Sadly the FCC has not been doing much oversight or even decent regulation for a good many decades. I've been following it off and on since the late 1970s. They were a mess back then, and they're still a mess. This is what happens when technical people leave judges, lawyers, and politicians to fend for themselves.

I don't think we're disagreeing much, but I am going to point out that even in a very practical sense, bandwidth costs money. You focused upon the physical fiber infrastructure, whereas I focused on the concept.

In a practical sense it costs money to get the hardware to support that connection to the home. It costs money to modulate it on a cable to the end user. It costs money to trunk and coordinate the flow so that we do not need to overbuild infrastructure. The Terrabit link you cited may be very low in power, but the gear to process that link at each end is not.

After all, you don't have a pair of wires that go all the way back to the generation plant. You have wires that go to a pole transformer that goes to a substation on a transmission ring through very large transformers, breakers, relays, and so forth. THEN you get to one of several generation plants.

Data networks are no different.

Do we need to regulate these monopolies? Of course! Do we need to set minimum performance standards? Of course! Do we need to set privacy laws? Yes, of course!

This all costs money. My question to you: The infrastructure is expensive. Who pays for it?

I work for a large industrial user of electricity. We have medium voltage substations and we buy our electricity by bidding for blocks of energy in advance and by buying it off of the spot market from the PJM grid. We do get good prices. Why? because we own some of the infrastructure and we attach at the inner tiers of the grid. If you could afford to put a large substation in your back-yard and to run feeders to the transmission grid at a million dollars per mile, you too could get these rates.

Likewise, if you build a data center in your basement, and you manage your bandwidth, you will be paying a lower rate than someone with a home firewall/switch who just wants an ISP to handle his e-mail, DNS, and web site for him.

But you will still be paying for the bandwidth. Someone needs to make the connection in to the rest of the Internet. Someone eventually has to attach to the inner Tiers of Internet routing. That infrastructure isn't free either. The hardware and the trunks and the energy that hardware uses isn't free.

So there will be graduated pricing and volume pricing for how you use bandwidth. Eventually, I predict time-of-day pricing for bandwidth use.

It's not that outrageous. Look at bandwidth use on the Internet. It is not constant. It has a rhythm and flow just like most energy firms have diurnal curves of consumption.

What the FCC seeks to do is to set up a framework that acknowledges this reality. I don't like it, but I also realize that it is very necessary.

It happens all the time with utilities. People fail to notice that their toilet flapper valve is leaking until they get their next quarterly bill. And it will be a very large bill.

The same happens when someone fails to realize that the compressor for their heat pump is running nearly all the time and isn't keeping up with demand.

Most utilities have forgiveness policies for people who simply can not know any better. An example would be a deaf person who has a toilet flapper valve problem. He or she would never hear the water running.

Likewise, a busy single parent with kids and several computers could also have this happen. Computer hygiene is not always easy.

Uh, no. The differences aren't so huge after all.

The cost of GENERATING electricity is actually pretty small. The cost of getting it to your home is significant. Furthermore, fundamental laws of physics would tell you that the cost of higher data rates is more power. Literally. So at some fundamental level, this is not a bad idea.

However we need to recognize some facts: the delivery company of this content is a monopoly. The infrastructure to deliver FiOS was paid for and is maintained exclusively by Verizon. So, as a monopoly, they should not be allowed to "shape" traffic, they should not be allowed to block traffic, or even to inspect it without a court order. But it is not unrealistic for them to meter how much traffic is headed to your home and to bill you accordingly.

This will cause two things to happen: First, people will become somewhat aware of how much bandwidth they're using and what they're getting for that bandwidth. You want to play games at high bandwidth? Have at it. But expect to pay for it at the end of the month, just as someone who keeps their thermostat real cool in the summer and very warm in the winter will pay for it.

...because he was not only a great scientist, inventor, publisher, and politician, but also a great guy to party with!

Surely the name and brand are worth SOMETHING. Hasn't anyone purchased the rights to the name or logo?

Why 12 volts? Telephone companies figured out decades ago that 48 volt positive ground systems were more desirable. They reduced the need for heavier copper wire, and they are not likely to be lethal shock hazards (though burns are certainly possible).

Furthermore, every motherboard has multiple switching supplies built in. We have 12 volts, 5 volts, 3.3 volts, 1.8 volts, and probably some adjustable voltages too. Some even have separate regulators for individual parts of the board. We will never be rid of the power supplies. We have simply moved them closer to the processors, memory, I/O, and GPU. Why not design the boards to use -48 volt battery systems as primary inputs so that we can reduce corrosion, use existing infrastructure designs, and keep I^2R losses down?

Quiet? Hardly. Yes, the engine does make some noise, but it's actually the slap of air from each pass of a propeller blade that makes the most noise.

Regarding certification: The rule of thumb that most aviation experts use is that certification isn't over until the weight of all the documentation exceeds the weight of the aircraft. There is more truth in this joke than most people realize.

If all we do is watch documentaries and read Wikipedia, this won't be much of a debate.

Nearly all raw water we get from wells and from surface flows (rivers, streams, etc) is dirty. We use energy to clean it up enough to be fit for human consumption.

That energy has to come from somewhere. The question with Fracking is whether the additional contamination it puts in to the water supply is too expensive to remove. It may be so expensive that the value of the gas we'd extract makes the process uneconomical. One thing we do need to consider is some way of linking these two activities so that whatever additional costs are incurred for water clean-up are paid for by the drilling operations.

To know that, we need better information. We need before and after comparison data. That data is just now emerging. I am hopeful that after all is accounted for, the costs will be favorable for Fracking.