I agree with you. I hate being charged $40/month for downloading 200MB/month. I have a non-3G phone (Treo 680) I don't think I could get 5GB per a month if I ran it 24x5 if I tried. They don't offer tiered plans anymore. Their old tiered plans were SO out of sync of what reality was you had to get an "unlimited" plan in order to not to be raped by per MB charges. The wireless ISPs need to come up with a better tiered packages. Maybe something like $10/1GB flat rate so there is none of all that surprising exorbitant overage charges. You pay what you use. Also companies wouldn't mind you going over and people who have to use 3G/4G networks for tethering and heavy laptop use. Some people can only use laptop cards because their local utilities (i.e. cable/telco) don't provide services there. Please don't mention satellite as a VIABLE solution, for home internet usage.
Patents != Licences
Also patents have to be enforced by the companies that own them. If they do not the patent will be invalidated. The requirement for 'enforcement' is a bit vague thought.
I could see it making sense in certain situations. Cloud computing is a good example. If you some of your OS images are parsed across a few machines with only 20 percent usage and if you could devise a way to seamlessly migrate them to other machines so there is more OS image density per machine you could shut down some of the unnecessary capacity. You would obviously leave a few machines open for hot machines if there was a usage spike, but the rest could be shut down and be powered up when the hot spares start to used.
I can see why NASA didn't name it after Colbert. The name would be very culture/time specific. What happens in ten years when Colbert out of the public light and forgotten? I think the treadmill is a wonderful place for Colbert.
Also Serenity is a bit of a loaded name. What if the MPAA sued for copyright infringement of the name? While I think is wouldn't stick in the courts, it would bring some unwanted attention to NASA. Also with Obama's appointment of many RIAA lawyers.. I don't think it would end well for NASA or the public even if they won.
Your mandated to be in schools. Your not mandated to pay attention.
"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds