Behold, the latest wonder from Asus. UltraHD in a 28" screen for $650 at NewEgg. Limit 2 per customer. (No, they're not paying me to post this. I wish they were.)
Yeah it's a TN panel, but the reviews show it can manage a standard color gamut better than pretty much any TN panel before it, while still benefiting from the TN design in its response time. It claims 1 ms grey to grey transition. Off angle viewing is better than many TN panels as well. And with the DisplayPort connection, it's capable of 60Hz vertical refresh at full resolution, something HDMI can't do until the new HDMI spec is finalized. It has one DisplayPort connector and two HDMI connectors (including one MDL-capable). Full range of display stand flexibility, including height, tilt, swivel and 90 degree rotation. Built-in picture-in-picture using multiple inputs simultaneously, or side-by-side mode from multiple inputs. Those last two being funky features I never even considered, but I'm not complaining.
It's undoubtedly not the last word in UltraHD, but it's a FINE entrant in the race.
Are the Stingrays (which are useful as a law enforcement tool -- assuming proper warrants are obtained and appropriate restrictions adhered to)...
There are no proper warrants that can be acquired that can authorize the Constitutional use of a Stingray device, nor are there appropriate restrictions other than a total ban on their use. They are the very definition of blanket surveillance and can not be used in any other way. There is no way to utilize them in a warranty-compliant manner because they will always sweep up the details of everyone in the vicinity, and there is no warrant for that. They are impossible to target, therefore their use by law enforcement (or any private organization being using to whitewash their use by law enforcement) is unconstitutional and therefore illegal.
That's black letter law, too, which is why it's being hidden. There is no sell-us-down-the-river Supreme Court decision that has ruled blanket surveillance legal, unlike, say, the assinine decision that is going to get the 11th Circuit overturned for claiming we have an expectation of privacy for our cell phone records (we do, but the Supreme Court has already ruled, in a massive fit of stupidity, that we don't because the phone company is some sort of magical "third party"). That hasn't happened (yet) with blanket surveillance, and it's hard to imagine even the Roberts court going that far around the bend.
That said, I echo the question you and others posted. How could these devices possibly be so valuable that federal agents are conspiring with local law enforcement to hide their illegal use? I'm assuming they're just unwilling to give up their toys, any toy at all, like the petulant children they are.
It's worth pointing out the law was ruled unconstitutional vs. the California state constitution, not the Federal constitution. Any state that does not have a "right to an education" clause in their constitution probably has legal tenure laws, at least vs that argument.
The slightly breathless article claiming this is "new ammunition" for challenges in other states is overstating the usefulness of the ruling, especially considering the judge ordered California tenure law to remain in place during appeal. State constitutions are independent of one another, so a ruling in one state court carries very little weight in another state's court.
There is no reason, at all, which a police force needs a fucking MRAP. Except to subjugate the population. Maybe not now, maybe not in 5 or 10 years even...but the unique function of that hardware can have no clearer statement. "Sooner or later, this will be used against all of you."
That's ok, 'cause our IEDs are much better than them furrin' IEDs!
I wrote that sarcastically, then realized there's some truth to it. Considering the engineer who designed the damn thing lives here, if he gets offended by one driving down his street, he knows exactly how to spend $20 at the local hardware store to be able to bind the thing's axle and bring it to a total standstill. (Etc. etc.)
And as Joe Arpaio has so beautifully demonstrated, once you've bought a toy like that, you have to find a use for it. Even if it's busting into a chicken coop with a light tank.
There has been only ONE societal factor that has been found to satisfactorily correlate with the reduction in crime (see the movie Freakonomics, and that has been widely disputed.
Especially because it isn't the only societal factor that correlates. Bans on lead in gasoline correlate, and correlate much better than the availability of legal abortion. Lead was banned from gasoline at many different times in different jurisdictions. The trend in violent crime reduction follows afterwards in all cases, at the same interval. It's the best candidate yet for explaining the change.
