Oh and I should add. The big cost is digging. If you're digging and laying conduit, you might as well blow fibre while you're at it.

Oh you can blow another one, but you have to pull the first one first. Conduit to single premises are a couple of millimetres inside diameter just so that you can blow a single narrow fibre. When you pull thicker trunk lines you attach the bundle to a "cushion" with the same inner diameter as the tube and hook what you're pulling to that, so then of course you can pull more due to the better fit and more force available.

Also, there are no contacts on residential fibre, it's not a patch cable, instead the terminations are typically welded. (At least at the head end, but not always in the CPE). So that's an extra cost and complication.

But you raise a good question. Where to read about it... I haven't seen any books on the subject, actually not much open literature at all. I learned this stuff "on the job" when I was building telecoms equipment at Ericsson, but most of that wasn't open documentation. (Not that it couldn't have been, but you know corporations.) The only more open literature I've seen is about LANs, and it typically doesn't cover the MAN side. Manufacturer literature would probably be your best bet. Ericsson is one company manufacturing fiber and conduits, but there are of course a ton of others.

Of course the reason they're sensoring Nazi imagery is that the US had it written into (west) German law as the new German law was being written past WWII.

So having USians argue that there's never any reason for government censorship is ripe with irony (and of course good old double standards).

Overall, I'm not sure I agree with your point. I find Europe much much freer, in that while some types of speech are regulated (not really "censored"), the rest of society is pretty free from censorship. While in the US the government doesn't abridge free speech much (well there are the seven words you allude to), the rest of society; corporations, special interest groups, media etc. are all too willing to self sensor.

Case in point, it only takes a week for a previously European company that get American owners before email starts to randomly disappear due to random filters falsely flagging non US English words as "profanity/sexually charged" or some such nonsense. I've never worked for a European company that even considers that kind of shit. Though it was funny at Volvo here in Sweden where they all of a sudden weren't making any cars since email with the word "slut", i.e. "has run out" weren't reaching the people responsible for material flow. You'd think a few such incidents would get the email filter turned off. No, of course not, we can't run a company that doesn't silently drop email with the word "slut" in them, the filter stayed, and we had to learn to avoid certain words. (Which would have been easier had the list of forbidden words been public, but that would have actually made sense... I swear, the Chinese are easier to deal with that US owners when it comes to random corporate censorship.)

I doubt that companies would fall over themselves to pull multiple strands of fibre to the same residence. (Of course talking last mile here). Here, the telco won't even go onto a street that's been "visited" by the energy company, even to hook up houses that aren't connected.

So, we're back to the natural monopoly argument. Requiring an operator to pull a new fiber (which means also pulling a new conduit, you can't blow eight strands of fibre in one conduit if you don't do it all at once), is just too large a barrier to entry. Not much better than what you have today. No, lowering barriers to competition is the way to go.

That sounds overly complicated and expensive and risks customers becoming captured (if vertical integration is allowed) i.e. "No you can't change ISPs, you're on our fibre." That's a good way to not achive competition.

Better would be to do it like we do here in Sweden (though sadly not universally) with "Open City Networks" where a (municipal) company, in my case the local energy/district heating company, also laying fibre and installing CPEs etc. (They're all basically the same anyway). The competition is at the ISP level, where I have a choice of 8-10 ISPs/telecom providers/IP-tv providers. If I want old fashioned cable TV there's only one provider, but I'm happy with it, and there's plenty of IP-tv providers. Due to market pressure we even have the old elephant monopoly telco (now private since many years) installing Open City Networks, i.e. where you don't have to have them as the ISP, but have a choice.

Cost is about $40 for 100/100 Mbps, including IP-telephony. TV is on the order of $20 and up depending on the usual cable TV crap.

How are they any more personal than expenses incurred when the police investigates a crime that you've been the victim of? Or, perhaps a better example, when the fire department helps put out a fire, that if left to itself would lead to much greater damage?

Answer: That's how society, especially risk management through insurance, works. Put another way. Why should these ingrate people's little pet peeves be allowed to cost society twice as much for a worse outcome? What gives them the right to make other's pay so much more for nothing in return? Their right to selfishness is after all killing people. If they want to live in a society like that, why would it be wrong for the majority to just say "Fine go start one somewhere else, you're not welcome here."?

I used to do that. But then I came to the realisation that I was running a server anyway, and I always wanted a workstation handy, so I've gone the way of the big iron on consolidated everything onto one machine. It's my router/firewall, file server, web server, workstation and everything else. It sits in my living room and for maximum convenience I even don't bother with different user accounts. Instead I use Chrome and my wife uses Firefox so that we can access our email, surfing sessions etc. just by switching windows. Runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with Mate desktop.

Since it's consolidated I can spend more money on better components (CPU, 32 GB memory, raid storage etc.) and I save a couple of hundred dollars per year in electricity alone from not running a separate file server etc. like I used to. It also means less to manage. (The kids use another computer with windows 7 and when they mess that up, it's no major hassle. They just have to do without until I get around to fixing it. Which is good for them anyway... :-)

Well yeah, I'm in Sweden, and we have so much fresh water that we just let the surplus run straight out into the ocean. And you know what. There's not a lot stopping diverting a bit of that water to raising animals and then let it out into the ocean (having been used for fertilisation first of course, yes agg runoff into our water ways is an environmental problem, but that's almost all industrial fertiliser, not cow piss).

So by that token, there's no problem. (Hint there are problems, but that isn't one of them). It's not as if we could build a pipe line and ship our excess water to Africa where it would be put to better use...

Well, there's that. On the other hand agriculture has changed dramatically in my lifetime. When I was a wee lad much of my family where small hold farmers with a dozen-twenty cows etc. That's all gone. Today it's mega farms that are in many cases owned, not by the farmers themselves, but by agriculture corporations. Feed lots have replaced pastures etc. Now it's not as bad here as it is in some places I've seen in the US. Not yet at least. But there's a large difference of scale especially on the local surroundings between running a small farm with ten pigs you can scratch behind the ears when the inclination strikes you, and a 1000 pig industrial farm. That place can stink up the entire countryside like you wouldn't belive...

I see. You mean that there are people who would make that fine a distinction. While I don't think there are enough of those people to make a difference in a poll like this, your point is well taken.

Yes, but that's predicated on the idea that people wouldn't know what "celestial maps" meant and that they likewise wouldn't know what "horoscopes" meant. I don't think you'll be able to find support for that. Many more people (the overwhelming majority) would probably be familiar with the term horoscope and know what it entailed, than would know about "celestial maps".

So no cigar.

Well you fooled me at least, so it wasn't a complete loss. :-)

Yes well: Sweden 38.2% of GDP, Luxembourg 20.8% of GDP, Finland 53.1% of GDP, and Denmark 45.6% of GDP. (From the CIA world fact book, est. for 2012).

From the same source: USA 70% of GDP (and that's apparently not counting it all).

"Huge" debts indeed... So we're lazy? Well it takes one to know one I guess...

Sure, but there's being wrong and there's being wrong.