After realizing that the page was actually 5 pages I read the rest of it.
The car looks pretty sporty to me and I think thats one way they could market it. Make it cheep while making it fun to drive, as a poor collage student I can't afford to drive around much nor can I afford to buy a new car at todays prices.
You have to get people driving these cars when they are young, older people can afford to pay for current cars and want them big and are not likely to accept these electric cars. Also older drivers don't need a car that last along time.
I want something that I can afford to buy and afford to drive.
As for the joy stick/drive by wire system, I don't think this will ever take off, I like being able to stear with either hand, changing often, think of repetive stress disorder from driving your car. Also the problem of what happens when the power dies or the computer crashes is a big issue aswell. The current stearing system seems to work good to me and its one of these if its not broke why fix it things.
I guess there is another problem with this electic car design, what happens if your going down the highway at 60 miles an hour and you lose power? Will the motors disengage from the tires so you can roll off to one side of the highway(Assuming you have manual steering and some sort of breaks)? Or will it be like an R/C car where the wheels just lock up?
Another thing to think about is will this technology work in 18 wheelers? Around here 90% of what you see on the highway is big trucks.
We still have a 1988 Chev pickup on the road and it still runs perfect except for the transmission is starting to go on it with around 200,000km. We also have a 1995 Chev Blazer which runs like new with 240,000KM and our third truck is a 2002 GMC. (Now if I could only get my parents to buy me a small car that I could afford to keep gas in)
In my 95 blazer when the engion dies so dose the power steering and power breaks, it takes something to get that thing off the road and stop manually. The worst has to be when it cuts out going around a turn, almost hit a car last winter.
Here is a short list of things I would like to see in my future car.
-Low fuel cost -Last at least 20 years -Plastic pannels(metal dents too easily, rust, and expensive to paint) -Modular design -Easy to exchange parts in and out
Basicly I want a car where I can swap any part in or out in less than 15 min. If one of the pannels get a scratch or I want to change the color of my car I just order the panels from my dealer and swap them myself.
Todays cars are not built to last, are very diffcult to repair and cost way to much to keep on the road.
But I'll never see my dream car in my life time. The car companies will never have it, imagin millions of mechanic out of work, and you would only need to buy a new car every 20 years or so. Even more jobs gone then. But on the flip side you can work at a low paying job and still afford to own and drive a car.
Corporations shouldn't just make the rich richer, once a company pays back its shareholders %200 of their investment it should owned by itself and its objectives should be to serv it customers and employees. The corporations then should be controled by its employees democraticly. Pay increases should be goverment controlled. The products should be priced based on how much it cost to produce them including the cost of R&D, marketing, labour, etc... (Err got off topic)
Yea, It takes like 5 min of picking packages and then like 5 min to install them if your installing off a HD partition like I do. So its 10 for me. One of these days I need to make a copy of my etc dir, I ususally spend 15 after installing slackware going through the/etc directory editing files.
I'm not usually a fan of big manufactures like dell, compac, etc... and I don't think I would ever buy a dell desktop computer but when I get a new laptop it's going to be a dell.
My current Dell Latitude CPi PII 266 laptop is great, I have stopped using my much faster desktop machine all together. I've had few problems with it, and after over a year of heavy use (5 classes a day) and many drops(In my soft case) it still runs great.(Besides the many cracks in the plastic, I bought this thing used)
Just last week my boss got a new Dell laptop and he asked me to take it for the weekend and install some software and stuff on it. Once I got rid of the ugly winXP default theme(switched to win2k theme) on it I was in love.
Everything worked right away with the exception on our old laser printer which dosn't work in usb mode for some reason.
My hat goes off to mircosoft for making Win XP a good operating system, once you get past the hype. Win XP is what win 95 should of been.
Anyway back on topic, the dell is great, nice big bright lcd display in a package that dosn't feel like its going to break. The keyboard is nice and wide and dosn't have a bad feel, alittle bigger than the one on my old latitude which took some getting use to. The scratch pads are useless, I always bring a mouse along with me. In a pinch it dose work though.
