Causing actual damage with an asteroid seems to require far more mass (or at least significantly better aerodynamics than a space station).

I would suggest it is the density of the asteriod vs the empty shells of space stations that is the problem.
A 100 ton asteroid (which might be equivalent to the ISS, and the shuttle was a lot lighter on re-entry) is approximately a 5 x 5 x 5 meter cube if you assume a 5,000kg / cubic meter density. It's not that big (er, spread out may be a better term) that aerodynamic forces can act on it in a way that can easily break it up and slow it down.

100,000kg moving at an impact speed of, say, 2km/sec is 0.5 * 50,000 * 4,000,000 or 100,000,000,000 Joules. Converting that TNT gives you about 23 tons of TNT. Not a world-ender, but not something you want to have land nearby. And that's just a 100 ton rock. Economies of scale would suggest you go get the biggest rock you can find, and a 5 x 5 x 5 meter rock is pretty piddly......

The fibres are rated at 2.5Gbps downstream, but they're split,

Split where? The NBN fibres in my town here in Tassie end up in your house. There's a 4-port distributor on the power pole outside, and when a person connects a fibre goes from there to the NTD. The distributor isn't powered, it's just a weatherproof connector.

They do get aggregated further upstream somewhere, so I guess there could eventually be some congestion there.

We can't just throw some men on a boat and have them survive when they arrive and along the way. We have to plan every detail, plan for every conceivable error and failure step and build very precise machinery using the best technology of the day. Sure, we can do it, but it'll be extremely expensive, very dangerous and unlikely to yield anything more useful than bragging rights.

Funny, everything after your first sentence describes early trans-oceanic seafaring exactly.

I'm not grumping about the system as such, just the vendor's claims.

"95% accuracy" sucks when you're scanning "thousands per hour" as you have to deal with at least one or two incorrect plates a minute. If "deal with" in this case means "officer isn't hassled by a beeping machine" it's ok.

I just hate the description of high throughput systems with a "xx%!" accuracy claim. Unless its up there in the 5 x 9's (like site availability), it's pitiful.

According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy.

Just a little grumble....
Two thousand an hour at 95-98 percent accuracy gives 40 to 100 wrongly-read plates.

Just like dictation software, where they say "99% accurate!" - a hundred words is pretty easy to clock up and then you seem to be forever correcting it.

And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio.

Oh yeah, I suppose, there'll be some cash needed to pay for all that compute time to render it like the big boys. Great big stinking wads of cash. But yeah, it's totally levelled the playing field now.

*rolls eyes*

HVDC is OK.

DC for homes is not - it's quite difficult to arc-proof a switch for 110/220VDC. In the late 1930's, when DC was being phased out here in Australia a couple of relatives of mine experienced arcs in DC light switches that progressed out of the switch and up the cabling feeding them. Only way to stop them was to go and find the next breaker upstream.....

Oh they're not idiots.

They're very smart.

It's just that they have different goals to what you would like.

Check out EnOcean sometime.

Wireless, kinetically powered switches, with up to 300 metres open-air range.

Too many digits. Australian numbers are ten digits long.

adding the leading zero that gets dropped when you dial international numbers gives 11 digits.

And of course the fact that "Austria" and "Australia" are usually right next to each other in your average "choose your country" drop-down box.