Übertechie and democratically elected despot of Stupid Evil Bastards worldwide, Les Jenkins put up a quick post on the latest developments in Internet speed:

By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group.

"Bettered"? Shit, they doubled it! Picture Doc Brown hollering "Two point fifty-six terabits! Tom — it can't be done! Can it?" Color us impressed.

Okay, sure, we know that this isn't coming to our homes any time soon. Hey, it isn't like our current broadband connections are even vaguely approaching the old record of 1.28 terabits per second, so we hold no delusions about seeing the new record rolled out for public consumption in the foreseeable future. But we can dream, can't we?

Just imagine how fast you'll be able to download porn, bid on eBay, and find out how many degrees of Kevin Bacon exist between Kenny Baker and Maximilian Schell. Oh, and we've heard some people actually do research and/or publish opinion pieces on the 'Net. We suppose you could do that faster, too, if you're into that kind of thing.

Yes, we're drooling at the possibilities. But take a moment, if you will, to mourn for all those soon-to-be-unemployed GUI designers who specialize in download manager windows and Flash preloaders. Poor guys. They'll be out of work, and we'll be surfing the Web at hitherto inconceivable speeds.

That's a sacrifice we're willing to make.

Unless of course, they start making programs and things to download that are much larger. It might be like with hard drives. My windows 95 had a hard drive with 500 megs of space. You can download videos and game demos bigger than that now. 500 megs for a hard drive would be a joke now. I imagine by the time we get connection speeds like that we'll need them for the programs and files we'll have.