https://www.opensecrets.org/ov...

Actually it is close, and it's only in the most recent election that Republicans took the lead in fundraising. I expect this is largely driven by the general lack of progress on social issues and the outstanding progress towards a police state we have made.

Yes. Although more and more amplifiers are either Raman effect based or hybrid Raman/EDFA.

He didn't address peering at all, so it's possible that Comcast/VZ/ATT could still bottleneck their peering links to Google/Netflix/Amazon to reduce the amount of bandwidth their customers have access to without doing anything in 'the last mile'.

Raman amplifiers add zero latency. EDFA amplifiers add latency equivalent to the length of the fiber coil inside, which is going to be just a few microseconds.

No, it really doesn't. 5 microseconds per kilometer of latency.

The receive sensitivity on common '10G' DWDM optics is frequently down to -24 dBm or lower. That's less than a hundredth of a mw. So from that perspective, that +0 or +3 dBm is rocket hot. 100G optics aren't quite as sensitive, but still down to -14 or -17 or so depending on the specs.

This sort of thing is measured in dBm to make the math easier. Decibel Milliwatts, where 0 dBm = 1 mw and it's a logarithmic scale up and down from there.
Individual channels are on the order of 0 to 5 dBm, or 1 to 3 mw. The composite signal coming out of an amplifier, which consists of multiple channels, is on the order of 20 dBm depending on how many channels are active and what the reach of the amplifier is. That's about 100 mw. Definitely a laser safety concern, but not military style death ray.

There are, which is why the electricity is at very high voltages to overcome it, which is why it attracts sharks. I'm more of a terrestrial guy, but if i remember correctly what they do is apply a very high + voltage on one end of the cable and a very high - voltage on the other end, and the amplifiers are powered in series inside of 'festoons' on the bottom of the ocean.

But there are still going to be amplifiers. They are referring to eliminating transponders, which we already don't use for modern sub-sea links. This is basically just 16QAM, but instead of using 4 symbols over 1 frequency, it's 2 symbols over 2 frequencies tightly spaced together. It's been understood for a while that widening the channels was probably the only way to go beyond 100gbps for a transmitter/receiver.

Cyaninc.com and Infinera.com products are made in the USA :)

Multiple competing cable companies would have multiple competing outside plants. The franchise fee was always just a way for the town council to exchange monopoly status for money in the coffers.

He deserves to spend years in prison for being a pretentious asshole? That's ridiculous.

If we catch you we sue the shit out of you. In addition to that, I'm sure plenty of other vandalism type criminal charges also apply if it's intentional.

Maybe they save weight by not providing a return line?

"Radioshack never offered what the consumers really wanted
a good unlocked cell phone and our choice of prepaid plans." Unlocked phones don't provide the store residual payments like selling contracts does. That's the only thing that has kept Radioshack open this long.