It is entirely possible to have a scenario where some factor is driving crime down faster than gun ownership is driving it up. The fact that it hasn't been found...
It may have been found. There is a remarkably close correlation to the reduction of lead in gasoline to the reduction in violent crime. The downward trend in violent crime follows after lead is banned, and it follows the ban consistently even when the ban occurs at different times in different places with otherwise similar cultures and economic conditions. Nobody has traced the biochemical pathways yet, but it's the best candidate discovered in many years.
And that in turn means that we will have high and climbing rates of violent crime regardless of material circumstance.
We have neither high nor climbing violent crime rates. They are low and have been getting lower for 30 years. See other posts in this thread for citations.
The constant propaganda isn't causing us to be violent. The constant torture porn movies aren't causing us to be violent. Rap music isn't causing us to be violent. Pile it all up and still we're getting less violent all the time.
While you're working on it, how about a new name? "Supercharger" is already a "thing" in automobile-lingo.
There's a possibility that the device currently called a supercharger will become so rare that only the geariest of gearheads will remember the old definition, let alone have one.
I'm inclined to believe overloading the term was an accident on Tesla's part, at least initially. The decision to keep the name is probably quite calculated. When the new order subsumes the jargon of the old order, it wins.
It remains to be seen whether or not the new "Supercharger" wins anything.
Gigacharger. Goes well with gigafactory. Even if it has nothing at all to do with what the "giga" in gigafactory means. It's marketing. It doesn't have to make sense.
Instead of flying from Honolulu to Hong Kong, there are any number of Western European states he could have flown to prior to going public.
You forget over whose airspace the Bolivian president's plane was forced down. He knew damn well any western European nation would have fallen all over itself to rush him into US custody, preferably secretly.
Flying to a nominal US adversary and ending up in an actual US adversary was his only option. US allies are obviously eager to break their own laws and their own human rights treaties if the US government says so.
Jesus wept to think that so many people are getting hoodwinked by this crap.
mpercy wasn't hoodwinked by anything. That account is astroturfing and the original owner may or may not even be involved. That post was packed from one end to the other with the Party Line, in every detail. It's meant to affect the thinking of people reading it. I should say, it's meant to damage the thinking of people reading it. It's disinformation/spin/propaganda. Call it what you like. I call it bullshit.
But that got me thinking. Could we, and big providers in particular, sort of collectively force network neutrality on the ISPs by encrypting everything, so that it's impossible for the ISPs to know what the packets are, only that they're supposed to be delivered to such-and-such a place? Would that work?
Not really, no. It works when ISPs are interfering with traffic using deep packet inspection, but they're unlikely to be bothering in this case. They know where Netflix traffic enters their network. They simply degrade ALL such traffic, regardless of its contents, knowing they're mostly catching Netflix packets in the process. If that's not what they're currently doing, it's certainly something they could do. Encryption then doesn't help at all.
VPN evidence indicates that's precisely what they are doing. VPN forces a change in route, so traffic from Netflix enters Verizon's network from an unusual direction. Magically, no "congestion". It's artificial, it's anticompetitive, and it's a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
And no prosecutor has the nerve to do anything about it.
What you are witnessing is the completely unqualified wealthy class getting more than their share of opportunity, simply because they are wealthy.
What you are witnessing is the completely broke poor class trying to break into the wealthy class that has absolutely no interest in penny-ante plastic trash. The wealthy class pays people to pay people to pay people to make shit like that bicycle light. They do not bother to even read the reports, let alone participate.
I heard this story on NPR yesterday and they said the idea came from a 7 year old Dutch girl who wrote LEGO a letter complaining about the lack of girl figurines doing the cools things the boys figures where doing.
Of course that's what NPR said, 'cause it makes for a better narrative, but where it came from is LEGO CUUSOO, which has since been renamed LEGO Ideas. Specifically, this proposal. It sat in LEGO CUUSOO as a proposal since April 30, 2012. It didn't get the 10,000 supporters it needed until late last year.
