Regardless of who owned the local loop or who sold service on it, US local loop lengths are longer than most other countries (regardless of population density).

I believe the long local loops relates to a massive central office "centralization" in the US when digital switching came along. Why exactly this centralization did not happen in Europe (and Australia) is not clear to me, it might have involved timing of DSS deployment versus the timing of DSL practicality.

The result is that the US has fewer COs, and longer local loops. Worked fine for voice, not so well for DSL.

I believe "Bell Mobile TV" was a unicast IP service, but we know that Verizon and AT&T are planning roll-outs of LTE Multicast in the US, which is a very different beast.

Would it still be against "net neutrality" to allow carriers to serve up specially priced content on LTE Multicast, or would they have to make LTE Multicast available to all content providers equally? And how does one actually do that (given that the Internet, in general, has failed miserably at getting "general access" multicast routing to work)?

Don't be mislead by the debt problem. If Greece had economic growth, it would not have a debt problem.

Greece rankes "mostly unfree" on the Index of Economic Freedom:

Greece's economic freedom score is 54.0, making its economy the 130th freest in the 2015 Index. Its score has declined by 1.7 points since last year due to a substantial deterioration in the control of government spending and smaller declines in business freedom, labor freedom, and fiscal freedom. Greece is ranked 40th out of 43 countries in the Europe region, and its overall score is below the world and regional averages...the rule of law remains problematic, with property rights weakly enforced, tax evasion on the rise, and corruption pervasive. Despite efforts to create a more business-friendly regulatory environment, the labor market remains rigid and slow to adjust to market realities...The overall pace of regulatory reform lags behind other countries. With no minimum capital required, launching a business takes five procedures and 13 days. However, completing licensing requirements still takes about four months on average...

By the way, regarding "austerity", Greece's public expenditures equal 58.5 percent of domestic output. That does not sound very austere to me.

Considering recent studies show that cancer is more likely to be caused by genetics than smoking

Can you link to these "recent studies"?

And if so, why did lung cancer rates fall by 12% in the last 30 years in the US, does that mean we are evolving immunity?

Or perhaps it lines up with reflect changes in the nation's smoking habits - smoking less, especially by men.

what the U.S. does won't matter to China and India because their domestic markets will be larger than the United States. Currently they have even worse social inequity than we do

Actually the US Gini index is HIGHER than that of China or India.

Perhaps Google wants to go after the Xiamoi/Kindle model where most money is made on selling apps and value-add services, rather than phones or typical telephony.

Start mass producing some sort of cheapie glass-like thing under a different name out of China.

I saw one at CES 2015!

This is a direct recipe for increasing income inequality, and you have to be a dishonest psychopath to think that's a good ida.

You will have to show the evidence that higher tax rates on individuals with higher incomes are effective at changing income shares.

In case you didn't notice, EU countries also have rising Gini coefficients as well as the US, despite different tax policies (though the US doesn't have the same level of unemployment).

Higher returns to people with more skills is a function of increasing technology and global economic growth, and will continue regardless of the tax rates.

Certainly, a lot better than investing in more tax cuts for billionaires.

Alternatively, billionaires could be using their money left over after tax to invest in new technologies, and actually do it intelligently as they are trying to make money instead of political points.

It looks like US BSN are higher paid than their UK counterparts.

US doctors and nurses are paid about 50% higher than OECD equivalents even after adjusting for cost of living.

When governments are more involved in the medical field, they have the power to reduce salaries.

Although it may also be simply a selection bias.

I'd argue college is 50% or more credentialing inborn capability. The value of a college degree is that 1) you proved yourself capable enough to be accepted by that college and 2) you made it through four years without dropping out.

Evidence for (2) is that there is a huge salary difference between someone who completes 99% of college without getting a degree and someone who gets the degree for completing 100%.

Why should guys like Mitt Romney only get to pay 13% on his annual income in tax

You should be aware that for tax year 2014, the maximum capital gains tax rate is now 23.8%. Romney was only paying 13% effective tax rate when the capital gains tax maxed out at 15%.

Of course Romeny paid millions in taxes, which is more than you ever will.

Back in the late 1990's, we edited Geeks in Space Slashdot Radio with Cool Edit. It was great for normalizing & compressing the recording levels from Slashdot HQ, we could do noise gates, speed up/slow down audio, etc.

What is ironic is that Gastric Electric Stimulators are used to ease the symptoms of gastroparesis, reducing nausea and allowing those patients to gain weight.

No, Hedy Lamarr invented a particular mechanical way to achieve frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) using paper player piano rolls.

FHSS was actually invented by Tesla, who patented the idea in 1903, and there were various implementations of it by WWI.

Moreover, direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) was actually only made practical through the "noise wheel" work of Mortimer Rogoff around 1950. His work was kept secret for over 30 years, which is part of the reason why few people know of him.

Hedy Lamarr was clearly a very intelligent person, and her work with George Antheil was apparently used to control some torpedoes in the 1960's using FHSS.

But it is misleading to say that she invented spread spectrum, or even invented frequency hopping.

It should also be noted that only the lowest bandwidth early 802.11 protocols used FHSS. There was a transition to DSSS, and now most modern 802.11 protocols use OFDM.