The safest car the NHSTA has ever tested, for one thing?

It's kW*hour not kW/hour. If a new battery powers my phone for twice as long does that mean it has half the capacity?

There is some shared medium in all the PON applications, but the segregation of traffic is handled within the PON implementation. All the customer and 3rd party service provider should see would be a transparent VLAN-tagged Ethernet pipe.
I'm not a PON expert so I don't know how security is handled. I don't know what would happen if I went out and bought my own GPON modem, plugged it into the fibers,and tried to sniff my neighbor's traffic. That's sort of outside the scope of the discussion though.

I do know if you look up all those acronyms and read the wikipedia articles, you'll know more about the future of telecom than most of the people who work in telecom. :)

Decrypt? I think you're inventing networking technology. In a utopian muni network, the muni would offer MEF compliant E-Access service over whatever GPON, EPON, WDM-PON solution they choose. The customers would appear as VLANs at a ENNI handoff at the local CO or the nearest NAP/IXC. This is how it already works in a wholesale/large enterprise market and it's easy to buy service from one provider through an access network run by another.
Another solution that would work would be to just provide plain unbundled IP service and allow the muni customers to buy voice and video services over the top. I'm sure 3rd party IPTV could be made to work over an peered access network.

Either way, I have no doubt this would be captured and squeezed and we'd sit around blaming $OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY for the next 50 years.

Do they compete to offer services over it, or do they buy the mayor's nephew a new car? Instead of building an open fiber network, you might just end up building out Comcast's fiber network for them. I don't see this working out well, at least not in large swathes of the USA.

Less Spam vs Open Internet? That's an easy question for me.

I believe this is spot on. I also think that services stuck behind a NAT should not be sold as 'Internet' either. This seems like a perfect stick for the FCC to keep ISPs in line with. Do whatever you want, but if your product is inferior we won't let you advertise it as 'Internet'

I don't think you break up a monopoly by building Municipal fiber. You just create a new Monopoly. Maybe that monopoly is benevolent, or maybe you live in Illinois and it's a perfect blend of incompetent and corrupt. I think a better step would be to break up or limit franchise agreements which are a big reason there is so little competition in the last mile.
Kudos for spelling 'colo' right though.

I work for a large ISP. We love the Netflix and Google cache boxes because they reduce our network costs and congestion and improve our customer experience. But we also do not rely on video as a revenue stream like cable and FTTH companies...

Or maybe they get it from Level 3, Cogent, XO, Integra or some other wholesale carrier. Competition is actually pretty healthy once you get out of that residential last-mile. Also, if you switch from an ISP that relies on selling video services to one that is more focused on data and voice, you will find they are much less dickish about impairing your connection to content providers.

The government doesn't have any consequences when they make a bad investment, so the due diligence is going to be lower.
It also opens the door for the money to just be funneled into companies owned by campaign donors or which employ lots of union labor or which happen to be located in an influential senators district.
On the other hand, funding basic science at universities and other pure research organizations is something that is much less open to abuse, and something that private investment is less able to provide for. On the other hand it's also less likely to funnel in the campaign contributions and votes, so I'm not holding my breath.

Forgot the link, awesome. http://www.connotech.com/FAXBI...

Faxes are secure? Not likely. It would be easy to tap into the phone line of a hospital or a lawyer, run the receive pair to a fax machine, and print off a copy of every fax that comes through. See here for a more detailed overview.

There's nothing wrong with the data. This data does say something about the driver. The BRZ costs more than the FRS, which means FRS drivers tend to be younger and dumber and get more tickets.

Did you make that up, or did you have someone else make it up for you? Apple has thousands of employees in Ireland. http://www.independent.ie/busi...