Ok, so I was thinking more along the lines of 1998-2000, not 1995. A year or so made a big difference back then...

Web hosting was expensive back in those days, and even now it'll still cost you at least ten quid a month or so.

Not true. All it cost, then or now, was a DSL-or-better Internet connection (that you wanted whether you had your own website or not)*, free account with a dynamic DNS service and electricity to keep your home computer running 24/7.

(* OK, I admit Tripod may have been useful in the dial-up era, but still...)

SeaQuest was set only 4 years from now. We're already failing to get our Back To The Future flying cars; I think we're going to fail to get our underwater settlements and talking dolphins too.

There's a reason why marijuana is called "weed," you know: it's because it grows like one (without fertilizer)!

Once you've accounted for externalities, "more profitable," "more efficient," and "more environmentally-friendly" become equivalent.

We've had no problem discovering suitable and better alternatives for every conceivable use of hemp...

...you say in a thread about how hemp is better than the lab-created "alternative!"

And benzene is literally just a ring of Carbon atoms, but you wouldn't want to drink a cup of it!

Eh, some GMO-ing will fix that up in a jiffy...

Every definition I've seen disagrees with you.

Your flat tax is actually defined as "proportional," not "progressive."

I think "boot" meant "enlisted personnel"

Taxes should be flat across the spectrum. You shouldn't get a break because you are extremely rich or poor. Besides, a flat tax is naturally progressive. If you make more, you pay more.

A flat tax is not progressive. A flat tax is flat, i.e., a linear equation:

[tax] = [constant tax rate] * [income]

A progressive tax is where the rate increases with income, a quadratic equation:

[tax rate] = ([scaling factor] * [income])

and

[tax] = [tax rate] * [income]

so

[tax] = [scaling factor] * [income] ^ 2

(give or take some lower-order terms).

I bet using a socket would cost more than soldering on higher-capacity chips.

There is absolutely no reason why every user shouldn't be a "P2P user," so yes! The Internet isn't -- and shouldn't be -- fucking cable TV, you know!

I think it's clear that the majority of customers vastly prefer just paying a reasonable, fixed monthly rate with a promise that "under typical usage scenarios, you can just use the thing whenever you like without worrying about extra costs for data".

That's a funny word, "typical."

It seems to me there are only two possibilities: either the "typical" user doesn't use "too much" data (whatever that means) and no data caps are necessary (although QOS during peak usage periods may be, and that's OK), or the "typical user" does use "too much" data and the real issue is that the network provider needs to upgrade the capacity.

"Throttle all of a user's data after they've used N megabytes in a month regardless of current network congestion"-style caps are not necessary in either case.

So if you were running an ISP, what would you do to bandwidth hogs?

QOS. When the network is congested, "bulk data" like BitTorrent should get a lower priority than low-latency data like streaming audio/video. When it isn't congested, there's no need or reason to throttle at all.

(And if your network is still congested when only streaming data is left, then it means you need to upgrade your network!)