I'm out of town for Christmas this year, as is my girlfriend. We have absolutely no need for the Internet in our apartment for the two weeks or so that we're going to be gone. But we're going to pay for it, because you pay monthly, and the service can't be turned on and off by request.

Phil Spector once said that he hated albums; he described them as being two singles and filler. The economics of music distribution, however, made it difficult to profitably distribute individual songs, and so for years, artists bundled ten or more songs together. If you wanted just one, you were out of luck, because you had to buy all the rest, too.

iTunes and digital music changed this. It's not likely that Internet Service Providers are going to make this change anytime soon, but I still wonder: the electric company gives me light switches and a metered rate. Doesn't that make sense for bandwidth?