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Anyone from SF bay area, Denver or Washington DC remember Ricochet? http://www.ricochet.net/

Say hello to Ricochet.

They're doing what you proposed - wireless nodes on telephone poles. Streetlights, too.

I remember being in the Yahoo MLB chatrooms in the fall of 2000, and this guy logged in on his Ricochet-mobile equipped laptop from Yankee stadium during an ALCS game.

It's too bad Ricochet died (blame the naff commercials). It rocked hard. But it's come back in a lighter, less ambitious, less vulnerable form.

The article leaves out some interesting details. Like--how many antennas per square kilometer do you need to get this kind of speed? When I lived in Santa Cruz, Ricochet did one of their first deployments around town. This was in the early 90s, so you were getting 2400bps (yeah, bps) wireless all over town, which was kind of cool. Except they had to hang transmitters from every other light pole to blanket town. I think that's one of the reasons they never caught on: deploying infrastructure was too expensive.

It sounds to me like Verizon has something with much better range going here, but I guess Pegoraro didn't think to ask.

One of the reasons I'm interested is that my parents live in one of those oft-forgotten places in the US where high speed internet is a far-away dream. The town (population 500) is about an hour's drive over a terrible mountain road from civilization, so the local CLEC never bothered to run phone lines in: they just set up this crappy microwave link on top of a mountain.

No cable, no wired phone lines: needless to say, broadband is impossible (satellite being the unacceptable semi-exception). Which makes going back to hang out at the ranch pretty annoying.

The point (I'm getting there!) is that if these guys have figured out a way to get high speed internet to travel a good long distance, this could help solve the access problem for rural america.

Of course, I've seen so many supposed solutions come and fade away, that I sort of doubt it.

The big question is, when will Ricochet be turned back on nation-wide??

...except that the first time someone's kid gets routed to animalsex.com or some such, they're going to sue the city. So the city's going to have to install porn filters, and do age verification, and all the other crap that schools and libraries have to put up with in order to even offer desktop-based internet access, at which point it probably won't even be worthwhile.

Not to mention having to provide tech support for an entire metropolitan area...

Or the fact that the people that can afford computers or laptops with 802.11 cards can probably afford decent DSL access anyhow.

More power to 'em if they can pull it off, but there's reasons why Ricochet didn't do so well...

With the population density of London, I would think that one or two loosely affiliated 802.11b networks would give coverage would rival any commercial offering.

Other interesting tidbits for those to lazy to click thru:

• Under the protection of Chapter 11, the Company will seek to restructure its operations and debt obligations while maintaining the operation of its wireless network
• The petition allows Metricom to continue its operations and to explore financial alternatives, while working with its creditors to restructure its debt obligations.
• "It is clear to me that Metricom's wireless Internet access product is viable and that its Ricochet service offering provides the fastest mobile wireless communications solution on the market today,"

So, it's not quite over yet. But, I won't be holding my breath...

This sucks cause Ricochet was a good service, and its bad news that the flat rate access model got rocked in this case. However, check out this list of top 20 creditors, man those are some debts yo!

Looks like all the assets are for sale, who knows maybe one of the big boyz will snap it up and keep it running with their own people. Sorry to see more job losses in this battered sector.

This is false. Money buys protection against punishment for nonpayment of taxes and taxes are not "collectively" collected -- they are collected by sadistic police-power:

Federal Reserve + IRS = The Protection Racket Coup of 1913

by Jim Bowery
Jim Bowery, January 13, 2001 -- The author grants the right to copy, without modification.

INTRODUCTION

Federal Reserve money buys protection from punishment. You are punished if you don't pay taxes. This has become the Federal Reserve's primary monetary authority. The moral hazard of basing monetary authority on punishment has now been realized in the systemic and out-of-control gang rapes of prisoners in the US. All other unlawful acts by US governments are now overshadowed by the murderous, sexually sadistic character of governmental authority that has developed in US penal systems. Federal Reserve money is now protection racket money, or, if you prefer "punishment protection money". Calling it "fiat money", "debt money" or even "legal tender" obscures its true character. The transition to this form of money began in 1913, when the 16th Amendment dramatically expanded the potential need for legal tender in the form of taxes while, in that same year, the Federal Reserve Act started the process of removing from legal tender any backing value other than the protection it affords against punishment. That the redefinition of "legal tender" was unconstitutional(1) has become only a minor dimension of the massive decay in legitimacy and moral leadership during the 20th century triggered by these acts of 1913. These acts were largely in the interest of continental European banking concerns doing business under the name of J. P. Morgan. As vital interests of the United States were sacrificed on their behalf, those foreign interests are reasonably called "enemies of the United States", the acts of U.S. citizens on their behalf "treasons", and all such citizens "traitors".

