There are many no-annual-fee cards out there that charge no interest if you pay it off every month.
And as soon as a single check for one of your credit cards (or other loans) gets lost in the mail, or arrives a day late, all your cards will instantly go up to 40% interest. Good luck paying off the balance.
b) if you're robbed, as long as you conscientiously inform the card company, you are not liable for anything charged on it - you're out nothing.
If someone is able to charge the card before you have a chance to report it, you are liable for $50.
[...] debit cards don't have the same form of protection.
Completely wrong. Credit card liability terms are only slightly better than with debit cards.
If you report the fraud within two days of noticing your debit card is missing or being abused, you can only be charged $50. If you wait longer, then you may owe a maximum of $500. And only if you wait a ridiculously long 60 days after a fradulent charge appears on your bank statement, do you lose all protection.
Might it be possible that there are methods of living that do not require us to live distantly from useful and necessary services?
No. Upward mobility is an absolute necessity in a free market economy.
It's not as if everyone is an idiot. Trying to live near where you work, stores, and where you want to recreate, is in-demand, and therefore even a tiny amount of space in city centers is unbelievably expensive... More expensive than a few gallons of gasoline and one hour of your life, on a daily basis.
There isn't enough arable land, and there are already concerns about top soil depletion just with food crops.
Arguments about arable land are crap. I can grow crops on the roof of the Sears Tower if necessary. And things like genetic modifications have the potential to allow even higher yields, with less resources. The economics are the only existing problem with biofuels, though that's certainly not insubstantial.
A pre-heated car with 5 people in it on a hot, sunny day requires a lot of cooling capacity to catch up, let alone keep up, and I'm sure that a lot of folks in such a situation might feel that it's nowhere near overbuilt enough.
It requires a lot of power, up-front, but there's absolutely no reason it has to run at full power once the air temperature has dropped to tolerable levels, which makes electrically powering it a much more practical proposition. Currently, they just keep running, even when the temperature has dropped to levels where the AC is terribly inefficient, and really can't lower the temperature any further no matter how long it tries.
Personally, I've always wanted to be able to set my AC to a high temperature, or a low-power level, rather than freezing my ass off and wasting power left and right. Until that happens, I toggle my AC.
It may need 10 minutes to cool the vehicle, but after which, shutting it off will go unnoticed... The now-chilled mass in the air system will cause it to keep blowing cold air for a couple minutes, and you'll only notice after if you're really paying attention. I imagine if you turn your AC on for a minute, then off for 4, nobody would notice any difference.
I bought a chevy 3 cylinder metro 10 years ago. It got me about 44 hiway/38 city new.
And a maximum speed on level ground of, what, 60MPH? On the freeway, you are a just a speed-bump.
My friends laughed at me. I laughed right back when they discovered their monthly gas costs would last me 3-4 months. Don't turn on the AC though. I'll laugh at you because I have a dirt cheap used Saturn, that seats 4 (unlike your tiny tin can), is much more powerful, and gets quite nearly the same gas mileage as your tiny car. Ever driven across the country in your car? I have.
the SMART car is supposed to be quite excellent in a crash
The SMART car looks good after it has been crashed, at the expense of the passengers. It's reinforced not to crumple, basically AT ALL. In other words, when you hit a wall going 50MPH, your neck will snap, but with minor repairs, someone else will be able to drive around in the car you died in...
I think the route to all electric cars will be traveled using better and better hybrid technology to wean people off of gasoline.
Existing hybrids are more accurately parallel hybrids. Parallel hybrids have to be heavier than fully either conventional or electric vehicles, much more complex, much more expensive, and exist only so that they can avoid actually working on any of the hard problems holding back electric vehicles.
There is no upgrade path there. It's just one more pointless waypoint. The technology used in hybrids has absolutely no bearing at all in constructing an all-electric vehicles. Furthermore, it seems manufacturers are going out of their way to avoid allowing you to plug-in your hybrid, use it in all-electric mode, add batteries, etc. pointlessly forcing you to depend just as much on gasoline as you always have.
The road to all-electric cars seems to be lightweight electric city vehicles like the Zap Xebra. In fact they've announced plans for a long-range, fully-electric SUV, though I'll reserve judgment on that one.
But I digress. Wake me when someone produces a plug-in serial hybrid. Current (parallel) hybrids can never become anything more than a fuel saver.
