You can't use car batteries in your home. They make toxic fumes. You'd have to use marine-quality sealed batteries. And at the scale for your home, you're talking real money, usually around $5000-7500 in just batteries. They're heavy, bulky and take up a lot of room. Just think of putting 20-30 car batteries in your home. Plus you'll need to replace all of them every 3 years or so. If they can make a battery pack for $10,000 that's a fifth the size, lasts 10-15 years, and comes warrantied for use in specifically that method... that's a really big win.

I would consider the reduction of loss of property to be a economic benefit. It's the same reason stores hire loss prevention officers and put beepers at the door.

They could have put it in Detroit and used the city itself as an example of post-bombardment Taris.

Oh, well, if you don't trust it, I suppose we should can the whole project. I'll let Mercedes know that their automated controls for slowing down a vehicle to match the speed of the one in front of it, and their lane assist keeping distracted drivers from creaming minivans aren't effective enough, even though they haven't caused any issues yet.

It's not really a needed service, if you can do it yourself just as easily, or if it can be done by a computer. Did you pay a local technician to assemble your computer by hand, transistor by transistor?

That song is burned into my soul.

You peer with other carriers, not content providers, typically. Exceptions are if the content provider happens to also be in the same data center, or if they are also a carrier, ala Redbox / Verizon, Comcast / NBC, Time Warner, Google / Youtube... So they allow for no-cost peering agreements with the carrier / content provider, and also appear to allow for no-cost co-location. They probably used the word "peering" because it happens to be a hot topic in the news, and they are providing contrast to all the other content provider / carrier combos in that they are working with other people to keep costs down.

It appears that you may not have read the article. They let the providers put servers in their racks at the datacenters, and give them free power and connection to their networks, and if there end up being a bottleneck, it'll be the connections from the servers to the switches, in which case they'll simply allow the provider to put in more servers. It's like the old cache servers that companies would run to make their T1 seem snappier, or the old NNTP servers that they hosted in the past to lower their outside connectivity load.

Population density is pretty good where I live. I live in a major city. In fact, it's a lot like Austin. I know because I lived there all my life until a couple years ago when I moved out here. However, the city needs to make a bid, which means the council needs to not be owned by corporate interests. Our $80 million jumbotron on the stadium came at the price of them trying to close the local public libraries. It's unlikely that they'll see past the payments from the telco and cable company.

There is no winner when the rabbit must choose between the lion and bear.

They also said they were planning to offer this before Google moved in.

You've posted this twice now.
1) is Clear. 20mbps if no one else is using the tower. Reliably, closer to 3-4mbps. I know, I used to compete directly with them in the market, running a WISP north of Austin.
2)This is actually a VOIP company. They don't sell internet.
3) U-Verse: only available in some areas
4) Grande: Only available in some areas, usually do not overlap with Time Warner
5) VOIP company, no internet service
6)Western Broadband. This is the company I used to work for. Outside Austin, north of the city, in the rural area, it's the best choice for net. You can get a few megabits to your home when the cable company isn't there. Inside the city, they don't compete.
7) This is Clear again, see #1.
8) OnRamp is a Colo / Datacenter. Not home internet.
9) Business only, pretty much downtown only, where they have prewired. Extremely limited service area.
10) Clear again. See #1.

So, while you can go on yelp and pull up a list, you clearly didn't even click any of the links it's provided. Are you shilling, or just clueless?

Much of what drives up the cost is not laying conduit under the streets and giving fair access to the conduit. This means that companies have to get a permit (months or years, if it's not rejected) and then actually go dig up everything and lay cable. While that's expensive, it's still quite doable, but not if you have to line the pockets of the local council more than the cable company can to get your permit approved.

Where I am, you have 2 choices for internet. Comcast and AT&T. Until a few months ago, AT&T was DSL only. And 6 mbps just wouldn't cut it for my needs, since I work from home, so Comcast was a functional monopoly, and they acted like it. Until AT&T stepped in with the UVerse service and gave me more than I was getting from Comcast for about $50/mo less. Now, I'm with AT&T and Comcast has dropped price and increased service to compete. Funny enough, if they'd decided to price competitively when they had the monopoly, I'd probably be with them, since overall their net service was better, but I'm with AT&T to reward them for actually coming into the area to compete.

No, they had billions of government dollars to do it a decade ago, and didn't. Just took the money and pocketed it.