An Advanced Radioisotope Stirling Engine using the methane winds of Titan.

That's 3 without even trying......

Steve

Can't they use their individual domain credentials?

Steve

AC@16:04

I'm aware of the "Who needs more than 640K RAM/56Kbps modem" side of things, but realistically the current 512kbps/2Mbps services achieved are more than adequate to interact with most businesses (apart from digital media provision)

My point is that it's not about content creation (whether pre-print or digital media). Investing for this small part of the economy that cares about high-speed is an asymmetric levy.

Physical goods and services don't care how fast the broadband connection is (assuming that it's fast/reliable enough to complete transactions), and that's the bulk of the economy.

This sort of investment - if it's not just posturing or mere cant - needs to show an economic return, and that will not magically come from the provision of high-speed proadband.

Steve

As Professor Barwise noted, there is no pervasive need for a vast amount of the population to have high-speed internet access (i.e. over and above a reliable connection for email/web browsing for those who want to).

Fast broadband on its own does not magically generate revenue

Why will it be "a massive boost" to the economy?

Access to reliable connections (of a reasonable speed) enables email and interaction with suppliers of goods and services. This need can pretty well be served via uncontended 64k ISDN links, rather than nominally 2Mbps+ links (assuming that there are not pages of flash animations).

Once you have a reliable connection (of almost whatever speed) then surely the economic impact of increasing speeds is minimal.

Where high-speed connections with decent QoS would make a difference is in official digital content delivery (e.g. the media, TV, VoD, VOIP, iPlayer, software), and also in unofficial content delivery (e.g. P2P, Torrents).

This would only affect a relatively small part of the economy, such as the paid-for content providers and the ISPs/telcos (and maybe advertising brokers/market intel firms like Google/Phorm etc.).

Unofficial content delivery (as it's all free) will not have a positive economic impact, and at higher speeds may be negative as more free stuff could then be downloaded more quickly.

The economy dependent upon delivery of Physical goods and services would be unaffected (assuming that their existing connections are reliable for transactional interchange).

Why then is faster broadband going to be such a magic economic bullet? At least the railways and roads can move physical goods from A to B.

"The point of things like the ABL system is to be able to reach out at the speed of light and blast a missile out of the sky so it *doesn't* kill anybody."

That rather depends where the bits come down.

Although an explosion at altitude is probably preferable to one on the ground, a weapons-grade fissile material shower is best avoided at any altitude.

Steve

It's a shame that their analysis did not determine whether the pledges from those that signed up would have offset the carbon impact of their Grauniad newspaper purchases over that period.

I suspect it might show that not reading a dead tree-based newspaper (and especially the Grauniad...) is a worthy pledge to make.