Nope. It's more like they lost the punchcards.

Relative to the logarithm of the drag, obviously.

No kidding. Every time I post a comment here on /. voicing my opinion about nuclear power being inherently unsafe, two guys are on top of me, praising the virtues of nuclear energy and calling me out for the clueless hippie liberal that I am.

Except you can't blame municipalities for the cost when they're pretty much the only part of government that's been trying to provide low-cost access. Many municipal governments have tried to set up as ISPs for their citizens, and the costs are typically far lower than what you see from the cable/DSL duopoly. They've been lobbied and sued and otherwise lawyered to death for the effort, but at least they're trying.

And while you can't fix size, you don't really need to. Most of the long-distance fiber backbones have already been run, and most of the US population lives in urban or suburban areas. The bulk of the land area of the US is rural, and they may not get cheap broadband anytime soon (it literally took an act of Congress to get them electricity and telephone after all), but they're a pretty small minority.

Ok, I almost need healthcare after trying to read this.

It's cases like this that make me miss Groklaw even more. They'd have someone there in the court to report on all this, and explain the legal shenanigans going on, with links to prior cases of the people involved trying the same thing, and probably how Microsoft is funding them!

Could California just slide into the ocean and disappear already?