As for proformace, it could of been better, the machine only came with 128 megs of ram and a 1Ghz Celerey. I didn't find it much faster than my PII 266 with 128 megs of ram. It cam with 20 gig HD and nice built in network adapter and modem.
Also with this newer model they fixed alot of my beefs with my old latitude. The power connection was moved to the back, the audio connectors are on the left and the disk drives are on the sides. So the only thing to get in the way of a mouse on the right is the cdrom drawer which is only open when I'm not using a mouse.
My friend's acer laptop has to be the worst thing I have ever used, it has a small slow LCD with really bad color and contrast. Big bulky constuction that is somewhat toy like and alot of software and proformace problems right out of the box.
I haven't used many other brands of laptops but the Dells don't have many weaknesses.
They say eh alot in ontairo and thats about it. Here in newfoundland you can tell what town they are from by their accent.
Here in stephenville which was the harmon US airforce base, we are pretty american in our speech. Where my family comes from in the vally an hour away its very scottish/irish. People from the east coast put e in front of h alot, so it's heggs insted of eggs. Their are many other examples of this.
Imagin a world where you can't buy any hardware cheeply that can run anything other than software made by big business. The first thought is just to boot linux. But what if they changed the arch to a closed system, got rid of all the legacy stuff. All of the new hardware would only run windows with software that microsoft and the MPAA approve of. Microsoft would likely make a programming enviroment with limited access to wav, video and file devices, poof no more MP3's, MPEG's, Divx, etc... Only ASF...
Sure hackers will find lots bugs in the system to get around the restrictions but mass use of MP3's and Mpegs are dead in their tracks. Mass software pirating is no more.
Almost all the software makers will support this because it means that no one will be able to crack their programs. But the small guys will suffer and most will die off.
I've never thought about this before but this seems like the most logical path of the future.
All it would take would be a partnership between Intel and microsoft and its reality.
Copy protection dose not == encryption.
Copy protection == closed systems.
The computer industy made many mistakes in the early days by making the systems open in design and they have been opened right up with linux. From a programmer/hacker/geek perspective this is a good thing but from a business perspective its a nightmare.
Basicly it all comes down to taking the tools out of the hands of the general public. --
If you want pro results you will be smart to stay away from consumer soundcards like the soundblasters and get something built for recording from echo or M-Audio.
Don't bother with the Headphone matrix mixer, get a mackie or behringer board with lots of prefader aux sends and a multi channel headphone amp.
Don't go with a mic just because it has the shure name on it. The 57's and 58's are the standards for live sound and they get their rep for being almost indistructable and having a known sound. Check out the studio projects line of mics, the Marshall electronics mics and the Rode. All of these companies sell mics made in china which is usually a bad thing but they seem to have pretty good quality control and good designs. The mics sell a hell of a lot less than their American made and european counter parts(shure, neumann, etc...)
There are lots of mics for under $300 right now that sound just as good as any Neumanns.
The Studio Projects C1 I have sounds alot like the u87. Many people who have reviewed it like it more and are shocked when they find out its only $229.
The m-audio Audiobuddy is the best preamp under $1000 in alot of peoples books and it only cost $79.
The SM-57 is an ok mic. Most of its fame comes from how much abuse it can take and still sound the same.
There are a few mics that are around the price of a SM-57 that sound really good. The marshall electronics MXL603 is one of them. Its a Small condensor mic.
N-track studio is starting to mature and its under $100, Cool edit pro has been around for a while and I use it in the studio all the time, its around $200 I think. You can certianly multitrack with that software.
The M-audio Audiophile 24/96 soundcards are only $150. Thats 24bit 96khz and they sound way better than the Soundblaster soundcards. Their Delta soundcards are a little more pro with balanced +4 inputs.
Pro studio quality gear is now becoming within reach of the hobbest.
Re:If you pay to play, make the game free to buy
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 1
Yea I agree that the games should be downloadable for free once you subscribe.
I would pay upto $20 a month for an online gaming service aslong as the game is ever expanding like everquest is.
What I want is a game like Everquest but with more action and taking place in say current time or in the world wars or something.
