earth

Pool regulations in Queensland are more for safety purposes (as well as building permit purposes) as fences need to comply with Australian Standards. There are moves a foot to charge an annual fee to every poolowner to cover the cost of regular inspections, and knowing where all the pools are would be key to this.

New Zealand has a very low 'cost of compliance' for taxation. Each tax $ collected costs half what it does for the Aussies to collect. The tax law is also nice and simple in NZ. I used to complete a paper tax return in 10 minutes (and that was writing out the two copies). It takes me about 45min-60min to complete an Australian tax return using the free E-Tax software, and I'd hate to think how long it would take on paper, with the supplementary return as well.

In Australia you get a Notice of Assessment telling you what is owed or will be refunded after you do the return telling them what was earned, what your deductions are and any other tax offset. The thing is there is a piece of paper telling you what needs to be settled by the end of October. Australia hasn't figured out that you can take tax from interest when banks pay it to you, so if you have savings you end up paying tax. If there is more than about $2000 of tax to pay, you go onto quarterly tax payments (called PAYG, but the same as NZ's provisional tax). One day they might catch up with NZ to simplify things

I pronounce 'metre' met-re when in New Caledonia, and meat-ter when in an English speaking country (or a close semblance, such as 'Stralya).

We can tell the difference between a Newton-metre and a Newton-meter. One is a unit of torque and the other is a force gauge (yes, there is a 'u' in gauge) that reads in Newtons.

At least the meter/metre thing is minor in that there are the same letters - the hood/bonnet, trunk/boot, fanny (quite different meanings!) are much more amusing. What non-US English speakers don't like to let on is that we understand the US English words just fine because of TV and movies - it is much more fun to be an arse about it (which is quite different to being an ass - hee haw).

Do you mean 'Am I often a pedantic person?', because that two word sentence didn't have the requisite verbs and nouns. If so, yes.

Given the difficulties of controlling boats, giving the limit as 20m or 70' would make more sense. If the photographer knows metric then they can get 1.2m closer :-) Or does rounding to tens not work in feet - does it have to be rounded to the nearest 12 for non-metric people to understand (and do they have six fingers on each hand?)

It's a friend of the litre :-) The rest of the world had to make some concessions for the US to adopt metric, and the alternative spelling for metre (meter) and litre (liter) was one, and the capital L as a symbol for litre/liter was the other. The unit for volume is not named after a person, so should be lower case, but some found it too confusing and thought it might be a 1 (one).

Anyway, if you can hold position on the water to within a metre you are doing VERY well.

Three words in reply: Mars Climate Orbiter

The two posters below got it right. The whole point was that the US Coast Guard issued the release in metric, but the news article was in feet. It might surprise those in the US but the metric units are actually the preferred units now. Road drawings are metric, and there are official km/h speed signs available for use.