Bond ratings don't necessarily tell you anything about the performance of an entity. They tell you about the ability of the parent entity (corporation, municipality, whatever) to make interest payments.

Here's a different take, opinion site (I tried to stink to links from news sites, rather than opinion sites in my original post.):

http://freestatefoundation.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-gift-that-keeps-on-taking-municipal.html

Not quiet. From the link I cited (which I viewed, overall, as positive): "The towns borrowed $92.5 million to create the company and, while MI-Connection is now in the black operationally, it doesn’t yet generate enough revenue to also cover the towns’ payment on the debt." The chairman of the company estimated that within 3–5 years, MI-Connection would be able to stop receiving further subsidies.

That's a lot of debt. We're not talking millions of potential customers in this area either, the cities are relatively small.

But here's the biggest problem for Davidson and Mooresville. AT&T fiber is coming to the Triad and Google is coming to Charlotte. AT&T and Google cost the cities nothing (or very little), and in fact they probably make money from permitting and taxes. What will happen to these municipal networks when there's competition? Will municipal fiber be competitive with Google or AT&T?

After having read about a lot of these municipal setups, 100 million debt is not uncommon. This is expected to be paid back over decades. I guess we'll see how often they become--or remain--truly profitable over that time period.

That's exactly the point. Governments (and corporations, to be fair! any suitably behemoth organization) are terrible at planning for this kind of project and event. It's really hard to predict the future (no shit, huh). A small municipality like Davidson, NC (population 10,000) being saddled with even a portion of 100 million debt, is a big deal. It doesn't take more than a few bad assumptions to seriously and very negatively affect the entire population of the area. Maybe they will be lucky and succeed, maybe not. It's a risk, and in my view, frequently one that is not worth taking when corporate fiber is in the process of exploding across the country.

It doesn't have to in order for it to be true elsewhere.

"Terribly expensive" is a relative term - if you're the cable company and could spend the money that would bring faster speeds to 1000 people, or even faster speeds to a million living in a highly populated area, you make the best choice for your company, because as of yet, the infrastructure is NOT a public utility.

Of course there are when there's hundreds of cities across the U.S. that have populations of hundreds of thousands or millions, unlike your little "northern European" nation that's as big as Rhode Island. BTW, I didn't say the total population density, I'm saying the U.S. is so large compared to Europe that you must break it down into highly populated (which accounts for 95% of the people) and lowly populated areas. If the companies haven't gotten to that last 5% yet, too bad - it's one of the prices you pay for living in the countryside. The 95% that live in highly populated areas, with few exceptions, has decent internet access.

The backwards system of it being cheaper to incarcerate someone for 50+ years than to quickly execute them is asinine. In some countries they would have a second jury or committee of judges watching a death penalty trial, the instant appeal would be dealt with immediately. This process of incarceration for 20 years through numerous appeals is ridiculous. So I will say this - I agree that we just do life without parole in order to save money, but my preference would be instant appeals and immediate execution, especially in cases where the perpetrator admits guilt and actually asked for the death penalty instead of solitary confinement for the rest of his life, because that's where he's going... locked in a cell for 23 hours, then an hour alone in a little exercise room. And that's it.

No.

Do you need batteries?

No.

The fine line between opsec and paranoia.

With an initial install cost of 40 million funded by the denizens of Longmont, I hope a lot of you subscribe at $59/mon!

I'm looking forward to getting fiber as well. Funny how back in the day those who played network games from a university were LPB (low ping bastards). 80ms pings?! So unfair to those of us on dialup...

Actually, North Carolina is one of the most active states in the country in terms of upcoming fiber installs. All of the main populations centers--Charlotte metro area, the Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill), and the Triad (Greensboro/Highpoint/Winston-Salem) are currently scheduled to receive AT&T fiber, Google Fiber, or both(!) within the next year or two.

Disclaimer, I live in NC and generally support municipal broadband projects when communities are underserved. I'm a big fan of the Wilson fiber service.