Where you can play diffrent roles and go diffrent places. In say one country there is no real goverment or inforcement and its just crazy war in another part of the world there is strict no gun laws and your main objective is to get money and gather allies. The whole game could be about money rather than leveling up in EQ.
Another thing I would like to see in the game would be stuff like racing or even GTA 3 type play where you steal cars and drive through the citys and stuff.
Basicly make a simulated world where you can do what ever you want and getting killed only cost you money.
I don't think they belong out front! They should be out of sight.
Anyway the bigest beef I got with soundcards are those little crappy 1/8" plugs. They should be done away with. RCA pin plugs are better suited for this. 1/8" are fine for headphones but for everything else RCA are much better.
The other thing is, how can people listen to music on those crappy computer speakers? They are fine for simple sound effects but for MP3's you need something with atleast a 6" wolfer with say a 1" silk dome.
Anyway right now I'm using a M-Audio Delta 44 which has an external breakout box that has 1/4 plugs. I usually have it sitting behind my audio mixer in my studio. And thats connected into my HiFi amp and then into my Yorkville YSM-1 speakers(they are actually studio montiors, but I find they sound great as computer speakers and they don't cost that much either, around $200 a pair)
Well there are already some hefty fines for using h-cards to hack digital satlite of companys like Expressvu. Thankfully, hacking DSS from other counties like DirectTV from the US here in canada is perfectly legal:)
Yea that would be nice. I have an old(1998) Dell Latitude CPi PII 266 and I love the lcd on it so much I gave up on my desktop and when the psu died I gave all the parts away to my mom's computer.
Now that I want to do some gaming I'm wishing I could rip the lcd off this thing and hook it up to a desktop:P
The hell with 15" displays I'd be happy with a cheep 13" one that's like the one on my laptop.
LCD's are so much easier on the eyes and make
reading from the computer easy.
--
The problem lies upstream. Their are like 3 major backbone providers in the US and everyone's trafic goes through them.
It would be way more cost effective if each ISP had atleast one giant pipe going from one point to another and then the peered with two other ISP's who had a simlar setups. Then all it cost for basicly unlimited bandwidth is how much it cost for that one big link. And of course it has to be redundant so say both the DSL and the cable provider has to have links covering the same gap.
Alot of people don't use the internet that much anyway. I know people who have 120 hours a month dial up accounts and they use maybe 4 hours a month, connecting once a week to check email.
Here in NF Newtel has had fiber down since the early 90's. Its alot cheeper than copper and they don't need to have so many CO's. Before where there was say 30 CO's now there is just one that connects via fiber to each of the little towns. When they put the fiber down they put lots of pairs in there just in case some got broken or they needed to expand in the future. When broadband came along they already had lots of fiber in the ground all they had to do was buy the gear and hook it up.
In most places here in Canada water isn't metered. Power still is though.
Once the large pipes are in place then Broadband will be cost effecive. Right now it cost lot to transfer very little data. But as the pipes get bigger the price should drop big time. My ISP has to cover a large area but it has a T3+ going right threw its service area. It dosn't cost them any more if a user uses a gig a month or 1000 gigs a month, the pipes are big enough to handle what ever we throw at them. And my ISP peers with many other large ISP's so there cost are minimal.
The problem in the US is that their major pipes go from one major city to another and skip over all the ones in between and the ISP's that own the major lines are not the same ones that provide the broadband. So the broadband provides are paying big money for the bandwidth when they should be a peer for it.
The local ISP here is also the telco and to save money back in the early 90's they cut out all their CO's and ran alot fiber to all the little towns and ran all the telephone lines directly onto the fiber. So when broadband came around in like 98 all they had to do was buy the gear for DSL, the 1000's of KM of fiber was already in the ground. In the fiber runs they had lots of free strands that the sold off to cable companys and used for peering.
Once the lines are in the ground it should be cheep enough to provide unlimited bandwidth to customers.
When compared to other utilites internet is pretty cheep to distrbute. Its just that you have to own enough of it to peer for access to the rest of the net.