So yeah, little Dutch girl. Right. I'm sure there is a little Dutch girl, and I'm sure she did write a letter, but it had nothing to do with this set. Broadcast media lies for ratings, as usual. The real Dutch woman who proposed the set is a geochemist who likes LEGO and classic video games. She's designed some Megaman minifigs and sets too, not just Female Scientists. Her Big Bang Theory vignette has also reached 10,000 supporters, and is currently in review by the LEGO Group for possible production. Her Megaman designs have 3891 supporters. She's not 7 years old.
...I guess those friends sets are selling, probably purchased by dads who wish their daughters were into LEGO
Those Friends sets are currently the most popular LEGO line, outselling even Star Wars. I'm sure there are some dads trying to get their daughters into LEGO (and more power to them), but when I was last in Toys R Us in the LEGO aisle, I watched multiple little girls pick out a Friends set on their own initiative, and take it to their mother to ask for it, not their father. LEGO has tried and failed six times to make sets appealing to girls, and this time they've done it. If ponies and pink and purple bricks is what it takes, then so be it. I suspect the cartoon TV series has something to do with it as well.
Of course whenever I've discussed it, the conclusion was not to force gender equality in a police force or fire department - that's simply a fake reality, but it's not to make bricks pink and purple either. Most women even agreed they just wanted more female figures in sets.
LEGO is going with all of the above. Both a set including a female firefighter and a set including a female police officer are currently available. And this year, LEGO released their very first female criminal, available in a City set. Of the 12 minifigs in the Carnival Mixer set, precisely half of them are female. The LEGO Creator series in general has featured more female minifigures than most, especially the Modular Houses series. Cafe Corner, from 2007, was in fact majority female, with 2 out of 3 minifigs being female. Admittedly, there has only ever been one female astronaut, in a 1999 NASA licensed set. Still, the number and variety of female minifigs has been going steadily up for 15 years.
It happens often enough that I think there's a bug in SlashCode. Somehow the way the comment submission box works causes it to occasionally fail and post a top level comment to the wrong article.
Did someone say satellites? Said Elon Musk, perking up.
I think it's safe to say Google would not be seriously considering this idea in the absence of SpaceX launch prices. The ULA price for launching 180 satellites, assuming you cram 5 of them into each launch (a guess based on the usual definition of 'small' when talking about satellites), is a nice shiny $16,200,000,000. Give or take. And you haven't even built the satellites for that. The current SpaceX price would probably be $1.6 billion, since SpaceX is 1/10th of ULA, so the $1 billion estimate is probably predicated on the new pricing assuming first stage reusability. Without Spacex, and indeed, without SpaceX's most advanced capability (which isn't quite done yet), Google's idea would be a nonstarter.
It's been said for decades that getting launch costs down would invite whole new use cases. This is a dramatic demonstration of the truth of that assertion.
Good thing that's past tense, or you wouldn't dare show your face here.
I knew the margins were good. I didn't know they were that good. If I hadn't already posted on this thread, I'd be modding you up. Your post needs a LOT more visibility.
I know it's a pipe dream. But a fella can dream, can't he?
A fella can do more than dream. A fella can contribute to the FreedomBox project. Money, code, trying it out on your mother-in-law, every little bit helps.
(Fine print: FreedomBox Foundation takes no responsibility for disturbances in your domestic tranquility due to software experimentation on your mother-in-law.)
This x 1000. I pay $65/month for an AT&T 12 Mb business UVerse account with 5 static IPs. Upload is a crappy 512K, but as you mentioned, there's no throttling and no ports are blocked.
512k? For allegedly a business connection? That's pathetic. That's beyond pathetic. That's so sad you should make a little miniature gravestone and stick it next to your modem.
I think that usage-based billing does make sense, since the costs go up with usage.
Not it doesn't because no it doesn't.