Every time I think that the Slashdot crowd may have regained some of their critical thinking skills, some fool goes and posts a whackjob conspiracy theory and gets modded +5 informative.
Strange... You seem to know none of the facts, but are ready to brush it off as a "wackjob conspiracy theory". Who is lacking in "critical thinking skills" here?
There are a few reasons why AMD may go bankrupt in a few years:
AMD isn't stealing market share, hand over fist, from Intel anymore... That, however, is an absolute world away from bankruptcy, which you claim. AMD is a closer second than they've ever been before, and doing extremely well. What's more, over the past few years of dominance they've made the same inroads with systems manufacturers that kept Intel artificially propped-up throughout the years of the P4 fiasco.
AMD is behind in the laptop market, which is growing at a staggering pace.
AMD has a more significant share of the laptop market now than they did for basically the rest of their existance. Furthermore, they have the lowest-power laptops processors, even if they're perhaps slightly slower than Intel's offerings.
I can only hope that I am wrong but I would definitely not buy AMD shares today.
I can assure you that you are wrong, and I wouldn't buy AMD shares either, but that has to do with how unbelievably over-inflated the stock market as a whole is, not fear for the future of the company. I'd definitely wait until a lot more of idiot average-joe investors get scared off before I'd buy.
Call up Comcast, tell them you saw a compelling offer from the local DSL provider for only $29.99 (or whatever else the price is) for a year and Comcast will match it.
FYI, I tried that with Earthlink about a year ago... Their scheme is to offer you a $10-20 rebate, claiming they're likely to have a sale/price-drop in another month or two. In my case, I checked for the next 6 months (after I switched) and nothing ever happened. I guess they hope they can brush you off, and hope in a month you'll forget about it.
time. It sounds nice and all, until you compare price/kbs against other countries and remind yourself again, that the US is still falling off the backend of the broadbandwagon.
BAH! I would personally be MUCH happier with, say, 128/64k DSL/Cable for $5/month, rather than $50/month 10Mbit...
Even with my regular use of P2P, Linux/BSD ISO downloads, etc., I don't come anywhere close to maxing out my 768k connection for the tiniest fraction of a day.
I'm obviously not a gamer, and I'm sure I could squeeze at least one VoIP stream in that (with traffic shaping to stop everything else).
let's not be so tunnel-visioned to believe that this could never happen on the blue side of the aisle.
Maybe it could have, but it didn't...
And if even if it was... It wouldn't be tied in together with the past 500 huge GOP scandals in the past 6 years that have also been ignored, and yet still having no repercussion.
Democrats aren't remotely perfect, but they're a hell of a lot LESS corrupt than the current Republicans.
most atheists bend themselves to the scientific way of thinking,
I'm sure that's wrong. And extremely bigoted to say the least.
and as a result would have a difficult time making the numbers work out in such a way that a war would actually benefit them.
I fail to see how you've come to that conclusion. Many wars through history have been extremely profitable. That's the main reason wars are waged.
I can evaluate and rationally CHOOSE from a list of outcomes (wrong or right!), rather than just picking one, and "taking it by faith".
Religious beliefs absolutely do not forbid rational thought.
Faith/Organized Religion != Blind Faith
Religious people, at least in the western world, almost always disagree with their churches on at least one of their major teachings. It isn't only atheists who use condoms.
Why dont they simply use polycarbonate and use the same coatings used on glasses?
As a glasses wearer, I can assure you the scratch-resistant coating on plastic glasses is crap. It's certainly an improvement over nothing at all, but it wears out over time, and doesn't come close to the scratch resistance of actual glass.
I imagine a touchscreen undergo far more scraping than eyeglasses, and with a high sticker price, most people are going to want the screen to be legible for more than just the first year.
Sorry for the naive question in advance, but I was under the impression that some flavors of BSD (OpenBSD?) were extremely secure as well.
The confusion here is that this certification has nothing to do with exploits or kernel bugs (the form of security most people talk about on a regular basis). We're talking about CIA/NSA levels security. It's based largely on how finely-grained the system permissions are, so that an exploited application can't access any other files, open any other ports, etc., etc., as well as ensuring that a system can have multiple administrators, each with very limited scope of privileges (no single root account) and overlapping authority. It is known as MAC (Mandatory Access Controls).
RedHat Linux has MACs mainly because it took the mechanisms from the NSA's SELinux and rolled it into their own OS.