I seen a rackmount case somewhere for like $130 USD add a PSU, motherboard, processor, ram, HD, video card and a LCD and Delta 1010LT soundcard and your ready to roll.
Put it all in an SKB rack. You can buy rackmount keyboard drawers pretty cheep and 15" LCDs are getting cheep aswell. Put the LCD in a rack drawer. 2U should be big enough for the LCD and lots of Foam.
I shouldn't be too hard to retro fit some kind of a metering system on to an hotel system. All you would have to do is montior the current on the lines feeding that room, they sell handheld meters that do that, I don't even think you have to cut the wire.
But I don't think the standard wiring in a hotel would be enough for most geeks. My bedroom alone needs 2 15 circuits. You need at least another two for the kitchen and a 220 30 amp for the oven/stove. Most hotel rooms I've been in only have a single 15 or 20 amp circuit for the tv, lights and alarm clock.
Zoning laws are I guess city to city, here its not to hard to get the zoning changed and building codes are almost near non existant but I live in a small town here in Newfoundland Canada.
I think the problem is that they are limiting the design too much. It should be a base of operations for everything that goes on in low earth orbit and beyond.
For example they should have enough tools on board to fix anything in LEO so when something like the hubbel telescope has problems they don't have to spend millions on a trip up just to fix it. They just send the parts along on a normal resupply mission to the ISS and then when the orbits of the hubble and the ISS match up they send out a small robot of somesort to get it. It seems to me that this would be alot cheeper than doing two seperate trips.
Back on topic for a second projects like the ISS give countries like us here in Canada access to space. We don't have the money nor the launch faclities to send our own space craft into space so partnerships like the ISS are very important for us.
Fighting the whole world because someone knocked two of your buildings down is taking too much money away from your space program. Here is a better solution, don't build huge buildings that fall down easily build many small buildings and spead them out a little.
[/rant]
Slashdot Mirror
After realizing that the page was actually 5 pages I read the rest of it.
The car looks pretty sporty to me and I think thats one way they could market it. Make it cheep while making it fun to drive, as a poor collage student I can't afford to drive around much nor can I afford to buy a new car at todays prices.
You have to get people driving these cars when they are young, older people can afford to pay for current cars and want them big and are not likely to accept these electric cars. Also older drivers don't need a car that last along time.
I want something that I can afford to buy and afford to drive.
As for the joy stick/drive by wire system, I don't think this will ever take off, I like being able to stear with either hand, changing often, think of repetive stress disorder from driving your car. Also the problem of what happens when the power dies or the computer crashes is a big issue aswell. The current stearing system seems to work good to me and its one of these if its not broke why fix it things.
I guess there is another problem with this electic car design, what happens if your going down the highway at 60 miles an hour and you lose power? Will the motors disengage from the tires so you can roll off to one side of the highway(Assuming you have manual steering and some sort of breaks)? Or will it be like an R/C car where the wheels just lock up?
Another thing to think about is will this technology work in 18 wheelers? Around here 90% of what you see on the highway is big trucks.
We still have a 1988 Chev pickup on the road and it still runs perfect except for the transmission is starting to go on it with around 200,000km. We also have a 1995 Chev Blazer which runs like new with 240,000KM and our third truck is a 2002 GMC. (Now if I could only get my parents to buy me a small car that I could afford to keep gas in)
In my 95 blazer when the engion dies so dose the power steering and power breaks, it takes something to get that thing off the road and stop manually. The worst has to be when it cuts out going around a turn, almost hit a car last winter.
Iceland are quickly becomeing the worlds largest supplier of H. With all there geothurmal power the electricty cost them next to nothing.
Here is a short list of things I would like to see in my future car.
-Low fuel cost
-Last at least 20 years
-Plastic pannels(metal dents too easily, rust, and expensive to paint)
-Modular design
-Easy to exchange parts in and out
Basicly I want a car where I can swap any part in or out in less than 15 min. If one of the pannels get a scratch or I want to change the color of my car I just order the panels from my dealer and swap them myself.
Todays cars are not built to last, are very diffcult to repair and cost way to much to keep on the road.
