There is no correct way to pluralize Texas, there can be only one Texas. Anyway, just because Australia or Alaska or Siberia are larger, doesn't mean Texas still isn't a big place. You can drive from Beaumont, Texas to Los Angeles and by the time you're halfway there, you're still in Texas.

That's probably not the case. It seems like these days a presidential candidate is chosen for broad(ish) appeal, but the VP is chosen to be a party hard liner to galvanize the faithful voting blocks and keep the party legislators in line. See Biden, Cheney, Gore. I think Palin was a calculated choice to try to get a group of people, Tea Party, to vote Republican instead of Libertarian.

My chromebook is faster, easier to use, has better battery life, and has a much better screen than my smart phone or my kindle fire. Also, both of those have to be rebooted occasionally. Not sure if I've ever done anything but put the Chromebook to sleep. It really was a smart purchase.

You are overthinking it. If I wanted to tap someone's network, I'd find a splice case in the middle of nowhere and splice in a 90/10 splitter during some unrelated outage so it wouldn't be noticed. To the victim it would just look like a relatively poor splice on their OTDR readings.

Ah, well that's also not really true. Centurylink, Frontier, TDS, Windstream, Sprint, and others I'm probably forgetting are all still out there running ILEC markets. Not that I disagree with your conclusion, from a wholesale perspective I can assure you AT&T is even more disfunctional and apathetic than they are at the retail level.

AT&T didn't buy up baby bells. SBC bought up other baby bells and then also bought what was left of AT&T and took the name over. AT&T itself was withering away after the breakup. Both Verizon and what is now AT&T have their origins in local carriers, not long distance. Anyway, they're not evil. They're just fat and lazy and that makes everything more expensive for them as well.

Thanks for actually posting an intelligent comment. Everytime there's a story that involves technology I work with I realize how ignorant most of Slashdot really is.
The API I think is the key observation. Forget websites though, that's chump change.
SDN is actually really interesting for my industry, long haul fiber networks. Today we have multiple layers of equipment, the physical fiber plant, the DWDM layer, the OTN layer, the Sonet or Packet transport layer, the IP/MPLS layer. Today those layers don't talk to each other so all the configurations are manual and static. The hope is that SDN succeeds where GMPLS has sort of stalled. GMPLS is really only used in some proprietary network implementations, and not as an interface between different vendor equipment as it was envisioned.

Also, Infinera's best is currently 160ch x 50gbit/s and has been shipping since last year.

Add up the channels in each direction? That sounds like router marketing math to me.
I'm referring to actual 50ghz spaced systems on the ITU grid which would theoretically allow 100 channels, but everyone skips a few to cut down on NLE.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/optical/ps5724/ps2006/datasheet_c78-598521.html
http://www.tellabs.com/products/7000/tlab7100nano.pdf
The Infinera is 25ghz spaced, and goes to 160 channels.
http://www.infinera.com/products/ILS.html

I shouldn't give exact figures but I'm pretty familiar with 100Gig pricing. Let's just say, 100Gig short range optic = new motorcycle. 100Gig intermediate reach optic = new car. 100Gig DWDM optic = new luxury car.

Why stop at 44? Cisco supports 80ch, Tellabs supports 88, Infinera supports 160 channels (of 50Gig each today, 160x100 in a few years).

Yes it exists, we are already deploying it across the network I work on. The technology you need for long haul 100G is 'Coherent' optics using advanced modulation such as DP-QPSK instead of the old on-off keying used by 10Gig and below. See here for a good example data sheet. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/optical/ps5724/ps2006/data_sheet_c78-713298.html

Centurylink is an Incumbent (ILEC), not a Competitive carrier (CLEC). They have CLEC business units and sales groups for inter-lata Long Distance type deals, such as the one in the article, but DSL, voice, T1s, those are all their bread and butter. And, they're still required to lease voice, T1, T3 and other standard services at standard tariffs. Citation needed on the 2005 thing, CLECs are alive and well and generally making more money than the ILECs.

But, you have the option of buying a phone off newegg or ebay and activating it on a plan with no contract or termination fee. Why WOULDN'T they charge you for the hardware if you haven't paid it off yet?

I used to use 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1' on every laptop that got decommissioned from the network and donated or sold.
It's not rocket surgery.