The difference, though, is that RedHat is a company, which wants to pay for certification so they can use it to market their product. FreeBSD/TrustedBSD isn't run by any large company with a deep financial interest in marketing the OS, so it's unlikely to go through the evaluation and certification process.
OpenBSD doesn't have any of those security mechanisms, but you can accomplish the application security part of it through extensive use of systrace. Both methods are difficult to use effectively in practice, and require a skilled an dedicated admin... not really cost-effective for 99% of companies.
Blockbuster does basically the same thing as Netflics (ordering over the net with postal delivery) but you can drop the movies off at the store, if you want, so, yeah, I guess they are still relevant.
Nice comparison... The two are exactly the same, because they're in the same business...
Blockbuster delivers movies by mail, but they have a far smaller selection, usually master their own non-standard DVDs which have extremely saturated and damaged colors which I can't stand to watch for 10 minutes, and often have problems when you try to seek.
First of all, he doesn't say it's an "impossibility" at all. He says it won't resemble historical colonization, as the distances are too far for communications and trade.
So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon in order to move a capsule [...] to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime.
That sounds quite practical, actually. If the Soviet Union could build a 50 megaton bomb in 1960, surely we can produce the equivalent of 8 of them today...
Alternatively, something like a solar sail seems within reach even now, and surely could provide much more power still, and with far less weight. Something a bit more complex like a Broussard ramjet isn't too far behind the horizon, and could also become workable.
The biggest source of concern with space travel seems to be projectiles, which we haven't worked-out yet, but newer materials and clever designs seem likely to resolve those problems in a reasonable time frame.
Your entire post is a all straw-man... I did not say the US was founded as a theocracy, of any kind.
And, just for the record, I certainly do believe that all organized religion is a scourge that has resulted in untold death and destruction rather than the altruism and brotherhood that it is said to foster.
Interesting that you have faith in something that you absolutely cannot possibly prove.
I'm just waiting for the atheist wars... Where atheists decide their beliefs are the only correct ones, and militarily attack any nation whose people have differing views... We can call it an un-holy war.
One of the holy grails of the nanotech enthusiast would be a system that is capable of producing all the components used in it's manufacture.
1) "Holy Grail" != "Realistic Possibility"
2) Raw materials (and energy) isn't free, and nanotech can't create them out of nothing.
3) Even if nanotech has the capability to be directed to create copies of itself, its probably always going to be less expensive to centrally produce.
If your car is made of incredibly strong, light materials, you can make it half the weight, twice as safe, and still save on fuel.
I'm afraid you can't. Inertia is an overriding principle in car crashes... If your vehicle weighs half as much, it's going to bounce-back twice as fast, and twice as far, with the very real possibility of breaking your neck in the process. Your other ideas are more realistic.
How is Farenheight better for weather? I don't see any advantage there at all.
You only need to use 2 digits the vast majority of the time, and usually don't need to go into negatives. In addition the precision is just right, precise enough for what people want to know, without requiring a decimal place, which, when you start using, you have the burden of accuracy down to 1/10th of a degree...
The same can be said for at least a few other imperial measurements... Inches, feet, gallons, etc., they just happen to match real-world scenarios very often. With large measurements like km/kelvin/tonne/etc., I suppose it really doesn't matter, as long as you have a point of reference.
During the program I was watching, suddenly some magical gradients took over the lower part of the screen and advertisements started appearing for different programs to watch and so on. [...] So, my question is, how does DVR solve that?
Same as any commercial... You skip right over it, and assume the part of the show you're missing isn't important.
Alternately, the really empowering part of DVRs is that you aren't tied to the airing of a show during the time of day that you're home... The pop-ups on the first-airing of the show may be annoying, but the channel syndicating them may have fewer pop-ups, or none at all. For those around the Los Angeles area, KCAL 9 syndicates a few shows like South Park and Scrubs late a night (11pm+), and not only do they *not* have *any* pop-up advertising during the show, they don't even display a station logo... Just a 100% clean picture of the show. Without a DVR, I wouldn't be able to watch that insomniac timeslot airing of the show on a regular basis.