But I'll never see my dream car in my life time. The car companies will never have it, imagin millions of mechanic out of work, and you would only need to buy a new car every 20 years or so. Even more jobs gone then. But on the flip side you can work at a low paying job and still afford to own and drive a car.
Corporations shouldn't just make the rich richer, once a company pays back its shareholders %200 of their investment it should owned by itself and its objectives should be to serv it customers and employees. The corporations then should be controled by its employees democraticly. Pay increases should be goverment controlled. The products should be priced based on how much it cost to produce them including the cost of R&D, marketing, labour, etc... (Err got off topic)
Yea, It takes like 5 min of picking packages and then like 5 min to install them if your installing off a HD partition like I do. So its 10 for me. One of these days I need to make a copy of my etc dir, I ususally spend 15 after installing slackware going through the /etc directory editing files.
Last summer when my parents were crossing back into canada they pretty much took the car apart searching it. Another one of the 'random' searches.
You don't even need a HD for this, you could just burn all the data onto a CD.
I would have to agree, Dell laptops are great.
I'm not usually a fan of big manufactures like dell, compac, etc... and I don't think I would ever buy a dell desktop computer but when I get a new laptop it's going to be a dell.
My current Dell Latitude CPi PII 266 laptop is great, I have stopped using my much faster desktop machine all together. I've had few problems with it, and after over a year of heavy use (5 classes a day) and many drops(In my soft case) it still runs great.(Besides the many cracks in the plastic, I bought this thing used)
Just last week my boss got a new Dell laptop and he asked me to take it for the weekend and install some software and stuff on it. Once I got rid of the ugly winXP default theme(switched to win2k theme) on it I was in love.
Everything worked right away with the exception on our old laser printer which dosn't work in usb mode for some reason.
My hat goes off to mircosoft for making Win XP a good operating system, once you get past the hype. Win XP is what win 95 should of been.
Anyway back on topic, the dell is great, nice big bright lcd display in a package that dosn't feel like its going to break. The keyboard is nice and wide and dosn't have a bad feel, alittle bigger than the one on my old latitude which took some getting use to. The scratch pads are useless, I always bring a mouse along with me. In a pinch it dose work though.
As for proformace, it could of been better, the machine only came with 128 megs of ram and a 1Ghz Celerey. I didn't find it much faster than my PII 266 with 128 megs of ram. It cam with 20 gig HD and nice built in network adapter and modem.
Also with this newer model they fixed alot of my beefs with my old latitude. The power connection was moved to the back, the audio connectors are on the left and the disk drives are on the sides. So the only thing to get in the way of a mouse on the right is the cdrom drawer which is only open when I'm not using a mouse.
My friend's acer laptop has to be the worst thing I have ever used, it has a small slow LCD with really bad color and contrast. Big bulky constuction that is somewhat toy like and alot of software and proformace problems right out of the box.
I haven't used many other brands of laptops but the Dells don't have many weaknesses.
They say eh alot in ontairo and thats about it. Here in newfoundland you can tell what town they are from by their accent.
Here in stephenville which was the harmon US airforce base, we are pretty american in our speech. Where my family comes from in the vally an hour away its very scottish/irish. People from the east coast put e in front of h alot, so it's heggs insted of eggs. Their are many other examples of this.
Only if he got paid $1 for every hit is page recived. $79,000 would be pretty nice to get for being slashdotted. :)
I'm scared at this thought.
Imagin a world where you can't buy any hardware cheeply that can run anything other than software made by big business. The first thought is just to boot linux. But what if they changed the arch to a closed system, got rid of all the legacy stuff. All of the new hardware would only run windows with software that microsoft and the MPAA approve of. Microsoft would likely make a programming enviroment with limited access to wav, video and file devices, poof no more MP3's, MPEG's, Divx, etc... Only ASF...
Sure hackers will find lots bugs in the system to get around the restrictions but mass use of MP3's and Mpegs are dead in their tracks. Mass software pirating is no more.
Almost all the software makers will support this because it means that no one will be able to crack their programs. But the small guys will suffer and most will die off.
I've never thought about this before but this seems like the most logical path of the future.
