What about moral and aesthetic thought, don't folks at Slashdot support that?

I recommend a Star topology.

The best personality test would be the Milgram Experiment, where you come in sit down at the controls of someone hooked up to an electric shock machine and then someone in authority, say the perspective employer, tells to you shock the guy sitting down at progressively higher levels until the guy is just screaming in pain. However, the guy is not really hooked up, he is just acting. What would be really interesting is for people that know the guy is acting if they would play along and back off to show he is not cruel or go try to impress the employer and make the actor scream.

I bet fire would fascinate these people.

What data are they looking for? Most of the broadband data can be found easily on the annual reports of the publicly traded ISPs. The actual customer counts have always been something ISPs have publicly bragged about. It seems like there are several sources for the data if they want to look for it. Internet usage is prone to fashion and trends so any spending should just be based on dumb fast reliable pipes to as many people as possible.

And from the "mother of the internet": Perlman, Radia (1999). Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols (2e ed.). Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series.