> solar costs something along the lines of 3-4 times more than nuclear per KwH. Yeah, but when an earthquake his a solar plant... Don't get me wrong. Nuclear's cheaper than anything cleaner, and cleaner than anything cheaper; but there are significant risks involved.

Speak for yourself. I would much rather have the first option.

I would much rather have an Internet plan where I pay $40/month and I know it's going to cost me $40/mo.

My Internet usage is variable; I rarely hit a particular 'average' - I've used as much as 300GB to as little as 10GB in a month.

That's one problem.

Another problem is that the caps are low and overage prices are exhorbitant. $1.00 (or more) per GB is just highway robbery, especially since bandwidth costs the ISPs about $0.02 at max per GB. The only reason one would be able to charge that much per GB is because the ISPs are either defacto monopolies or oligopolies - $0.10/GB would be reasonable AND would provide a 500% profit at least.

A third problem is that I just don't trust my ISP to measure bandwidth effectively. Since the measurement happens on their end, they could be inaccurate and I'd just not know.

There's no reason ISPs can't offer a "unlimited speed but per/GB" vs "limited speed during peak hours but unlimited GB" plan, using QoS policies for the former and latter. So that people CAN make that choice as you suggested.

Because I'm going to be honest - I just spent 6 months in New Zealand. I found it a very hard adjustment and moved back to the states - one of the reasons I did so was because I don't think the Internet has affected the culture of New Zealand the way it has the culture of the United States.

New Zealand has pretty much always had UBB from the beginning, and there's no Internet plan that doesn't have UBB in the country.

So people use the Internet sparingly; they associate use of the Internet with cost and do not wish to incur that cost themselves, nor do they want to impose that cost upon their friends.

In the long run, it ends up that people don't use the Internet socially. It's less often in New Zealand that people organize social gatherings on the Internet, it's hard to find businesses, services, events, etc. on the Internet - in short, the entire country pretty much feels like you're living in the mid 1990s, where Internet is *there* but nobody really considers it central to the way they organize their lives. It's a culture shock that was just a huge problem for me; and I think it's actually retarded New Zealand's cultural growth. Now, there were other reasons I moved back, but that was a big one.

So I think there are some serious social problems associated with UBB.

1) Those on-demand services are a joke - you get a choice between one episode of thier 10 least popular shows. 2) YOUR cable includes all those channels except BBC3 and BBC 4 - mine doesn't. Mine doesn't even include CNNi unless I pay another $20 a month to buy ANOTHER 200 digital channels that I don't want... 3) You're getting 200 channels, which I'm assuming you like. Me, since I'm only watching five of your cable service's offered channels, I'm effectively paying about $12 per channel - and still not getting all the channels I want to watch! Mine's better because -you- can still have the 200 channels for $56+tax, and I can have only the channels I want to watch at $5 a channel. If it worked out cheaper to get the big 200 channel package, I'd probably switch over to the 200 channel package at a later date. Here's the bonus - you can still pay for your 200 basic channels and if you see a channel that you'd like to have - say, BBC3, - you could just plop on an extra $5 for that channel. Under your plan, there's -no way to see it at all.-

One more thing. Yes, there was a lot lost in translation between the two evaluations. We have changed our program up, adding several processes that were implemented before, including purchasing anonymously. Yes, Gateway sent us the FX400XL. We had to send it back. And yes, two different authors wrote these articles. However, I stand by my editorial at the end of the XPS 400. I personally experienced both machines, and when I say there was a stark contrast, there was. I realize now that it is not as apparent the way the two articles were written. I will be adding a dated addendum to the Gateway article to explain a few things better. While we took note of the 'bloatware' and 'value add' on the Gateway, I'm telling you now that it in no way impeded our enjoyment of the system. In other words, our testing suite at the time had no issues with the preinstalled software.