The marginal cost of sending 1 GB worth of data through a connection vs 1 MB of data through a connection is $0. Zero dollars. Nothing. There is effectively no measurable difference. The Internet is not a goddamn series of tubes. Attempts to reason about it as if it were are doomed to failure as not even wrong.
Packet-switched networks do not work like any other utility. The product being delivered is not the major expense of the operation. When delivering water, the water must be filtered and treated, a large on-going expense. When delivering electricity, it must be generated, a large on-going expense. When delivering sewer service, the waste water must be treated, a large on-going expense.
Bytes? Bytes are nothing. For most of the existence of the Internet, once you powered on a router, it's on. The amount of power it uses idle and the amount of power it uses while busy are effectively indistinguishable. The circuitry of the switching fabric draws the same amount of power all the time. The required switching speed wasn't achievable otherwise. It's only been very recently that routers were available that can sleep ports, and you can bet your typical US ISP doesn't have those. That would require replacing equipment that already works, and even with sleepy ports, the difference in power usage is still very small, so small it gets eaten by the labor to do the changeover.
But wait, you say! What about the Internet connection? You might think there's something there, but you'd still be wrong. Assuming the ISP in question hasn't managed to negotiate free peering, it still doesn't matter because the law of large numbers kicks in. The ISP can negotiate a price based on the average expected usage of all of their subscribers, because that number is very predictable. When Jane Q. Public uses more data this week than last week, her additional usage is lost in the noise. It takes major changes in available services, like the rise of Netflix, to shift that number appreciably, and that happens over an extended period of time.
So no, costs do not change with usage of Internet service. Once you've wired up the connection, turned on the equipment, and established connections to the other networks, you've spent what you're going to spend. If the connection is saturated 24/7 or not used at all, it still costs you the same to run it.
Slashdot Mirror
7) You just need to sell it better!
Huh?
You do realize he thought he was listing an invalid list of responses...
Behold, the latest wonder from Asus. UltraHD in a 28" screen for $650 at NewEgg. Limit 2 per customer. (No, they're not paying me to post this. I wish they were.)
Yeah it's a TN panel, but the reviews show it can manage a standard color gamut better than pretty much any TN panel before it, while still benefiting from the TN design in its response time. It claims 1 ms grey to grey transition. Off angle viewing is better than many TN panels as well. And with the DisplayPort connection, it's capable of 60Hz vertical refresh at full resolution, something HDMI can't do until the new HDMI spec is finalized. It has one DisplayPort connector and two HDMI connectors (including one MDL-capable). Full range of display stand flexibility, including height, tilt, swivel and 90 degree rotation. Built-in picture-in-picture using multiple inputs simultaneously, or side-by-side mode from multiple inputs. Those last two being funky features I never even considered, but I'm not complaining.
It's undoubtedly not the last word in UltraHD, but it's a FINE entrant in the race.
Are the Stingrays (which are useful as a law enforcement tool -- assuming proper warrants are obtained and appropriate restrictions adhered to) ...
There are no proper warrants that can be acquired that can authorize the Constitutional use of a Stingray device, nor are there appropriate restrictions other than a total ban on their use. They are the very definition of blanket surveillance and can not be used in any other way. There is no way to utilize them in a warranty-compliant manner because they will always sweep up the details of everyone in the vicinity, and there is no warrant for that. They are impossible to target, therefore their use by law enforcement (or any private organization being using to whitewash their use by law enforcement) is unconstitutional and therefore illegal.
That's black letter law, too, which is why it's being hidden. There is no sell-us-down-the-river Supreme Court decision that has ruled blanket surveillance legal, unlike, say, the assinine decision that is going to get the 11th Circuit overturned for claiming we have an expectation of privacy for our cell phone records (we do, but the Supreme Court has already ruled, in a massive fit of stupidity, that we don't because the phone company is some sort of magical "third party"). That hasn't happened (yet) with blanket surveillance, and it's hard to imagine even the Roberts court going that far around the bend.
