I suggest looking into lambda circuits/lambda switching. The path between the customer and the provider is not shared, and can be reconfigured to switch providers. What is shared between customers are the links from the provider's point of presence to the provider's backbone to the internet, and the quality of those links is one of the things that providers can use to differentiate their service. The scarce resource is space at the handover point between the utility and the provider, and that's something that would have to be regulated. But it's a fixed cost based on physical space, not on per-byte counts or somesuch.

No, the public utility is just providing a pipe for the last mile. The public utility can (and should) have no insight into what's going on in that pipe. The ISP is responsible for terminating the pipe and getting traffic to and from it.

No, the optimal solution is to treat the wires as a public utility and permit competition in providing the data. Let the consumers pick between NAT'd filtered consumer internet for one price or raw IP for another price or caps or 80% bandwidth pricing, good peering or cheap peering, etc. In no case should there be regulated pricing per GB, because that eliminates a lot of other pricing models and options that the customer should be able to pick based on requirements.

They're down to about $25 on ebay these days. How much support to you honestly think you're going to get? A heck of a lot of people have chromecasts which connect to their network just fine. So while it's possible that the chromecast is fundamentally broken, it's more likely that there's an incompatibility between your access point and the chromecast. I'd tend to suspect the AP more than the chromecast based on general experience with those vendors. Is your AP even getting firmware updates anymore? Do the updates address issues with the radio & low level functions like association & rekeying, or only high level issues like "gui doesn't load properly"? Assuming that it is an issue with the AP, how much money should google spend trying to work around the issue?

That's your car's fault, not your phone's. The manufacturers lock into a particular proprietary technology and then you're stuck. FWIW, you'd be stuck with a idevice also as apple updates their interface spec.

What cars really need is a more abstract vendor-neutral interface. (Like a universally implemented USB HID class coupled with a video interface.) Then we wouldn't be stuck with whatever the manufacturer thought was neat 5 years ago.

Of course, roads without semis on them don't last an infinite amount of time. So something's off on your dad's calculations.

As long as we also fund transit the same way, I'm game.

Rarely does NASA invent the basic technology behind the sensor these days. Usually the hard part is making it work reliably in space and then *doing something useful with the data*. Right now there's a NASA research effort for detecting lightning with space-based sensors. Making that work *in daylight* was hard, but it's working pretty well now. A few years down the road that technology should be added to a NOAA platform, because the lightning frequency information is very valuable in predicting tornado activity and other severe storms. That's the way the pipeline works; the NOAA platforms are operational, and you don't get time on one of them to experiment with new stuff, but NASA sends up research missions with experimental sensor payloads all the time. Could NOAA turn into that R&D entity? Again, why?

You do also realize that the sensors on the NOAA satellites are the output of NASA R&D, right? Yeah, NOAA (in collaboration with researchers at NASA & other institutions) developed and runs the models. But the input for the models comes from sensors on satellites which would not exist without the NASA space research mission. Is it possible that such systems could have been developed in an alternate reality without NASA? Sure, but also maybe not. Could future developments be made without NASA? Maybe, but why would you screw up something that works because it might also work a different way? You could develop the capabilities internal to NOAA, but there's no clear reason why that would be better and cheaper than leveraging capabilities at NASA which are amortized across a greater number of programs.

I think you dramatically underestimate how hard it is to manage such projects. Other people have done the same, and the result was NPOESS. NASA isn't great at it, but there's only contrary evidence that NOAA is better at it.

One possibility is that DoD was planning to fly anyway and offered NASA some payload capacity because they were interested in the results of that program. There are almost always more experiments queued up than there is funding to run them, so people are always looking to scrounge unused capacity--especially for small experiments that aren't funded for their own vehicle. Capacity for long-duration missions on ISS is especially tight because of the recent launch failures.

Weather? That's NOAA, not NASA. Yes, 4 letters and starts with "N" and they both do stuff in space, but that's about the limit of similarity. Oh, and the US DOD has their own weather bureau as well--what better way to waste lots of money than duplicating the functions of a "civilian" agency?

NASA designs, builds, and launches the NOAA satellites. NOAA manages the satellites once they're in orbit and is responsible for the data collection and analysis. NASA does support the operations. DoD flubbed their most recent weather satellite program (DWSS) and they're also now using data from the NASA-built NOAA weather satellites.

GPS? That's the US Air Force, just like the X-37B, not NASA.

The GPS program is entirely DoD, but it does use some NASA support systems.

Weather forecasts are handled by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA - I love that acronym for a weather agency!), who operate their own birds (though a few were launched by NASA).

NASA provides the design, launch, and project management for the NOAA satellites up until they are in orbit at which point the operations is turned over to NOAA. The last system they tried to launch with a reduced role for NASA was NPOESS--which was a complete failure. (Not all of which was NOAA's fault, it was a horrible idea that tried to merge NOAA & DOD requirements, but the reality is that there was no more appetite for NOAA to try to take on tasks that were being handled well by NASA and the successor project, JPSS, returned to the historic model of NASA program management driven by NOAA requirements.)

4. As to China and Russia getting access to the NSA, it is quite clear that much of what Snowden made public was news to the Chinese and Russians so they did not have access prior to that.

That would be the expected reaction from any competent intellegence agency. Or did you expect them to release an itemized list of what they had and had not managed to penetrate? Their post-Snowden public reaction tells you exactly nothing about their pre-Snowden activities.

Nope, I'm a very careful driver with no at-fault accidents in something upwards of a half million miles behind the wheel. (I have been rear ended while stopped.) Try again.

I have a lot of things I care about, but the car isn't one of them. I would prefer to take some sort of transit and not have to bother driving but that's not how the infrastructure around here works. Self driving cars are the next best thing, can't come soon enough. This is what a lot of older people have trouble understanding--the younger generations have more options and don't need to care about a car. For an older generation that literally built their homes around their cars that's hard to comprehend. When transportation choices were limited, the car promised freedom. Now the car represents a lot of work, and not having to deal with it seems a lot more freeing.

I've seen the people that are really passionate about their cars. They tend to be really unsafe drivers because they can't wait to hit that oversize gas pedal. They seem to be focused on the car and on themselves and not on the people around them. I actually start to wonder if spending hours alone in a box turns people into psychopaths.