THE MORAL HAZARD OF GOVERNMENT AND MONEY

Legitimate governments provide assurance that we are secure in our lives and properties by protecting our legal rights in exchange for taxes and other duties. The most legitimate governments will even back up their commitment by providing some sort of compensation if our legal rights are breached, much the same as insurance companies do when they pay out on an insurance policy. But there is a fine line between protection rackets and insurance companies. Indeed, gangsters frequently call their protection rackets "insurance" and the payments they extort from their victims "insurance premiums". That fine line between protector and protection racket is crossed when "moral hazard" tempts the "protector" beyond the limits of his character.

In conventional insurance terminology, "moral hazard" is the temptation to artificially increase hazards. A classic case of moral hazard is an otherwise unprofitable business buying lots of fire insurance and then hiring an arsonist to burn down the place of business.

Insurers, too, can profit by increasing hazards if it is the uninsured who suffer the exposure to risk. A classic example of an insurer's moral hazard is the temptation to parasitize a productive business by threatening it with destruction unless the owners pay regular "insurance premiums".

And that brings us to the morality of governance.

The most profound moral hazard for governance is the penal system combined with taxation.

The framers of the US Constitution included prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. They also made it difficult to parasitize productive States. This they did by requiring that taxation on a State's citizenry be proportional to the State's population under Article. 1. Section. 2. Clause 3. and Article. 1. Section. 9. Clause 4. Making taxes proportional to State population helps control the moral hazard of governance at the Federal level by making it difficult for the Federal government to transfer wealth to States that are politically active from States that are economically productive. Also, States are more capable of defending themselves from the Federal government than are individuals. Unfortunately, the requirement for taxation proportional to State population ("with apportionment" and "with regard to the census") was removed by the 16th Amendment, thereby promoting political porkbarrel at the Federal level and punishing productivity. In the same year the Federal Reserve Act gave license to gradually reduce legal tender's reliance on gold and silver as backing value, leaving the protection legal tender afforded against government punishment it's primary backing value. (Shortly thereafter, the 17th Amendment also removed from the States the power to elect Senators, further eroding the States' ability to protect their citizens from the federal government.)

These acts of treason have produced profound moral hazard at the Federal level, and set the stage for the relentless and radical decay of moral leadership during the 20th century.

WARRIOR INSURANCE

The proper role of government is protection against force and fraud. Therefore, to keep it honest, government's source of revenue should be insurance premiums against loss due to force and fraud. Said premiums could be payable in notes issued by the insurer/protector, but the insurer/protector should merely cancel the insurance policy and cease protecting those who do not pay. An insurer/protector should not generate the market for their own notes by threatening to punish those who do not pay -- as that is a protection racket, even if the insurer/protector honorably indemnifies those who do pay in the event of a covered loss. Such insurance premiums and corresponding insurance coverage would, necessarily, stipulate other conditions under which the insurance/protection continued to be provided at the agreed upon rates. This amounts to taxation on asset value, adjusted for various conditions that may affect risk -- with the added guarantee of indemnification in the event that asset value is lost due to force or fraud.

Such a system actually eliminates governance, as we know it. I call it "warrior insurance".