That said, I echo the question you and others posted. How could these devices possibly be so valuable that federal agents are conspiring with local law enforcement to hide their illegal use? I'm assuming they're just unwilling to give up their toys, any toy at all, like the petulant children they are.
It's worth pointing out the law was ruled unconstitutional vs. the California state constitution, not the Federal constitution. Any state that does not have a "right to an education" clause in their constitution probably has legal tenure laws, at least vs that argument.
The slightly breathless article claiming this is "new ammunition" for challenges in other states is overstating the usefulness of the ruling, especially considering the judge ordered California tenure law to remain in place during appeal. State constitutions are independent of one another, so a ruling in one state court carries very little weight in another state's court.
There is no reason, at all, which a police force needs a fucking MRAP. Except to subjugate the population. Maybe not now, maybe not in 5 or 10 years even...but the unique function of that hardware can have no clearer statement. "Sooner or later, this will be used against all of you."
That's ok, 'cause our IEDs are much better than them furrin' IEDs!
I wrote that sarcastically, then realized there's some truth to it. Considering the engineer who designed the damn thing lives here, if he gets offended by one driving down his street, he knows exactly how to spend $20 at the local hardware store to be able to bind the thing's axle and bring it to a total standstill. (Etc. etc.)
And as Joe Arpaio has so beautifully demonstrated, once you've bought a toy like that, you have to find a use for it. Even if it's busting into a chicken coop with a light tank.
Wile E. Coyote would like a word with you...
There has been only ONE societal factor that has been found to satisfactorily correlate with the reduction in crime (see the movie Freakonomics, and that has been widely disputed.
Especially because it isn't the only societal factor that correlates. Bans on lead in gasoline correlate, and correlate much better than the availability of legal abortion. Lead was banned from gasoline at many different times in different jurisdictions. The trend in violent crime reduction follows afterwards in all cases, at the same interval. It's the best candidate yet for explaining the change.
It is entirely possible to have a scenario where some factor is driving crime down faster than gun ownership is driving it up. The fact that it hasn't been found...
It may have been found. There is a remarkably close correlation to the reduction of lead in gasoline to the reduction in violent crime. The downward trend in violent crime follows after lead is banned, and it follows the ban consistently even when the ban occurs at different times in different places with otherwise similar cultures and economic conditions. Nobody has traced the biochemical pathways yet, but it's the best candidate discovered in many years.
And that in turn means that we will have high and climbing rates of violent crime regardless of material circumstance.
We have neither high nor climbing violent crime rates. They are low and have been getting lower for 30 years. See other posts in this thread for citations.
The constant propaganda isn't causing us to be violent. The constant torture porn movies aren't causing us to be violent. Rap music isn't causing us to be violent. Pile it all up and still we're getting less violent all the time.
What are the Decepticons going to use recharge then?
Anywhere they want?
While you're working on it, how about a new name? "Supercharger" is already a "thing" in automobile-lingo.
There's a possibility that the device currently called a supercharger will become so rare that only the geariest of gearheads will remember the old definition, let alone have one.
I'm inclined to believe overloading the term was an accident on Tesla's part, at least initially. The decision to keep the name is probably quite calculated. When the new order subsumes the jargon of the old order, it wins.
It remains to be seen whether or not the new "Supercharger" wins anything.
I vote for "Megacharger"
Gigacharger. Goes well with gigafactory. Even if it has nothing at all to do with what the "giga" in gigafactory means. It's marketing. It doesn't have to make sense.
Instead of flying from Honolulu to Hong Kong, there are any number of Western European states he could have flown to prior to going public.
You forget over whose airspace the Bolivian president's plane was forced down. He knew damn well any western European nation would have fallen all over itself to rush him into US custody, preferably secretly.
Flying to a nominal US adversary and ending up in an actual US adversary was his only option. US allies are obviously eager to break their own laws and their own human rights treaties if the US government says so.
