No, not a can ... but if you buy more than, say , a case a day, then the rate goes up. In the case of a case of beer, I'd say that if you consume more than a case a day, you need to be charged 24x ... or maybe 2^24x. However, since your beer isn't a commodity in critically short supply ... as electricity and telecom system bandwidth are ... it's not likely I'd urge you be charged more for increased consumption. If it were to become rationed, I'd happily sell you my ration at a nominal profit. That's why electricity might be a valid candidate for rationing. Then, the guy who uses a dozen and a half racks of large, power-hungry full-height 5-1/4" drives on a DEC CPU for his ISP will pay a reasonable amount, e.g $45 per kWH while the guy who uses the most power efficient system possible, costing a bit more per bit, as you know, with a microcomputer CPU on his single computer, and turns off the display when he goes to the head, will only pay 5 or 6 cents per kWH. Likewise, the guy who generates 500 TB of SPAM per month can pay 2 T$ per bit while those of us who generate maybe 10 MB per day get ours for a flat rate, say $15-20 per month. What grates me, however, is that large users of electricity have lower rates, hence, are less motivated to economize. It's the same with cars and gas consumption. If gas cost $1 per gallon for users of less than 25 gallons per week, $100 per gallon for users of 25..40 gal per wk, $10,000 per gallon for people using (for all their cars) > 40 gal per wk, things would change. Corporations would be viewed the same as individuals, by the way, so milk delivery might go up in cost. Individuals not using their allocation could sell that allocation to others at whatever price they can negotiate. The scheme to which I've alluded would fix that, wouldn't it? Maybe a bit of moderation could be applied, but you get the picture. BTW, I don't smoke. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Robertson" <steven_j_robertson(a)hotmail.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2001 12:57 PM Subject: Re: Wave of the Future (Spam)