Actually, airlines pay substantial fuel taxes which not only pay for ATC but get siphoned off into the general fund. Then they pay landing fees at many airports as well.

No major airport in the US is run at a loss. Some of the smaller airports may be, where the city feels that the benefit of the airport outweighs the cost, but all major airports pay their own way.

The AF payment is being given with no waivers or settlements agreed to in order to help the families with their direct, immediate costs such as funerals and travel. The true settlements will take a while but will (based on precedent) be in excess of a million dollars per victim.

But isn't just as valid to say...charge her $1 for each time her "source" was shared?

And it's trivial with p2p networks for you to share it 20 times to people that shared it 20 times to people that shared it 20 times? That (or however you divvy up the expansion) is only a net total of 8,000 times per song...and that's not wildly unreasonable.

Then you'd be at $576,000.00

As much as the question of 'at cost' matters, you also have to look at the way it was funded -- via bonds.

If we decide to offer "Slashlight Highspeed Internet for Towns" we have to raise money for the business venture. We will be faced with a much higher bar if we want to try and raise venture capital -- questions about profit, business plans, value, etc.

If we go to a bank to borrow the money...yeah right. Banks might lend you some money against equipment (that is, the things they could take back) but not against operational expenses like payroll and power bills.

And in the end, with bonds, the city IS on the hook for the money. If the venture doesn't work, then those bonds have to be paid somehow.

Now, if the cities want to use bond money to loan money to private companies, then that's cool. I can think of a lot of businesses I would like to get into but can't because I just can't raise the money...and I know I'm not alone.

But in reality, when public entities get into business, because they simply have a different risk model (in other words...well, if the business fails, then they'll just have to raise taxes to pay the bonds) they can fundamentally take on more risk and lower profit margins than private businesses, who have to answer for their use of money.

Strenuously argue that the RIAA is evil and that copying music is not an issue...through a myriad of excuses.

Why is this any different? Music, news...one can make all the same arguments.

And honestly...talking about "how to tinker with your feeds to make it tougher..." is just another form of DRM, isn't it?

Something to think about.

This is exactly on point. Getting Cogent style (which means, not directly peered to everyone) bandwidth costs $10/mbit, assuming you are buying at least 100mbit. That's raw bandwdth, assuming zero infrastructure; in other words, you as the customer own the cost of connecting to Cogent's network.

Connecting to a carrier like Level(3), even when buying in 1000mbit quantities, is nowhere near $10/mbit; it's more like $20/mbit. In gigabit quantities. Where you the customer have to provide the connection to them; that price just gets you a router port on their gateway router.

So clearly, delivering things like 20mbit downstream to consumers means overselling, and managing overselling.

With video coming along, etc., it's simply time to start establishing policies that reflect that overselling ratios are going to drop considerably.

It's called, welcome to the real world. Providing bandwidth costs money.

If everyone was honest and paid for it (with the 'criminal' being the exception) we wouldn't have DRM in the first place.

You would have to come up with some heavy statistics before most people (myself included) would believe that the majority of people running modified DLL's actually owned legitimate copies of CS4.