I detest the ludicrous prices of internet service as much as anyone. I'm all for new players entering the market and shaking up the monopolies' crappy (in the sense of evil, albeit profitable) business models. But I am somewhat uncomfortable with a local government being this player.

Now it's true that certain industries are natural monopolies (in the sense of economics: they require large capital investment in infrastructure, which results in high barriers to market entry and enables the sort of tactics other commenters have described, pricing competitors out of the market when they do crop up. Many of these industries seem to work better for society when they are government-regulated utilities, e.g. sewage, electricity, water, police and fire protection. But that doesn't mean that the government should be allowed to run any industry which is a natural monopology. In particular, I think it's best to maintain a healthy distrust of government when it comes to running media of communication which are necessary for political speech and dissent from government policies. Internet, phone, and cable services, I believe, fall into this category.

Another example might be newspapers, which are obviously about to go out of business, because website redistribute for free the content produced by the papers' journalists. Some people have proposed endowing newspapers as nonprofit organizations. Another possible model, I suppose, would be having the government pay journalists to do their reporting, which would then be delivered to citizens, e.g. online. But no one (I hope) would seriously consider this a good idea for "saving" journalism --- we would end up like with a state-controlled media of questionable objectivity, not really worth a damn.

The moral? Be wary when the government owns the flow of information. It's a Good Thing that the ISPs are being challenged. But hopefully private enterprises can accomplish the same thing, too.

I've got to agree that Courant-Robbins is the place to look. It's got pretty much everything -- a nice taste of calculus, some elementary number theory, and even a bit of knot theory. It's the elementary math book which comes closest to capturing the spirit of of the mathematical world as I grasp it, now nearing the end of my undergraduate math major and set to go to graduate school next year. It was also one of the better Bar Mitzvah presents I received, in retrospect.

At a lower level, Conway and Guy wrote an excellent book called "The Book of Numbers". It's got enough in it that a bright middle school or high school student could read it cover to cover four or five times and pick up something new and interesting on each read.

Another good book, written at an elementary level but sophisticated in content, is "Geometry and the Imagination" by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen.

The Weizmann institute outside of T.A. runs a summer program (two versions actually, one for HS students and one for undergraduates) called the Karyn Kupcinet International Science School for Overseas Students. At least, that's the part of the program I participated in, as an American undergrad. But there were a lot of Israeli HS students around, so I think you would be eligible. You get to troll the institute's websites and rank the distinguished faculty members you would like to do research with in order of preference. If you get into the program, they'll assign you one of your choices, and that advisor will help you with a research project. The CS/Math department is very strong. I don't know much about the other departments, But it's worth pointing out that Weizmann has its own particle accelerator (!), now used mostly for nMRI I believe.