Word: coppers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...industries so compelling is that each has something the other needs. The TV operators have built extensive networks of coaxial cable with enough information-carrying capacity (or bandwidth) to broadcast hundreds of TV channels simultaneously. The phone companies badly need that cable to replace their narrow copper wires, which can barely carry a single TV station. At the same time, phone companies have sophisticated switching and billing systems that the cable companies would otherwise have to build from scratch...
...hearted tobacco farmer named Alvah Stoke. Dickensian is too amiable a word for Jonathan's ordeals. He slept on a dirt floor with the animals. He was horsewhipped and chained after he tried to run away. One night Alvah and a traveling salesman subdued Jonathan and with a copper wrench pulled all his teeth, which could be sold abroad for $2 each...
...nation's radio and telephone traffic and still have room for more. As it is deployed today, fiber uses less than 1% of its theoretical capacity, or bandwidth, as it's called in the trade. Even so, it can carry 250,000 times as much data as a standard copper telephone wire - or, to put it another way, it can transmit the contents of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica every second...
...high-bandwidth fiber optic. But at the end of almost every local system - the "last mile" that goes from the local-service provider to the house - you run into the electronic equivalent of a bumpy country road. In the phone system, the bottleneck is that last bit of copper wiring, which seems far too narrow to admit the profusion of TV signals poised to flow through it. In cable TV, the roadblocks are the long cascades of amplifiers that run from the company's transmission headquarters to the home, boosting the signal every quarter-mile or so. These amplifiers...
...North Korea, South Africa and Israel (where he trained as a paratrooper) made him a widely traveled statesman. Some were seduced by Mobutu's eagerness to serve as a bulwark against Soviet expansion in the heart of Africa, others by Zaire's natural treasure trove of diamonds, gold, cobalt, copper, and the uranium used in the American nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in World...