HN user
I'm unfamiliar with ISP scale networks - where is the actual bottleneck for them? One of the large ISPs in the UK is Virgin, and they have their own fibre network. They also throttle Youtube.
Is there only so much data that can go down a fibre line? Is it the routers (I'm not sure if calling them routers is correct?) that lie between the main backbone and the network connecting a street/apartment? Is it the hardware in a handful of large data-centers?
I've experienced this too, not just in winter.
I live in Scotland, and the weather is mostly wet and damp (rain on ~2 out of 3 days of the year). This year we had a glorious summer. I got productive work done in a single month in June than the entire first 5 months of the year.
There exists at least one UK university which uses Haskell as a teaching language in its CS department. Not quite 7 year olds, but certainly a good percentage of fresh programmers.
Does it result in better programmers? Perhaps. It certainly forces you to understand recursion.