First, there is no concept of a citizen of a city or municipality. People are citizens of a state. Cities, counties, municipalities are all creatures of a state, and thus are under the control of state government, not local or federal government. There's no hypocrisy because the general argument in favor of states rights is not about ultimately devolving power to the smallest possible unit of control, but about maintaining state legal authority from being assumed by the federal government.

The main argument against municipal broadband projects is that they frequently fail and leave the municipality saddled with debt. This becomes the responsibility of the state government. Thus, state governments have the power to regulate what projects municipalities embark on, because the state government is the ultimate guarantor.

The secondary argument against municipal broadband is that municipal projects are typically able to entirely bypass permitting and other planning approval stages (costly stages and costly permits; let's not forget the requisite greasing of the political wheels). They are frequently given rights of way and access that private companies do not have authorization to use. There is a good chance that a municipal broadband network would discourage other companies from making a significant investment facing this kind of unbalanced competition. If the project then goes on to be a significant money loser, the municipality is even worse off than when it began.

Examples of municipal projects that have failed or otherwise had explosive debt:

Provo, UT (saved by Google)
Lafayette, LA http://www.rstreet.org/2014/05/30/muni-broadband-the-gift-that-keeps-on-taking/
Davidson, NC and Mooresville, NC http://www.lakenormancitizen.com/news/news/item/6426-reinventing-mi-connection-an-inside-look.html
Utah UTOPIA alliance http://www.wsj.com/articles/municipal-broadband-is-no-utopia-1403220660

Apple is obviously eating companies and barfing up cash like a corporate NoFace at this point - there was a story here just the other day about calculating location to 1/3 meter using DSP on GPS multipath reflections which is good enough for anything but robotic construction. Iridium reception is going to just add cost - the overwhelming trend is cheaper sensors and more processing power.

I don't agree with Lord Vader, but I support the Stormtroopers.

1) Unfunded.

Who cares? None of the Federal mandates on the People are funded. Amtrak can figure out a way to become more efficient and follow the law or the administrators can quit and get out of the way.

They have until the end of this year to get PTC up and running on all trains, or they should be force-marched to Federal prison, like the rest of the hoi-palloi. Live by the sword, die by the run-away train.

But I want a car that I'm going to keep for 15 years to be obsolete in two! :)

Seriously, why don't we just have an activation code for an e.g. "Toyota App" for Android and iOS and a wifi display protocol as standard features by now? I can understand in 2010 why this wasn't the case, but at this point - people who eschew smartphones in 2015 should certainly be able to buy a $60 Android stick to plug in instead.

Oh, right - here's why the headline is complete nonsense - the PC Revolution was the perfect example of what happens when an industry is unregulated. We get things like the Internet. Thank you, you awful capitalist bastards.

I saw the full trailer last week before Ex Machina - unless the trailer was godawful garbage, to me it looked like the budget was way too high, the action direction cheeky to a fault (e.g the zooms in to childlike sneers) and the color grading was entirely wrong. I like my Mad Max low-budget and gritty - *like the universe its set in*. The vehicles were so overly-elaborate in this one that it broke the suspension of disbelief ("can we get some more spikes on that? Here's another $50K"). Maybe it's full of all kinds of acting brilliance that never made the trailer, but nothing in what I saw made me want to see this installment.

That is the Trouble with Gribbles.

That got a lol.

Because even if Affirmative Action is their "policy" that doesn't necessarily mean that every implementation is in compliance with the law.

LK

That's how I feel about it - some people simply do not deserve to live with the rest of humanity. There should never, ever be a chance that some people should ever have the possibility of afflicting more atrocities on society. I can can understand arguments about when it's perhaps not clear the perpetrator was guilty (and, of course, it sadly has happened before)... but of course, that didn't happen in this case.

People think it's all about punishment, but it's also about keeping those who'd violate your rights away from you.