[quote]embedded tracking technologies[/quote] Can you elaborate on that? I take it the yellow dots are no longer used, but what do they use nowadays?

I think that is a bit over the top, millions. A 1TB drive, will be about 930GB when formatted. That is 930.000MB. Say your average MP3/AAC is 5MB and costs about 1 dollar, you could stuff 186.000 dollars worth of music on it. Still a lot though.

Question: Can you insure a harddrive based on the price/value of it content?

From a purely ideological perspective, there isn't anything wrong with communism. But in practice it utterly fails due to incompetence, corruption and selfishness. From a purely ideological perspective, there is a lot wrong with capitalism. It thrives on selfishness, inequality and stupidity but it works better than anything (well, credit crisis aside).

Too bad the article only focuses on legal downloads and such. I'm pretty sure that the long tail effect does exists, just not in the paid download market.

The worst part is, they aren't even original. No-one here heard of Despair Inc.? http://despair.com/frownies.html

Should have Googled for posting. Nearly all European countries use the Long Scale, some use the Short Scale but with milliard. In fact, the UK is the only European country to do it differently (why doesn't that surprise me, the bloody bastards still drive on the wrong side of the road too). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

I live in Europe (Netherlands) and last time I checked a milliard was still a 1000 million and a Billion is a thousand milliard. Perhaps the UK changed its definition, but the French/Dutch/German speaking nations haven't. No clue about the rest of Europe.

Which ones aren't? Ralink has that famous will-randomly-disconnect-wpa-connections bug. Broadcom has the issue with not having open drivers. Which leaves Atheros? Marvell? ...

Inter-ISP data can be free as well. Google Peering.

That approach is wrong as well. Whos says I want or only want to connect to certain pre-selected peers? I don't need or want a tracker doing that for me, I'll do that myself.

QoS and Throttling is not the same. Threating VOIP with a higher priority as BitTorrent is not a problem and noone could care less if you do (I do that myself). Dropping BitTorrent-packets in order to make room for VOIP is another ballgame and only (needs to) happen when your ISP has overbooked its network to such a degree that bandwidth is scarce. Overbooking is not a problem, unless you do to such an extent that your pipes become clogged.

The whole issue with melting internet and smoking routers has nothing to do with BitTorrent, Youtube or whatever protocol/app you prefer. It is bad management, poor investment and limited competition of ISP's. Which is why this is not a global problem, but only affects certain markets and ISP's.

You might want to reread what you wrote and think about it. Just because 95% of ALL your internet-connections is broadband, doesn't mean you have the highest uptake in Europe. You need to have a lot of internet connections as well. Unless 80% or more of all households has broadband, I doubt your even in the top 5 of Europe.
Aside from that, I read here that some providers have an 1.2GB/day cap. That about 15KB/s an entire day. I don't think anyone will consider 15KB/s Broadband anymore.

(60e6 * 1e3 kcal) / (c^2) = 2.7931967 grams. That is about a factor 1000 less.

The largest H-bomb ever build/detonated, the russian Tsar Bomb, was about 50MT, but capable of 100MT. I never heard of anything larger, but is/was there?