Power usage can be brought down by many orders of magnitude. In the era of cheap power we are now in, the electronics design focus is on speed but if power was expensive a computer could run on a lot less power than the current ones... pacemakers with microprocessors run for years on a single lithium battery... Edit: with all this credit freeze up, why does not somebody start up an ebank? With no toxic debt on the books I should think that they would be the only game in town rather quickly....
The U.S. is an E-Nation This is the biggest load of crap. As of August 2008, 96.81% of US workers connected to the Internet with broadband As of Q2 2008 Household Broadband Penetration was 67.14% http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0809/ To Compare The buildout of highways or Rail Road by the U.S Gov to adding more bandwidth is just an excuse for a national broadband tax Also we are the best users of broadband http://gigaom.com/2008/01/30/us-makes-the-best-use-of-its-broadband/ What is the future. Bleak. People think we are going to get government funded WiMAx to every home What we are going to get is 1) National Internet Tax 2) Further Regulation of the internet 3) Monitoring of traffic and restrictions of Usage. Look for the fights over political dollars dictating actions. Just as we do with NPR, and NEA 4) Stifling innovation. Look for Large government boards that will take 5 years to come to terms on standards for technology that is 10 years out of date. Think ATT 1981 5) Greater monopolization. With the heavy hand of government in the mix only well capitalized and connected companies will survive. Focus on Lobbying and not innovation. Every Industry the government has tried to help they have destroyed. The success of our technology and internet industry is directly due to it being among the least regulated industries. Even then, broadband deployment has had issues because of government regulations at the CLEC level. Every day the future for the U.S Diminishes.