All it would take would be a partnership between Intel and microsoft and its reality.
Copy protection dose not == encryption.
Copy protection == closed systems.
The computer industy made many mistakes in the early days by making the systems open in design and they have been opened right up with linux. From a programmer/hacker/geek perspective this is a good thing but from a business perspective its a nightmare.
Basicly it all comes down to taking the tools out of the hands of the general public.
--
If you want pro results you will be smart to stay away from consumer soundcards like the soundblasters and get something built for recording from echo or M-Audio.
Don't bother with the Headphone matrix mixer, get a mackie or behringer board with lots of prefader aux sends and a multi channel headphone amp.
Don't go with a mic just because it has the shure name on it. The 57's and 58's are the standards for live sound and they get their rep for being almost indistructable and having a known sound. Check out the studio projects line of mics, the Marshall electronics mics and the Rode. All of these companies sell mics made in china which is usually a bad thing but they seem to have pretty good quality control and good designs. The mics sell a hell of a lot less than their American made and european counter parts(shure, neumann, etc...)
Your Neumanns are over priced.
There are lots of mics for under $300 right now that sound just as good as any Neumanns.
The Studio Projects C1 I have sounds alot like the u87. Many people who have reviewed it like it more and are shocked when they find out its only $229.
The m-audio Audiobuddy is the best preamp under $1000 in alot of peoples books and it only cost $79.
The SM-57 is an ok mic. Most of its fame comes from how much abuse it can take and still sound the same.
There are a few mics that are around the price of a SM-57 that sound really good. The marshall electronics MXL603 is one of them. Its a Small condensor mic.
N-track studio is starting to mature and its under $100, Cool edit pro has been around for a while and I use it in the studio all the time, its around $200 I think. You can certianly multitrack with that software.
The M-audio Audiophile 24/96 soundcards are only $150. Thats 24bit 96khz and they sound way better than the Soundblaster soundcards. Their Delta soundcards are a little more pro with balanced +4 inputs.
Pro studio quality gear is now becoming within reach of the hobbest.
Yea I agree that the games should be downloadable for free once you subscribe.
I would pay upto $20 a month for an online gaming service aslong as the game is ever expanding like everquest is.
What I want is a game like Everquest but with more action and taking place in say current time or in the world wars or something.
Where you can play diffrent roles and go diffrent places. In say one country there is no real goverment or inforcement and its just crazy war in another part of the world there is strict no gun laws and your main objective is to get money and gather allies. The whole game could be about money rather than leveling up in EQ.
Another thing I would like to see in the game would be stuff like racing or even GTA 3 type play where you steal cars and drive through the citys and stuff.
Basicly make a simulated world where you can do what ever you want and getting killed only cost you money.
I don't think they belong out front! They should be out of sight.
Anyway the bigest beef I got with soundcards are those little crappy 1/8" plugs. They should be done away with. RCA pin plugs are better suited for this. 1/8" are fine for headphones but for everything else RCA are much better.
The other thing is, how can people listen to music on those crappy computer speakers? They are fine for simple sound effects but for MP3's you need something with atleast a 6" wolfer with say a 1" silk dome.
Anyway right now I'm using a M-Audio Delta 44 which has an external breakout box that has 1/4 plugs. I usually have it sitting behind my audio mixer in my studio. And thats connected into my HiFi amp and then into my Yorkville YSM-1 speakers(they are actually studio montiors, but I find they sound great as computer speakers and they don't cost that much either, around $200 a pair)
Well there are already some hefty fines for using h-cards to hack digital satlite of companys like Expressvu. Thankfully, hacking DSS from other counties like DirectTV from the US here in canada is perfectly legal :)
Yea that would be nice. I have an old(1998) Dell Latitude CPi PII 266 and I love the lcd on it so much I gave up on my desktop and when the psu died I gave all the parts away to my mom's computer.
:P
Now that I want to do some gaming I'm wishing I could rip the lcd off this thing and hook it up to a desktop
The hell with 15" displays I'd be happy with a cheep 13" one that's like the one on my laptop.
LCD's are so much easier on the eyes and make
reading from the computer easy.
