Usage insensitive pricing of Internet access can support market development initiatives, particularly when relatively few players participate, each having made a significant commitment to lease or invest in transmission facilities. With the passage of time, more ISPs have entered the marketplace, often without the need for, or interest in making substantial investments in facilities. Later entrants may serve smaller geographical regions, and may have a deliberate strategy of "free riding" the facilities investment of other operators who still agree to accept traffic at quasi-public interconnection points. Likewise, because end user access to the Internet is typically priced on a low, flat-rated, "All You Can Eat" basis, no facility conservation incentive exists and therefore congestion can readily occur. As congestion threatens to impede quality of service, some ISPs have responded by prioritizing traffic streams, and by varying the price of network access on the basis of the transmission capacity and traffic volume of other ISPs seeking interconnection. This demand-based responsiveness soon might include reserved bandwidth that would provide higher service reliability and quality for a premium price. Resorting to traditional pricing mechanisms means parties causing congestion, or contributing comparatively less to congestion abatement, will incur higher costs of doing business. The responsible parties include smaller ISPs who lack the traffic, subscribership and transmission capacity needed to sustain highly reliable service in the face of increased demand and new Internet applications that require more bandwidth. Requiring payment for access to the facilities of other larger companies constitutes an efficient outcome, but one that likely will impose comparatively higher costs on smaller and rural ISPs and their subscribers.
While interesting in an academic sense, such a discovery is rather trivial in a practical sense. Superconductivity itself has a number of astonishing uses that can sometimes look like magic, but they're only useful when we can get them to occur at useful temperatures. Unfortunately, cooling something to 1K will require something along the lines of laser cooling in order to achieve, and this turns out to not be very practical. Superconductors with a very low critical temperature cannot conduct much current before they exceed their critical energy level and "go normal".
Useful superconductors are more in the line of HTC's, high temperature superconductors. The simplest of these are the superconductors that work when cooled to the order of 70 degrees Kelvin (-200C) by liquid nitrogen (which is cheaper than beer). If I recall correctly, the highest published HTC was around 175K, which is only 100 degrees below freezing. I've heard rumors of higher temperature superconductors, but haven't seen any referreed publications of results yet. Keep your eyes peeled, we'll see room-temperature superconductors within the lifetimes of most slashdotters.
To be fair to lower temperature superconductors, I believe the maglev train in Japan uses a lower temperature superconductor cooled by liquid helium, which is somewhere down on the order of 10K.
Superconductors aren't too useful for their property of not conducting current, since they have a critical maximum current level anyway. They are mostly used for their diamagnetic properties (they repel magnetic flux lines). This is the basis for how an MRI works, or for how super-fast magnetic trains work.
Slashdot Mirror
Space.com has more on the subject here.
Usage insensitive pricing of Internet access can support market development initiatives, particularly when relatively few players participate, each having made a significant commitment to lease or invest in transmission facilities. With the passage of time, more ISPs have entered the marketplace, often without the need for, or interest in making substantial investments in facilities. Later entrants may serve smaller geographical regions, and may have a deliberate strategy of "free riding" the facilities investment of other operators who still agree to accept traffic at quasi-public interconnection points. Likewise, because end user access to the Internet is typically priced on a low, flat-rated, "All You Can Eat" basis, no facility conservation incentive exists and therefore congestion can readily occur. As congestion threatens to impede quality of service, some ISPs have responded by prioritizing traffic streams, and by varying the price of network access on the basis of the transmission capacity and traffic volume of other ISPs seeking interconnection. This demand-based responsiveness soon might include reserved bandwidth that would provide higher service reliability and quality for a premium price. Resorting to traditional pricing mechanisms means parties causing congestion, or contributing comparatively less to congestion abatement, will incur higher costs of doing business. The responsible parties include smaller ISPs who lack the traffic, subscribership and transmission capacity needed to sustain highly reliable service in the face of increased demand and new Internet applications that require more bandwidth. Requiring payment for access to the facilities of other larger companies constitutes an efficient outcome, but one that likely will impose comparatively higher costs on smaller and rural ISPs and their subscribers.
While interesting in an academic sense, such a discovery is rather trivial in a practical sense. Superconductivity itself has a number of astonishing uses that can sometimes look like magic, but they're only useful when we can get them to occur at useful temperatures. Unfortunately, cooling something to 1K will require something along the lines of laser cooling in order to achieve, and this turns out to not be very practical. Superconductors with a very low critical temperature cannot conduct much current before they exceed their critical energy level and "go normal".
Useful superconductors are more in the line of HTC's, high temperature superconductors. The simplest of these are the superconductors that work when cooled to the order of 70 degrees Kelvin (-200C) by liquid nitrogen (which is cheaper than beer). If I recall correctly, the highest published HTC was around 175K, which is only 100 degrees below freezing. I've heard rumors of higher temperature superconductors, but haven't seen any referreed publications of results yet. Keep your eyes peeled, we'll see room-temperature superconductors within the lifetimes of most slashdotters.
To be fair to lower temperature superconductors, I believe the maglev train in Japan uses a lower temperature superconductor cooled by liquid helium, which is somewhere down on the order of 10K.
Superconductors aren't too useful for their property of not conducting current, since they have a critical maximum current level anyway. They are mostly used for their diamagnetic properties (they repel magnetic flux lines). This is the basis for how an MRI works, or for how super-fast magnetic trains work.