Under warrior insurance, reinsurance networks take the place of existing international treaties and alliances. Intelligent warrior reinsurance networks will check loss of asset value resulting from gang, or "protection racket" formation well in advance of any need for warfare. Warrior insurance premiums eliminate taxation. Competition between warrior insurance companies creates checks and balances supporting liberty. Formation of mass armies on ideological/political grounds is suppressed by exposing the underlying quid-pro-quo of reciprocal altruism that actually exists between people and their sovereignties -- over-extended kin identification, the basis of political and religious warfare as well as one-world ideology, is rendered less viable. Warrior insurance companies are much like the original sovereignties that defended newly formed civilizations -- they are, in fact, quite traditional. Empires subsumed the original sovereignties because trade, communication and literacy were so centralized. In the information age, this is decreasingly the case. What is increasingly necessary is a strong, distributed militia living lives bonded to their communities and lands from generation to generation, who value honor above their own lives. Unlike systems of taxation, warrior insurers will compensate those who are bonded for conscription in time of war, or deputized in times of civil emergency. Those so bonded would naturally demand a vote, or representation, in declarations of war or civil emergency.

Under warrior insurance, the citizens' militias traditionally enjoy tax relief, since they are in effect, protecting themselves. In Scotland, rather than forming a Yeoman class from the "kindly tenants", "feu fees" were imposed to pay for foreign war debts during the Protestant Reformation, thereby dispossessing ancient families of their lands to make way for revenue generating land use such as wool-producing sheep. Kindly tenants were kindred or clan members who had traditionally been given relief from economic rent/taxation in exchange for sworn allegiance to their clans' militias under the command of their chiefs. But the clan chiefs were corrupted by the royalty which had become more interested foreign adventures than they were in allowing the clans to support and protect themselves and their families on their own lands. The royal war debts began consuming the livelihoods of the folk. Many were forced to flee for their lives. This was the primary origin of the Scotch-Irish pioneers who attempted to create a society in "the New World", free from such betrayals of clan loyalty. The earliest pioneers suffered a 25% mortality rate in the first year of migration in their desperation to create that "New World". This was not merely the moral equivalent of war -- it was death on a massive scale in a struggle with nature herself (war with natives was not the primary cause of these deaths), on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. As usual mostly men went to the frontier to risk everything for their new lands, but many women and children also suffered similar fates. As a consequence, the founders of the United States, folk memory still fresh, thought the avoidance of foreign wars to be common sense. This gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine and the avoidance of foreign wars.

Compare and contrast such a system to the internationally adventurous protection racket posing as a government we have today.


THE MURDEROUS, SEXUALLY SADISTIC BASIS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE

Forget the Clothes --The Emperor is a Murdering Rapist Run Amok

Many critics of President Clinton accused him of being a murdering rapist. But President Clinton was simply the by-product of an epic perversion that has overtaken the lawful government of the United States. It would be understatement to call this perversion a criminal gang. Criminal gangs only occasionally commit rape and murder against their own community. They don't pretend to be a lawful authorities in public. They don't issue their own currency as protection racket money and then demand it as "legal tender". They may rationalize their criminal conduct, but they don't convince themselves that what they are doing is lawful. They admit to themselves that they are gangsters. At least they are that honest. But, perhaps this is simply because gangsters are afraid to compete with the most massive criminal organization in history, whose roots extend back at least to 1913 when the Income Tax and Federal Reserve were created.

The Federal Reserve was created in the same year as the Income Tax for one simple reason:

The US Federal Government was shifting from Reward to Punishment Protection as the basis for its monetary authority.

Federal Reserve Notes are promises to reduce the bearer's risk of punishment for tax code violation, upon presentation to its collection agency, the IRS, in the form of Income Tax.

Note here that it is impossible to reduce the risk of punishment for violation of the income tax code to a level commensurate to the threat of prisoner gang-rape(5). This has become the foundation of the IRS/Fed's all-pervasive aura of fear(6) upon which their punishment protection money is based. The Income tax code is so complex that not even the IRS with all its private contractors from law and accounting firms, can reliably and reproducibly interpret it. This makes it possible only to _reduce_ the risk of punishment -- no matter how much wealth you turn over to the IRS.

In this manner the federal government creates demand for the Federal Reserve's otherwise worthless paper(7). Under the evil monetary basis of punishment protection, the government's monetary authority is limited only by the degree to which it can create pervasive terror of its prison system in the hearts of nonviolent potential tax code "offenders" -- and that means you.

With punishment protection as the basis of its monetary authority, and therefore its ability to buy votes, it was only a matter of time before the US Federal Government, as though an animal trained by operant conditioning, would find ways of increasing the severity and cruelty of its punishments.