But if that isn't possible, and the advertising is annoying enough, you just tell your DVR not to record that show anymore, and look for something else. I know that's the reason I stopped watching Law and Order, after being a loyal viewer for something like 15 years. When timeslots aren't an issue, you'll find that there is actually more good content on TV than you can watch, so dropping a show because of its annoying advertising is pretty painless. In fact, I've found that programs on PBS make up about 3/4ths of the shows I watch... Nova, Frontline, Nature, American Experience, Secrets of the Dead, NOW, etc., when timeslots are no longer a problem, and you are ensured you'll be able to watch the shows from beginning to end no matter when you sit down, PBS really has a lot of content, with little advertising.
Wake me up when the ISPs actually have the bandwidth to do this without kicking me for downloading a day's worth of broadcast quality programming.
From the very beginning of cable internet access and DSL, the ISPs have had FAR more than enough bandwidth to provide all the video you could want. What they don't have, however, is a big enough internet pipe to handle unicasting it all.
There are a couple solutions. The most obvious transition is simple multicasting. Have dozens of TV streams coming over the internet (or via digital satellite) to the ISP, where they are then dispatched to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, at nominal cost (the routers really don't care). This, though, is only the simplest transition from the existing model.
The better solution is proxying. If I could get every ISP to accept a 2U server from me, and attach it to their network POP, I could cache terabytes of TV programs on it, and let thousands of subscribers of the ISP download them as often as they want, for a really nominal fee, as nobody has to pay practically anything for internet bandwidth. Of course, ISPs don't want to allow 3rd parties to do that. They want full control over their network, so they can roll out their own cable service, and charge ridiculously high prices. Competition would ruin that.
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And as soon as a single check for one of your credit cards (or other loans) gets lost in the mail, or arrives a day late, all your cards will instantly go up to 40% interest. Good luck paying off the balance.
If someone is able to charge the card before you have a chance to report it, you are liable for $50.
Completely wrong. Credit card liability terms are only slightly better than with debit cards.
If you report the fraud within two days of noticing your debit card is missing or being abused, you can only be charged $50. If you wait longer, then you may owe a maximum of $500. And only if you wait a ridiculously long 60 days after a fradulent charge appears on your bank statement, do you lose all protection.
No. Upward mobility is an absolute necessity in a free market economy.
It's not as if everyone is an idiot. Trying to live near where you work, stores, and where you want to recreate, is in-demand, and therefore even a tiny amount of space in city centers is unbelievably expensive... More expensive than a few gallons of gasoline and one hour of your life, on a daily basis.
Arguments about arable land are crap. I can grow crops on the roof of the Sears Tower if necessary. And things like genetic modifications have the potential to allow even higher yields, with less resources. The economics are the only existing problem with biofuels, though that's certainly not insubstantial.
It requires a lot of power, up-front, but there's absolutely no reason it has to run at full power once the air temperature has dropped to tolerable levels, which makes electrically powering it a much more practical proposition. Currently, they just keep running, even when the temperature has dropped to levels where the AC is terribly inefficient, and really can't lower the temperature any further no matter how long it tries.
Personally, I've always wanted to be able to set my AC to a high temperature, or a low-power level, rather than freezing my ass off and wasting power left and right. Until that happens, I toggle my AC.
It may need 10 minutes to cool the vehicle, but after which, shutting it off will go unnoticed... The now-chilled mass in the air system will cause it to keep blowing cold air for a couple minutes, and you'll only notice after if you're really paying attention. I imagine if you turn your AC on for a minute, then off for 4, nobody would notice any difference.
And a maximum speed on level ground of, what, 60MPH? On the freeway, you are a just a speed-bump.
My friends laughed at me. I laughed right back when they discovered their monthly gas costs would last me 3-4 months. Don't turn on the AC though.
I'll laugh at you because I have a dirt cheap used Saturn, that seats 4 (unlike your tiny tin can), is much more powerful, and gets quite nearly the same gas mileage as your tiny car. Ever driven across the country in your car? I have.
The SMART car looks good after it has been crashed, at the expense of the passengers. It's reinforced not to crumple, basically AT ALL. In other words, when you hit a wall going 50MPH, your neck will snap, but with minor repairs, someone else will be able to drive around in the car you died in...
Existing hybrids are more accurately parallel hybrids. Parallel hybrids have to be heavier than fully either conventional or electric vehicles, much more complex, much more expensive, and exist only so that they can avoid actually working on any of the hard problems holding back electric vehicles.
There is no upgrade path there. It's just one more pointless waypoint. The technology used in hybrids has absolutely no bearing at all in constructing an all-electric vehicles. Furthermore, it seems manufacturers are going out of their way to avoid allowing you to plug-in your hybrid, use it in all-electric mode, add batteries, etc. pointlessly forcing you to depend just as much on gasoline as you always have.
