Actually I work for a company that specializes in rural areas. Not Alaska or Wyoming rural, but we've built fiber into schools in towns too small for a gas station.
Like I said, if you fill out the right forms there is a ton of funding available.

If that's what you're worried about, we already know that this particular galaxy supports life. Our chances of finding it in one of the others was astronomically smaller anyway.

A steampunk universe, most likely.

At least that only violates one person's privacy.

This doesn't jive with my experience. K-12 schools can get federal funding for IP connectivity and in my experience they generally end up with way more than they need. I've seen bus garages with Gigabit connections and elementary schools with 10Gigabit. That's enough bandwidth to aggregate thousands of broadband customers. Maybe qualifying for that funding is a pain or has limitations that some schools don't qualify for, but there's definitely a LOT of money spent every year subsidizing new fiber for schools.

Or the Connect America Fund, which subsidizes rural telecom buildouts. Rural areas being predominately poor and expensive to reach.

You'd be surprised at how many of these we are still using, especially in the far north or the desert areas where it is both flat and sparsely populated.
Most of those old legacy microwaves only go up to a DS3 though, which is 28 T1s or about 45 mpbs of encapsulated Ethernet traffic.
Now there is a new generation of microwave gear going in for Wireless ISPs and cellular backhaul. A lot of it already goes up to a gigabit I believe. I'm a fiber guy though so I don't know too much about them.

You understand why you get cash back though right? You get cash back because Visa/MC are charging so much extra they can afford kickbacks to the user.
By the same logic, CurrentC would be able to afford the same sort of rewards programs to get you to NOT use Visa/MC. Just because they haven't announced this doesn't mean they're not going to do it. If anything, I would expect more lucrative rewards programs because they're cutting out that middleman entirely.

He's not claiming a loss. He's listing Goodwill on his balance sheet. Since this is an 'intangible' asset it's taxed differently than a huge stadium.

To an ever increasing portion of the population, everything is about politics.

They are using technology developed for fiber optic communications. I expect the fiber they are using is standard single-mode G.652 fiber, and the device they are using to measure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... is an OTDR, which we use in telecom to measure fiber quality and locate defects/breaks.

The US system works exactly like the German system, as long as you are only dealing with voice or T1s. Unfortunately the laws have not been updated to apply to IP, Video, or cable and fiber delivery for that matter.

The safest car the NHSTA has ever tested, for one thing?

It's kW*hour not kW/hour. If a new battery powers my phone for twice as long does that mean it has half the capacity?

There is some shared medium in all the PON applications, but the segregation of traffic is handled within the PON implementation. All the customer and 3rd party service provider should see would be a transparent VLAN-tagged Ethernet pipe.
I'm not a PON expert so I don't know how security is handled. I don't know what would happen if I went out and bought my own GPON modem, plugged it into the fibers,and tried to sniff my neighbor's traffic. That's sort of outside the scope of the discussion though.

I do know if you look up all those acronyms and read the wikipedia articles, you'll know more about the future of telecom than most of the people who work in telecom. :)