But like rat in a maze, the US Federal Government had a problem to solve:

How to impose cruel and unusual punishment without arousing the wrath of a people whose ancestors had risked a 1 in 4 chance of dying in the first year of migration to the New World in order to escape just such evils?

The solution, reached without conscious intent (conspiracy) of individuals was a form of punishment so cruel and unusual -- SO TABOO -- that no decent human being would even want to think about it, let alone use freedom of speech and the press to talk about it:

Gradually cultivate prisoner rape as the basis of government authority.

By replacing pillory, open corporeal punishments and work restitution, so common before the 20th century, with an environment in which Mafiosi and other gangster types are protected from prisoner rape while the American pioneer cultures, less prone to prison gang formation, are systemically gang-raped, an ethnic bias was created against the very peoples who founded the country to escape government predation. The actual bias is apparent as at least 3 out of 4 prisoner rapes involve blacks victimizing men of Protestant heritage while Mediterranean Mafiosi are somehow immune.

The ruthlessly pragmatic and sadistically sociopathic genius of this is that its very intensity, both as physical trauma and moral outrage, rendered it invisible.

Such is the mentality of the child molester who relies on the traumatic nature of his crime to cover his tracks -- seemingly unable to control his subconscious urges. Such was the mentality of those men who, in 1913, gave us the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax.

CONCLUSION

As with a molested child whose shame and guilt compound his trauma, so the American people have come to accept as, as fated, a life lived with this filthy family secret(8). The US Federal Government, now basing its authority on cruel and unusual punishment, cannot be considered legitimate by any reasonable man . The fundamental role that the application of force against citizens plays in defining legitimacy demands such a radical conclusion.

Warrior insurance will be a crucial tool in the triumph of honor over the political will that has so corrupted the rule of law. But honorable warriors need something to protect. Pioneers risk their lives creating new lands. Women then risk their lives giving birth to new folk. Finally, warriors risk their lives protecting their lands and their folk.

The burden of leadership falls, as it did after the feu fees that so motivated the Scotch-Irish, on pioneers.

The dilemma, facing those of us who value the heritage of those early Americans who risked so much to escape sadistic authority in the old world, is not whether we are willing to risk our lives for freedom from such tyranny, but whether we can pioneer a 'New World' where our love of freedom can bear fruit in the face of death.

References

(1) This is a consequence of the unlawful declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender". "Legal tender" is called such because courts are required to accept it as money for legal purposes (by far, the largest legal purpose of money is payment of taxes). The US Constitution, under Article 1, Section 10 requires the States to use only gold and silver as payment for legally recognized debts. Article 1, section 8 does not give Congress power to make legal tender. Therefore, the declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender for all debts public and private" is unlawful. The best counter arguments to this generally ignore the fact that the paper currency issued by the original central banks were presumed to not be backed by legal tender's value as protection against punishment, let alone cruel and unusual punishment.

(2) See http://www.spr.org/docs/stats.html

(3) The "Scared Straight" program from the 1970s is still going strong as evidenced by this April 5, 1997 article from the Lubbock Avalance- Journal: http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/040697/prison.ht m

An excerpt:

"DALLAS (AP) - A grand jury has refused to indict prison inmates in connection
with a ''scared straight'' prison visit during which several boys claimed to have been molested."

(4) Assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Zubrod from Harrisburg, PA made the following public statement to 3 suspects who fled to Canada (this statement was captured for the public record during a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview):

"You're going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition."

(5) Look at the classic paper on the value of human life by Nobel prize winning economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago School of Business. He measured the effect of danger on wage rates in different professions. Prison is more of a danger in some lines of activity than others. We should be able to apply similar analytic techniques to the relationship between taxation and the prison system.

(6) "Prison Rape: Every Man's Greatest Fear", August 1995, Penthouse.

(7) Although the thesis of this paper does not necessarily predict it, an increase in the rate of prisoner suicide negatively correlating with the rate of inflation would be supportive.