Jesus wept to think that so many people are getting hoodwinked by this crap.
mpercy wasn't hoodwinked by anything. That account is astroturfing and the original owner may or may not even be involved. That post was packed from one end to the other with the Party Line, in every detail. It's meant to affect the thinking of people reading it. I should say, it's meant to damage the thinking of people reading it. It's disinformation/spin/propaganda. Call it what you like. I call it bullshit.
But that got me thinking. Could we, and big providers in particular, sort of collectively force network neutrality on the ISPs by encrypting everything, so that it's impossible for the ISPs to know what the packets are, only that they're supposed to be delivered to such-and-such a place? Would that work?
Not really, no. It works when ISPs are interfering with traffic using deep packet inspection, but they're unlikely to be bothering in this case. They know where Netflix traffic enters their network. They simply degrade ALL such traffic, regardless of its contents, knowing they're mostly catching Netflix packets in the process. If that's not what they're currently doing, it's certainly something they could do. Encryption then doesn't help at all.
VPN evidence indicates that's precisely what they are doing. VPN forces a change in route, so traffic from Netflix enters Verizon's network from an unusual direction. Magically, no "congestion". It's artificial, it's anticompetitive, and it's a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
And no prosecutor has the nerve to do anything about it.
What? I can't even escape the internet on the moon?
Get your ass to Mars. Ping time is as high as 48 minutes.
What you are witnessing is the completely unqualified wealthy class getting more than their share of opportunity, simply because they are wealthy.
What you are witnessing is the completely broke poor class trying to break into the wealthy class that has absolutely no interest in penny-ante plastic trash. The wealthy class pays people to pay people to pay people to make shit like that bicycle light. They do not bother to even read the reports, let alone participate.
I heard this story on NPR yesterday and they said the idea came from a 7 year old Dutch girl who wrote LEGO a letter complaining about the lack of girl figurines doing the cools things the boys figures where doing.
Of course that's what NPR said, 'cause it makes for a better narrative, but where it came from is LEGO CUUSOO, which has since been renamed LEGO Ideas. Specifically, this proposal. It sat in LEGO CUUSOO as a proposal since April 30, 2012. It didn't get the 10,000 supporters it needed until late last year.
So yeah, little Dutch girl. Right. I'm sure there is a little Dutch girl, and I'm sure she did write a letter, but it had nothing to do with this set. Broadcast media lies for ratings, as usual. The real Dutch woman who proposed the set is a geochemist who likes LEGO and classic video games. She's designed some Megaman minifigs and sets too, not just Female Scientists. Her Big Bang Theory vignette has also reached 10,000 supporters, and is currently in review by the LEGO Group for possible production. Her Megaman designs have 3891 supporters. She's not 7 years old.
...I guess those friends sets are selling, probably purchased by dads who wish their daughters were into LEGO
Those Friends sets are currently the most popular LEGO line, outselling even Star Wars. I'm sure there are some dads trying to get their daughters into LEGO (and more power to them), but when I was last in Toys R Us in the LEGO aisle, I watched multiple little girls pick out a Friends set on their own initiative, and take it to their mother to ask for it, not their father. LEGO has tried and failed six times to make sets appealing to girls, and this time they've done it. If ponies and pink and purple bricks is what it takes, then so be it. I suspect the cartoon TV series has something to do with it as well.
Of course whenever I've discussed it, the conclusion was not to force gender equality in a police force or fire department - that's simply a fake reality, but it's not to make bricks pink and purple either. Most women even agreed they just wanted more female figures in sets.
LEGO is going with all of the above. Both a set including a female firefighter and a set including a female police officer are currently available. And this year, LEGO released their very first female criminal, available in a City set. Of the 12 minifigs in the Carnival Mixer set, precisely half of them are female. The LEGO Creator series in general has featured more female minifigures than most, especially the Modular Houses series. Cafe Corner, from 2007, was in fact majority female, with 2 out of 3 minifigs being female. Admittedly, there has only ever been one female astronaut, in a 1999 NASA licensed set. Still, the number and variety of female minifigs has been going steadily up for 15 years.
