Have you EVER done anything related to cell site design? 40 mile RADIUS? That wiki states the LIMIT as 25 miles for GSM. In case you've never driving along a highway, there are towers a lot closer than every 50 miles. Wonder what the reason for that is? Oh, maybe it's because the radius of each cell site ISN'T 25 miles.

Let's try this. The signal being transmitted by the cell site, regardless of carrier or technology, travels at a certain frequency. When this signal hits any obstruction (yes, even air counts) it gets degraded and weakened by a certain amount. Buildings, trees, and ground are the main sources of signal degregation. If your tower is in a valley, you ain't getting signal from that tower on the other side of the mountain. The sad reality is that almost every tower is too low (either the height of the tower or it's ground elevation) to provide a 25 mile radius of coverage. Some mountain towers or towers along large bodies of water (Great Lakes for example) can get substantial line-of-site distances where calls can be made at 25 miles or more. So to assume that you can build towers to cover 6000+ square miles is absurd. Do the calculation assuming a radius of about 2 miles (most towers on highways in New England are spaced about 2-4 miles apart) and see how many towers you need to blanket the US. You could even go with a radius of 5 miles, because your towers in the Great Plains and other flat areas will get much greater radius of coverage and mountainous regious would have much smaller radius towers.

Either way, you can't have a valid calculation with an asinine assumption like each tower can cover 25 (or 40) miles in every direction. Nice try, though.

C'mon. At least of the 6 major Batman movies, 4 of them were decent or good (I'm sorry, but Batman & Robin and Batman Forever SUCKED!). Did you even SEE The Dark Knight? Hardly slapping on a fresh coat of paint and slapping it up there. And nevermind that Batman Begins WAS basically a "reboot" for the franchise.

And it's not necessarily originality that's lacking in Hollywood. It's the fact that original, high profile, big budget pictures tend to elicit quite a following if they're at least decent, and this causes sequels to be "big" as well simply because people who liked the first (or second, or tenth) will come see the next simply out of curiousity. Repeat ad nauseum.

I'm not sure where you went to school, but there are only 2 "American" continents. They are North and South America. Central America is a region, not a continent.

CDMA equipment is by and far more expensive than GSM (like almost 10x's more expensive....thanks Qualcomm). In fact, carriers such as US Cellular deployed TDMA (pre-GSM) after analog, and then switched to CDMA. CDMA is a more robust technology than GSM, which is why it give the appearance of better coverage in the sticks. It's also the reason GSM carriers have migrated to UMTS (which is simply wideband CDMA, or W-CDMA). And I think if you compare native coverage, you'll see that AT&T has coverage quite comparable to Alltel and VZW, and I highly doubt they've spent more money on building out their network compared to VZW.