(8) A final anecdote on silence: When the author of this white paper was called in for an audit by the IRS in 1994, he sought a tax attorney to represent him. During an interview with a prospective attorney the author told the attorney he thought the audit might have been politically motivated. When asked for details, the author related that the author had published articles on the Internet advocating a judical review of the legitimacy of the ratification of the 16th Amendment about one month prior to the notice of audit. The attorney then told the author that he could not represent the author. According to this tax attorney, he had attended a seminar given by the IRS in which the distinct impression was given that "tax protesters" were not to be defended and that any attorney who defended a "tax protester" would be subjected to a lifetime of audits. This was later confirmed during an interaction with a prominent southern California tax attorney when it became known that the IRS auditor had verbally admitted to his consulting accountant that the author was being audited because of his advocacy of a judicial review of the 16th Amendment's ratification.

In a related situation currently ongoing in China, a spokesperson for the Falun Gong Practitioners in North America has stated that: "lawyers in China have already been told not to defend these innocent civilians unless they agree with the government propaganda." The U.S. House and Senate unanimously passed resolutions on 1999-NOV-18 and 19 which criticized the Chinese government for its crackdown of the Falun Gong.

Also look at Ricochet wireless modems. They have 28.8 in many places and 128K bps in major cities.

Both the LART and Ricochet should only weigh a few pounds.

why have an expensive device that can only receive mp3s over a network

You don't get it.

I have something like 35GB of MP3's. I don't want to have to replicate that 35gigs everywhere I want to listen to music. Wireless isn't up to MP3 bandwidth yet (not even Ricochet), so local storage is a necessary evil for portable devices. But at home, I have a LAN. This is why man invented file servers.

More to the point, the Rio/Dell Receiver has better DACs than any sound card ever will (and probably better than many SPDIF-input home theater receivers), and more importantly no moving parts. I don't want the whirr of fans or the whine of hard disks interfering with serious listening. And at high bitrates with good encoders, MP3s can be worthy of serious listening.

That silence alone is worth the $299.

-Z

Of course my cable modem blows Ricochet it away, but if I traveled a lot I would have kept it.

They are now upgrading to 128K service, and if it is as consistent and stable as the 28.8 service, it should serve it's customers well in the future.

Ricochet wireless modems offer a 28.8kbps connection, and can be used in peer-to-peer mode *without* requiring a service provider (Metricom will never tell you this of course). Range is a couple of miles. They operate like regular modems in every sense: serial connection, AT command set.

Each modem has a "modem number" on the back and you just "ATDTXXXX-YYYY" to dial another Ricochet modem. The other side even sends the "RING" string, and you use "ATA" to answer. Totally transparent to whatever application you are using. These are truly wireless modems.

Although they are tough to get (either through ebay, or Metricom with a 1 year signup), they are the most amazing devices. I have two, and they cost me about $120 a piece. They are pretty funny to use with TI calculators and a Graphlink.

-Justin

• Cheaper Then a Playstation 2 ($300 or less)
  1. A copy of Fowler's Modern English Usage for CmdrTaco ($12.03 at Amazon). The phrase is "cheaper than a Playstation 2".
  2. A 128K Metricom Ricochet modem ($299?) and 128K wireless service in Washington DC from UUNET before 2001-Q1 (~$60/month?)
• Cheaper Then a Playstation 2's rumored eBay sale value ($301-$1500)
  1. My 1987 VW Golf repainted in the Slashdot color scheme with the Slashdot logo on the side
• Unlimited (Mommy, can I have a stealth bomber for Christmas?)
  1. No more spam
  2. No more junk mail delivered by USPS
  3. Every corporation and every person decides to do the right thing always.

Something I've been wanting to try is my Palm III with a Ricochet (sp?) wireless modem. I know they work together (with a little serial adaptor).

A Ricochet modem looks just like a regular modem to the computer. For internet access via ppp, you just have your dialer call a slightly odd looking number and voila, you're online.

So, the issues you face in doing this with a palm is the serial port, the ppp dialer, and the e-mail/web/etc. client. Those may be easily solvable; I haven't looked into them.

Another option is to use a terminal emulator on the Palm and use the Ricochet to dial into a system where you have a shell account. You can then use whatever e-mail/browser/etc. you want on that system. Note that this costs an extra $5/mo (to cover their costs for modems and outgoing lines) but can be well worth it in some situations.

