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There is no law preventing you from generating your own electricity and selling it to your neighbor.

Wouldn't selling electric power to my neighbor or to the power company require me to go back to school and take out a second student loan to pay tuition in order to learn how to generate electric power and sell it to my neighbor or to the power company? Or do there exist plug-and-play household solar power generators? Google didn't help.

If you produce more power than your home consumes and you run your power meter backwards, the local utility is required by law to pay you for it at the same rate they'd charge you for power.

I didn't know I could sell power back to the incumbent. Thank you. But wouldn't it still require an allegedly oppressive contract with the incumbent?

there is nothing preventing you from providing local low-latency, high-speed residential Internet service, either. Five years ago I put together a wireless ISP for my entire subdivision

Now that you have said the word "wireless", I have something to latch onto for Google research. Thank you. (after several minutes of using Google) I did some research into fixed terrestrial wireless and found an article about BroadLink. But there's one thing: what little information I could find on the site is nearly useless to ISPs that want to become a BroadLink partner and sell dishes to local customers. How would one learn more about this? And wouldn't managing a new business require that I go to a business school, taking out a second student loan? And how would I come across the land to put my antenna on?

In other words, I admit that my examples failed. Thank you for pointing out that I had misplaced the entry barriers in my argument; instead of at the municipal government level, they turned out to be at the education finance level. However, there are some other public utilities that I can't easily think of how to replace with small-business competition, such as the water company (as some state laws prohibit collecting rain on one's land) the natural gas company (as many customers own gas-powered appliances and couldn't afford to replace them with electric appliances even if I were to supply electricity for free), and the phone company (in the areas whose terrain interferes with fixed terrestrial wireless). What would you suggest to replace these? In addition:

You ask "who is the competitive provider of novels used in twentieth century literature classes in universities?" There is no law preventing you or anyone else from authoring any number of texts on any number of subjects you like.

It appears you have shifted the discussion from twentieth century novels to textbooks about twentieth century novels. Because each university has a different set of copyrighted novels that it chooses, many universities insource these textbooks; one of its professors writes such a text giving an overview of the novels, and the university press prints it and sells it to the bookstore. Can you help me find keywords that would help me use Google to discover another inroad to this market?

If you'd have spent half the effort you spent making all the above excuses actually looking for ways to solve a problem rather than looking for more excuses

I see those two activities as one in the same. What do you consider the more polite way to get other people to help me discover alternatives by tossing out relevant keywords such as "sell power back to the power company" and "fixed wireless", other than by explaining a few ideas that I know don't work, which you have called "making excuses"?

But complaining is easy and work is hard.

Without a job, I can't earn the money I need to invest in one of these businesses you describe. How would you suggest I find a job related to my computer science degre

According to the techs I worked with it's not DSL, it's just an implementation of 802.11 wireless with directional antennae.

We recently had to switch over to DSL because the wireless got too flaky over time.

MMDS has one serious problem that Sprint has been unable to solve. It's really expensive. In order to get themselves into the black they have to either oversubscribe like crazy or charge a lot for the service. The cost will fall over time (that much is inevitable) but right now I personally don't think it's an economically viable product.

Earthlink is using a system developed by Broadlink which uses 802.11b. We will evaluate 802.11a once quality parts are available.

(note: I work for broadlink but I'm a programmer not PR so please consider anything I say as unofficial)

Look at www.broadlink.com. It looks like it's IN the bay area.

The wireless is being provided by a company called Broadlink. Due to my employment with Earthlink I can't go into much detail (damn NDA), but here's the skinny. Customer Joe Bob has the install, he gets the receiver and a cpe. Broadlink has both routing and bridged cpe's, but for the consumer account Earthlink is going with the bridged configuration, and yes that means PPPoE. The receiver connects to a Wireless Access Point (WAP) by microwave of which several are located in a city, and the WAP connects to a "exchange", and from their onto Earthlink's network and then the Internet (sorry for the lack of detail but I like working). Installation time has yet to be seen yet since we're just coming out of beta testing, however it is a full install so I suspect it should As far as the performance goes, we've testing here in the office for about two months now and it has worked flawlessly, ping times range between 8ms and 15ms (the drool on my face was quite noticeable after seeing this since most other "broadband" services have really crappy latency). The speed is set for 1.5 megabits but I have seen it burst up 2 megabits. The Broadlink people seem really cool and have a lot of knowledge on the tech involved unlike like most of the ILECs and CLECs I deal with on a daily basis **cough** **cough** **Verizon**. As far as Sprints involvement in all of this it is non-existent.

It isn't mobile like Ricochet, no checking email on BART or a bus, but for the DSL and Cable less I think it's a good replacement. Service is great, though at $200 its a little pricey to setup when compared to Earthlink's DSL setup charges.