--
Its dosn't have to be so damn expensive though.
The problem lies upstream. Their are like 3 major backbone providers in the US and everyone's trafic goes through them.
It would be way more cost effective if each ISP had atleast one giant pipe going from one point to another and then the peered with two other ISP's who had a simlar setups. Then all it cost for basicly unlimited bandwidth is how much it cost for that one big link. And of course it has to be redundant so say both the DSL and the cable provider has to have links covering the same gap.
Alot of people don't use the internet that much anyway. I know people who have 120 hours a month dial up accounts and they use maybe 4 hours a month, connecting once a week to check email.
Here in NF Newtel has had fiber down since the early 90's. Its alot cheeper than copper and they don't need to have so many CO's. Before where there was say 30 CO's now there is just one that connects via fiber to each of the little towns. When they put the fiber down they put lots of pairs in there just in case some got broken or they needed to expand in the future. When broadband came along they already had lots of fiber in the ground all they had to do was buy the gear and hook it up.
In most places here in Canada water isn't metered. Power still is though.
Once the large pipes are in place then Broadband will be cost effecive. Right now it cost lot to transfer very little data. But as the pipes get bigger the price should drop big time. My ISP has to cover a large area but it has a T3+ going right threw its service area. It dosn't cost them any more if a user uses a gig a month or 1000 gigs a month, the pipes are big enough to handle what ever we throw at them. And my ISP peers with many other large ISP's so there cost are minimal.
The problem in the US is that their major pipes go from one major city to another and skip over all the ones in between and the ISP's that own the major lines are not the same ones that provide the broadband. So the broadband provides are paying big money for the bandwidth when they should be a peer for it.
The local ISP here is also the telco and to save money back in the early 90's they cut out all their CO's and ran alot fiber to all the little towns and ran all the telephone lines directly onto the fiber. So when broadband came around in like 98 all they had to do was buy the gear for DSL, the 1000's of KM of fiber was already in the ground. In the fiber runs they had lots of free strands that the sold off to cable companys and used for peering.
Once the lines are in the ground it should be cheep enough to provide unlimited bandwidth to customers.
When compared to other utilites internet is pretty cheep to distrbute. Its just that you have to own enough of it to peer for access to the rest of the net.
I seen a rackmount case somewhere for like $130 USD add a PSU, motherboard, processor, ram, HD, video card and a LCD and Delta 1010LT soundcard and your ready to roll.
Put it all in an SKB rack. You can buy rackmount keyboard drawers pretty cheep and 15" LCDs are getting cheep aswell. Put the LCD in a rack drawer. 2U should be big enough for the LCD and lots of Foam.
I shouldn't be too hard to retro fit some kind of a metering system on to an hotel system. All you would have to do is montior the current on the lines feeding that room, they sell handheld meters that do that, I don't even think you have to cut the wire.
But I don't think the standard wiring in a hotel would be enough for most geeks. My bedroom alone needs 2 15 circuits. You need at least another two for the kitchen and a 220 30 amp for the oven/stove. Most hotel rooms I've been in only have a single 15 or 20 amp circuit for the tv, lights and alarm clock.
Zoning laws are I guess city to city, here its not to hard to get the zoning changed and building codes are almost near non existant but I live in a small town here in Newfoundland Canada.
I think the problem is that they are limiting the design too much. It should be a base of operations for everything that goes on in low earth orbit and beyond.
For example they should have enough tools on board to fix anything in LEO so when something like the hubbel telescope has problems they don't have to spend millions on a trip up just to fix it. They just send the parts along on a normal resupply mission to the ISS and then when the orbits of the hubble and the ISS match up they send out a small robot of somesort to get it. It seems to me that this would be alot cheeper than doing two seperate trips.
Back on topic for a second projects like the ISS give countries like us here in Canada access to space. We don't have the money nor the launch faclities to send our own space craft into space so partnerships like the ISS are very important for us.
Fighting the whole world because someone knocked two of your buildings down is taking too much money away from your space program. Here is a better solution, don't build huge buildings that fall down easily build many small buildings and spead them out a little.
[/rant]