The road to all-electric cars seems to be lightweight electric city vehicles like the Zap Xebra. In fact they've announced plans for a long-range, fully-electric SUV, though I'll reserve judgment on that one.
But I digress. Wake me when someone produces a plug-in serial hybrid. Current (parallel) hybrids can never become anything more than a fuel saver.
Strange... You seem to know none of the facts, but are ready to brush it off as a "wackjob conspiracy theory". Who is lacking in "critical thinking skills" here?
AMD isn't stealing market share, hand over fist, from Intel anymore... That, however, is an absolute world away from bankruptcy, which you claim. AMD is a closer second than they've ever been before, and doing extremely well. What's more, over the past few years of dominance they've made the same inroads with systems manufacturers that kept Intel artificially propped-up throughout the years of the P4 fiasco.
AMD has a more significant share of the laptop market now than they did for basically the rest of their existance. Furthermore, they have the lowest-power laptops processors, even if they're perhaps slightly slower than Intel's offerings.
I can assure you that you are wrong, and I wouldn't buy AMD shares either, but that has to do with how unbelievably over-inflated the stock market as a whole is, not fear for the future of the company. I'd definitely wait until a lot more of idiot average-joe investors get scared off before I'd buy.
Yes, but it's still a milestone...
And the numbers do indicate that the percentage of IE users is gradually going down, across the board, while FF rises even faster.
FYI, I tried that with Earthlink about a year ago... Their scheme is to offer you a $10-20 rebate, claiming they're likely to have a sale/price-drop in another month or two. In my case, I checked for the next 6 months (after I switched) and nothing ever happened. I guess they hope they can brush you off, and hope in a month you'll forget about it.
BAH! I would personally be MUCH happier with, say, 128/64k DSL/Cable for $5/month, rather than $50/month 10Mbit...
Even with my regular use of P2P, Linux/BSD ISO downloads, etc., I don't come anywhere close to maxing out my 768k connection for the tiniest fraction of a day.
I'm obviously not a gamer, and I'm sure I could squeeze at least one VoIP stream in that (with traffic shaping to stop everything else).
Maybe it could have, but it didn't...
And if even if it was... It wouldn't be tied in together with the past 500 huge GOP scandals in the past 6 years that have also been ignored, and yet still having no repercussion.
Democrats aren't remotely perfect, but they're a hell of a lot LESS corrupt than the current Republicans.
I'm sure that's wrong. And extremely bigoted to say the least.
I fail to see how you've come to that conclusion. Many wars through history have been extremely profitable. That's the main reason wars are waged.
Religious beliefs absolutely do not forbid rational thought.
Faith/Organized Religion != Blind Faith
Religious people, at least in the western world, almost always disagree with their churches on at least one of their major teachings. It isn't only atheists who use condoms.
In fact much (most? all?) of the TrustedBSD code has been integrated back into FreeBSD 6.
As a glasses wearer, I can assure you the scratch-resistant coating on plastic glasses is crap. It's certainly an improvement over nothing at all, but it wears out over time, and doesn't come close to the scratch resistance of actual glass.
I imagine a touchscreen undergo far more scraping than eyeglasses, and with a high sticker price, most people are going to want the screen to be legible for more than just the first year.
The confusion here is that this certification has nothing to do with exploits or kernel bugs (the form of security most people talk about on a regular basis). We're talking about CIA/NSA levels security. It's based largely on how finely-grained the system permissions are, so that an exploited application can't access any other files, open any other ports, etc., etc., as well as ensuring that a system can have multiple administrators, each with very limited scope of privileges (no single root account) and overlapping authority. It is known as MAC (Mandatory Access Controls).
RedHat Linux has MACs mainly because it took the mechanisms from the NSA's SELinux and rolled it into their own OS.
FreeBSD has a spin-off project called TrustedBSD which has actually been around longer than SELinux, and has had much more impact, with some of it's features having been integrated into other systems such as NetBSD and OS X. See: http://www.trustedbsd.org/ and http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/
The difference, though, is that RedHat is a company, which wants to pay for certification so they can use it to market their product. FreeBSD/TrustedBSD isn't run by any large company with a deep financial interest in marketing the OS, so it's unlikely to go through the evaluation and certification process.