I absolutely love my Ricochet modem and will always have it.

I know of one guy who has his hooked up to a (iirc) a psion handheld and telnets to his linux box to read e-mail and surf the web. Personally, I prefer a real laptop, but I have big fingers.

So, if you're in one of their covered areas, I strongly recommend them.

I absolutely love my Ricochet modem and will always have it.

I know of one guy who has his hooked up to a (iirc) a psion handheld and telnets to his linux box to read e-mail and surf the web. Personally, I prefer a real laptop, but I have big fingers.

So, if you're in one of their covered areas, I strongly recommend them.

Ah, yes, the teacher's proably going to be running Win9x, I'll be the first one teaching my child how to run linux and knock out her box when she's about to bother him. *snicker* Seriously, though, I've had a laptop since Jr. High, it was a 386/SX with 4 megs of ram, but it ran edit and printed to the school printers fine, now-a-days I tote a pIII 450 notebook back and forth to work, mainly out of habbit, Laptop's have their usefullness, definatley (and when paired with, oh, wireless internet (Like ricochet..), they become a handy portable terminal. Anyhow, its an individuals decision, I personally faire better with a keyboard than I do with a pen.
--- 'dex

I was sorta under the impression that packet radio didn't involve dialing. I think we have a good chance of ending up on that instead, at least in the short term. Ricochet is coming out with 128k service this summer -- they won't tell me exactly when, or what it will cost, but they seem to be very devoted to having a flat-rate plan... (hopefully it won't be too expensive for this poor student!)

Lea

No mention was made regarding the connection to the Internet...that was just assumed to be there. But I have yet to hear about any affordable and sufficiently fast connection via mobile unit... How will they address this, or will they just leave it up to other companies to solve this general problem?

Transmeta is a chip company. They have come up with a innovative new chip for use in a mobile platform. How that platform will connect to the internet, is up to the companies that implement the chip in their portables.

The internet connection could be something as simple as an ethernet jack that you would plug an ordinary cat-5 cable into, or it could be an Apple-stype airport wireless LAN connection.

Personally, I'm going to use a Ricochet wireless modem.

------------------------
Help me switch to Linux!

With wireless IP (ricochet) and CDPD... it could be a pretty cool world... code up a paging/alert type app that monitors your servers and stuff... or whatever...

There will never be "a wireless Internet". The Internet will always be a rich amalgam of technologies, wireless being one. Wireless has advantages and disadvantages and it will be applied where it has substantial useful advantages, but that isn't everywhere or even a large percentage of everywhere.

In order for the Internet to function and to provide the kinds of things we're used to it providing, there will necessarily be diversity in access technology and there will be methods of connecting one to another, as there are now. So whatever portion of the Internet is wireless, now and in the future, noone will know or care. All that matters is that packets get through.

What portion of the spectrum is open to the public really doesn't matter IMO. It is important to have the spectrum open to public use, but not because we all need wireless Internet. The two ideas aren't related. (In other words, having the some portion of the spectrum open doesn't yield wireless Internet).

That said, having wireless _access_ to the net is really good and should be widely available for cheap. Ricochet provides an excellent example of this (see www.ricochet.net). But this is unrelated to either the notion of "a wireless Internet" or to public access to the EM spectrum.

...poor substitutions for the mouse, and a small screen, all hinder its usage.

My six-year-old laptop has a full size keyboard, as does my new one. Among the well over 150 portable computers I own, there are indeed some with very substandard screens, keyboards, etc. There are some with even worse features, though. You pick whats important to you when you pay your money.

on the train/bus/etc while commuting, in a restaurant on a lunch break, so on and so forth - a non-work environment.

My laptops work great in those situations, but I am not limited to "supplemental tasks" -- because my laptop is my main computer, I am fully functional where ever I might be. I don't have to worry about jotting down notes to update something later, I can update it right then and there. Heck, with my wireless modem, I can update a web page, upload it, and view it off the net without leaving the coffee shop.

When I get somewhere where I work a lot (such as my home office, or my main client,) I plug into a docking station connected to a MS Natural Keyboard, a Logitech Trackman Marble, and a 17 inch monitor. For trips, I have a bag packed and ready to go with a network card, serial card, another trackman, a ballpoint mouse, and various keyboard and monitor cables.

