Perhaps it will take them 45 years to fill those 39 orders?

For us here in Norway PSTN/ISDN was our bad time, when the one monopolist could charge pretty much everything they wanted. When we got DSL, the market was deregulated and lots of offers showed up. In the US, far more people get Internet via cable, which obviously has far more reason to protect their traditional business. As for recent fiber roll-outs it's really the power companies that got the ball rolling there, eyeing an opportunity to break into a new market by running fiber optics as well as power lines. Obviously the incumbents couldn't sit around and watch that and it became a race to lay down fiber first, since it's rarely profitable to come second. So it's a very nice three-way race to roll it out, though the prices are fairly steep.

Except if you got a bad batch where some kind of material or production defect will cause many disks to fail near simultaneously. The overall MTBF might be true for all the disks they produce, but unless you make a real effort to source them from different batches over time you can't assume that's going to be your MTBF.

Or if you have a Netapp with a decent support contract: A disk fails while you're asleep[1]. The filer notifies Netapp over a dedicated POTS line. Netapp overnights a new disk to you. You find out the next morning that the disk failed, via a call from the loading dock about a package for you. You pop in the new drive, activate one of your other hot spares, and configure the new drive as a new hot spare, all in less time than it took you to walk down to the loading dock and back.

[1] You don't have single disk failure alarms wake you up in the middle of the night because you configured your array to run with two failed disks.

It wasn't quaint *being* that American, it was embarrassing.

In this case, yes. But, in general, someone with an important call might not be calling from a cellphone, and hence not have the opportunity to send an SMS.

A receiver like that would have a power draw that is almost infinitessimal compared to the power draw of the motors. A simple radio receiver adequate for the job would possibly reduce the flight time by less than a second.

The government, of course.

You know it's not a contest to come up with the worst bullshit. If you're left with one person 95% of the time when you have 249 possible wrong answers, it's like being left with 4000 people when you have 999999 wrong answers. If all those are too close to tell apart you'll misidentify >99.9%.

Imagine for example that you wanted to find people by height and weight, as measured to nearest cm and kilo. It might work decently on a small group, but if you scale it up to a million people there'll be a lot of duplicates and then you're just guessing, double the population and you halve the chance of being right.

Assuming they're calling from a cellphone.

Oh, and by the way, their competitors are already "allowed" access. Cable companies don't overbuild each other because it's a great way to lose money.

Revoking their franchise IS shutting down cable. The system belongs to the operator. You can revoke their franchise, but then you have to either build out a new system, from scratch (figure $800 per home passed, or $150M for a city like Minneapolis, and that's just for the outside network), or get another company to come in and put up the money, even though you've just kicked out a cable company (not exactly an enticing proposition).
I suppose you could try to eminent domain the system, rather than building it out yourself, but that's a couple of years of litigation. Meanwhile (i.e. absolute minimum a year, probably 2-3), your constituents are without cable TV or internet service.