OpenBSD doesn't have any of those security mechanisms, but you can accomplish the application security part of it through extensive use of systrace. Both methods are difficult to use effectively in practice, and require a skilled an dedicated admin... not really cost-effective for 99% of companies.
Nice comparison... The two are exactly the same, because they're in the same business...
Blockbuster delivers movies by mail, but they have a far smaller selection, usually master their own non-standard DVDs which have extremely saturated and damaged colors which I can't stand to watch for 10 minutes, and often have problems when you try to seek.
That sounds quite practical, actually. If the Soviet Union could build a 50 megaton bomb in 1960, surely we can produce the equivalent of 8 of them today...
Alternatively, something like a solar sail seems within reach even now, and surely could provide much more power still, and with far less weight. Something a bit more complex like a Broussard ramjet isn't too far behind the horizon, and could also become workable.
The biggest source of concern with space travel seems to be projectiles, which we haven't worked-out yet, but newer materials and clever designs seem likely to resolve those problems in a reasonable time frame.
Interesting that you have faith in something that you absolutely cannot possibly prove.
I'm just waiting for the atheist wars... Where atheists decide their beliefs are the only correct ones, and militarily attack any nation whose people have differing views... We can call it an un-holy war.
1) "Holy Grail" != "Realistic Possibility"
2) Raw materials (and energy) isn't free, and nanotech can't create them out of nothing.
3) Even if nanotech has the capability to be directed to create copies of itself, its probably always going to be less expensive to centrally produce.
I'm afraid you can't. Inertia is an overriding principle in car crashes... If your vehicle weighs half as much, it's going to bounce-back twice as fast, and twice as far, with the very real possibility of breaking your neck in the process. Your other ideas are more realistic.
You only need to use 2 digits the vast majority of the time, and usually don't need to go into negatives. In addition the precision is just right, precise enough for what people want to know, without requiring a decimal place, which, when you start using, you have the burden of accuracy down to 1/10th of a degree...
The same can be said for at least a few other imperial measurements... Inches, feet, gallons, etc., they just happen to match real-world scenarios very often. With large measurements like km/kelvin/tonne/etc., I suppose it really doesn't matter, as long as you have a point of reference.
Same as any commercial... You skip right over it, and assume the part of the show you're missing isn't important.
Alternately, the really empowering part of DVRs is that you aren't tied to the airing of a show during the time of day that you're home... The pop-ups on the first-airing of the show may be annoying, but the channel syndicating them may have fewer pop-ups, or none at all. For those around the Los Angeles area, KCAL 9 syndicates a few shows like South Park and Scrubs late a night (11pm+), and not only do they *not* have *any* pop-up advertising during the show, they don't even display a station logo... Just a 100% clean picture of the show. Without a DVR, I wouldn't be able to watch that insomniac timeslot airing of the show on a regular basis.
But if that isn't possible, and the advertising is annoying enough, you just tell your DVR not to record that show anymore, and look for something else. I know that's the reason I stopped watching Law and Order, after being a loyal viewer for something like 15 years. When timeslots aren't an issue, you'll find that there is actually more good content on TV than you can watch, so dropping a show because of its annoying advertising is pretty painless. In fact, I've found that programs on PBS make up about 3/4ths of the shows I watch... Nova, Frontline, Nature, American Experience, Secrets of the Dead, NOW, etc., when timeslots are no longer a problem, and you are ensured you'll be able to watch the shows from beginning to end no matter when you sit down, PBS really has a lot of content, with little advertising.
From the very beginning of cable internet access and DSL, the ISPs have had FAR more than enough bandwidth to provide all the video you could want. What they don't have, however, is a big enough internet pipe to handle unicasting it all.
There are a couple solutions. The most obvious transition is simple multicasting. Have dozens of TV streams coming over the internet (or via digital satellite) to the ISP, where they are then dispatched to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, at nominal cost (the routers really don't care). This, though, is only the simplest transition from the existing model.
The better solution is proxying. If I could get every ISP to accept a 2U server from me, and attach it to their network POP, I could cache terabytes of TV programs on it, and let thousands of subscribers of the ISP download them as often as they want, for a really nominal fee, as nobody has to pay practically anything for internet bandwidth. Of course, ISPs don't want to allow 3rd parties to do that. They want full control over their network, so they can roll out their own cable service, and charge ridiculously high prices. Competition would ruin that.