I give a huge fuck about this issue and I only watch a few hours of tv a week.

As if to say they are usually taught anything they need to know for their job anyway.

All of the preliminary plans involved using, in some form or another, methods that would allow them to keep the oil rather then having the primary concern of say, stopping the leak all together.

I don't think "we" as in the government could have come up with a solution quicker, what I think is the solution should have already been mapped out BEFORE ANY DRILLING TOOK PLACE. You know, like a "oh shit, all my servers are dead, what do I do?" The fact that things took this long is a sign that nobody is really looking over the shoulders of the guys in charge here. This was a slow and lethargic bullshit response that started with BP trying to make money off the spilling oil and spiraled into "welp, guess we can't fix it, might as well plug it up." btw, I live about 100 miles from the coast, have family who live on the coast, more family who fish on that coast and plenty of friends who've been down there and shunned off by the local law enforcement (read: BPs minions). This is a catastrophic failure and totally pisses me off to no end.

No, complain to the FCC. http://esupport.fcc.gov/complaints.htm Follow the little wizard and put everything you told us into it. It's not AT&T's job to stop phone calls to your device. You either call the police or the FCC.

My thoughts exactly. I do wonder how they plan on making money off this. Perhaps their portal (eg: gmail) will have some target advertising? Anyway, I'm excited about this but it's years off before we have widespread adoption.

Excluding the hiring of people to find the right deployments to sink money into, isn't this what the government is doing? As far as internet infrastructure go's we are way behind, and creating more infrastructure allows for higher internet speeds. This in turn will drive the market to produce products that use those faster speeds. Creating jobs and spending.