The point is, where ever I am, I don't have to sacrifice. I have the best of all worlds, instead of sacrificing for a good machine some of the time!

people are finding laptops unwieldy for anything more.

Again, I think you are flat out wrong. Perhaps you find them unwieldy, but from what I've seen, laptops are replacing desktops in the corporate world left, right, and center. Fifteen years ago, I was about the only person I knew who owned a portable computer. Today, it doesn't surprise me to see two or more other people on the train with me working on a notebook -- at 9pm, going against the commute.

I have no problem carrying a large laptop -- it beats driving somewhere to walk on a treadmill the way people do -- but there are smaller, lighter ones that still have full-sized keyboards and screens.

Of course, portable computers aren't for everyone. My wife doesn't use hers anywhere nearly as often as I think she should. But for an awful lot of people, they are the future.

See if you can snag a few of their shoeboxes. Place your main server indoors somewhere and leave the outdoor packet-hopping to a proven technology.

Ricochet

I don't know about software and licensing, but it sounds to me like you're reinventing the wheel.

I use a Ricochet modem on my server at home in Alexandria, Fairfax County, VA. It's my only connection to the Internet. Sometimes I get nearly 28.8K out of it. Other times it's much slower. Overall, I'm happy with the service although I wish that its interactive performance was better. It's unusable for telnet. In spite of the sometimes slow connections, I'm running a couple of services over the radio link. Visit Madison to play with my NetBSD port of Alan Cox's Linux Portaloo and also Ben Reser's Echelon Armor thingie which I swiped from here. I'm running an OpenVerse server on madison.dynip.com:7000 and a dopewars server on the default dopewars port. Feel free to try any of them. I don't advertise, so I don't get lot of traffic. Don't be surprised if the connection is slow!

I've also used the modem on my NetBSD-running Sony PCG-505 laptop. I've used it to listen to WPFW in DC and WWOZ in New Orleans using RealAudio. In fact, Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post wrote about my experience in an article on the future of radio. It appeared on January 21, 1999. Depending on network congestion, it acutally sounds OK. In the article, I think I said the sound was "like a cheap transistor radio". Mr. Ahren's editor cut out the qualification that that was a weakness of the small Sony speakers I used rather than the streaming audio technology or the wireless modem.

A recent announcement from Metricom promised 128K service in 12 markets by summer 2000.

I use a Ricochet modem on my server at home in Alexandria, Fairfax County, VA. It's my only connection to the Internet. Sometimes I get nearly 28.8K out of it. Other times it's much slower. Overall, I'm happy with the service although I wish that its interactive performance was better. It's unusable for telnet. In spite of the sometimes slow connections, I'm running a couple of services over the radio link. Visit Madison to play with my NetBSD port of Alan Cox's Linux Portaloo and also Ben Reser's Echelon Armor thingie which I swiped from here. I'm running an OpenVerse server on madison.dynip.com:7000 and a dopewars server on the default dopewars port. Feel free to try any of them. I don't advertise, so I don't get lot of traffic. Don't be surprised if the connection is slow!

I've also used the modem on my NetBSD-running Sony PCG-505 laptop. I've used it to listen to WPFW in DC and WWOZ in New Orleans using RealAudio. In fact, Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post wrote about my experience in an article on the future of radio. It appeared on January 21, 1999. Depending on network congestion, it acutally sounds OK. In the article, I think I said the sound was "like a cheap transistor radio". Mr. Ahren's editor cut out the qualification that that was a weakness of the small Sony speakers I used rather than the streaming audio technology or the wireless modem.

A recent announcement from Metricom promised 128K service in 12 markets by summer 2000.

While communications technology improves at an amazing rate, the Bell companies are stuck in the 19th century. Their primary goals appear to be increased profits through elimination of skilled union jobs, investment in anything but their core business, and maintenance of the status quo in services and pricing.

How difficult would it be to bypass them? I'm thinking of something like the Ricochet radio modems, except at much higher data rates.

out of the shower, and i whip out my Palm III and Ricochet datamodem, and i'm all set with email and web browsing .. and ssh