This is surprising because the federal government is not supposed to be taxed. Utah has enacted a piece of discriminatory legislature that allows the selective taxation of power being supplied to government and military installations such as this NSA one.

The issue is that this is only going to be replacing a single fiber. You never run a single fiber except short loops to your endpoint customers. This could potentially replace the point-to-point links for the "last mile", until such time as you get enough subscribers to make it worth your time to trench the land and run a bundle of fiber.

Huh? I have a 15" laptop with a quad-core CPU, 12GB of memory, and a 2GB Quadro chip, and I can easily run 7 hours before having to plug in.

Batteries are not supposed to discharge at speed anywhere near that of supercapacitors. The trouble is that batteries are basically just a way to control and limit a ton of stored chemical energy. They're just a catalyst to a reaction to occur at a low temperature, and capture the energy released from that reaction. Many battery chemistries have a tendency to go into thermal runaway once they hit a certain temperature, as the catalyst is no longer necessary to allow the reaction. Now granted, it's not going to be the single, high speed short of a capacitor, but it's also going to release a whole lot more energy in a relatively short time.

Are you suggesting any company that brings a viable solution to market is basically going to be printing money?

You're already running 2kW into that room to power various bits of electronics, and you still need the space heater? Is this room uninsulated or something?

Because this is science, and science is almost always done in metric regardless of locale.

When you speak English, you should use English conventions... Most of the English speaking world uses '.' as the decimal separator.

Perhaps they're including the initial installation cost, averaged out of the next few years.

Are you suggesting the police forces adopt a "scorched earth" tactic?

The rovers don't move anywhere near that slow. They only spend a minute or two moving per day. After budgeting daily energy requirements for heaters, communications gear, and science equipment, that's all they have left to move the thing around.

Considering this website IS based in the US, then US convention rules.

When you pronounce "1,5km", do you say "one point five" or "one comma five"?

By recently, you mean hundreds of years ago. Shipping companies didn't want sailors cutting up and smoking their good hemp ropes.

Right. When it comes to supercomputing, the network is just as important, if not more so, than the nodes it connects. Grid computers like the various @Home projects are far and away more powerful than anything on the TOP500 list, but that doesn't make them supercomputers.

Huh? Rich people have middle men too. They call them a concierge service.