They're getting there.
... what?
It happens often enough that I think there's a bug in SlashCode. Somehow the way the comment submission box works causes it to occasionally fail and post a top level comment to the wrong article.
Did someone say satellites? Said Elon Musk, perking up.
I think it's safe to say Google would not be seriously considering this idea in the absence of SpaceX launch prices. The ULA price for launching 180 satellites, assuming you cram 5 of them into each launch (a guess based on the usual definition of 'small' when talking about satellites), is a nice shiny $16,200,000,000. Give or take. And you haven't even built the satellites for that. The current SpaceX price would probably be $1.6 billion, since SpaceX is 1/10th of ULA, so the $1 billion estimate is probably predicated on the new pricing assuming first stage reusability. Without Spacex, and indeed, without SpaceX's most advanced capability (which isn't quite done yet), Google's idea would be a nonstarter.
It's been said for decades that getting launch costs down would invite whole new use cases. This is a dramatic demonstration of the truth of that assertion.
I worked for comcast and know what that cost is.
Good thing that's past tense, or you wouldn't dare show your face here.
I knew the margins were good. I didn't know they were that good. If I hadn't already posted on this thread, I'd be modding you up. Your post needs a LOT more visibility.
I know it's a pipe dream. But a fella can dream, can't he?
A fella can do more than dream. A fella can contribute to the FreedomBox project. Money, code, trying it out on your mother-in-law, every little bit helps.
(Fine print: FreedomBox Foundation takes no responsibility for disturbances in your domestic tranquility due to software experimentation on your mother-in-law.)
This x 1000. I pay $65/month for an AT&T 12 Mb business UVerse account with 5 static IPs. Upload is a crappy 512K, but as you mentioned, there's no throttling and no ports are blocked.
512k? For allegedly a business connection? That's pathetic. That's beyond pathetic. That's so sad you should make a little miniature gravestone and stick it next to your modem.
I think that usage-based billing does make sense, since the costs go up with usage.
Not it doesn't because no it doesn't.
The marginal cost of sending 1 GB worth of data through a connection vs 1 MB of data through a connection is $0. Zero dollars. Nothing. There is effectively no measurable difference. The Internet is not a goddamn series of tubes. Attempts to reason about it as if it were are doomed to failure as not even wrong.
Packet-switched networks do not work like any other utility. The product being delivered is not the major expense of the operation. When delivering water, the water must be filtered and treated, a large on-going expense. When delivering electricity, it must be generated, a large on-going expense. When delivering sewer service, the waste water must be treated, a large on-going expense.
Bytes? Bytes are nothing. For most of the existence of the Internet, once you powered on a router, it's on. The amount of power it uses idle and the amount of power it uses while busy are effectively indistinguishable. The circuitry of the switching fabric draws the same amount of power all the time. The required switching speed wasn't achievable otherwise. It's only been very recently that routers were available that can sleep ports, and you can bet your typical US ISP doesn't have those. That would require replacing equipment that already works, and even with sleepy ports, the difference in power usage is still very small, so small it gets eaten by the labor to do the changeover.
But wait, you say! What about the Internet connection? You might think there's something there, but you'd still be wrong. Assuming the ISP in question hasn't managed to negotiate free peering, it still doesn't matter because the law of large numbers kicks in. The ISP can negotiate a price based on the average expected usage of all of their subscribers, because that number is very predictable. When Jane Q. Public uses more data this week than last week, her additional usage is lost in the noise. It takes major changes in available services, like the rise of Netflix, to shift that number appreciably, and that happens over an extended period of time.
So no, costs do not change with usage of Internet service. Once you've wired up the connection, turned on the equipment, and established connections to the other networks, you've spent what you're going to spend. If the connection is saturated 24/7 or not used at all, it still costs you the same to run it.