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""Unlimited" should always be understood to include "but don't be a dick"."

So being "a dick" now is using a paid for service as advertised? ISPs should have no trouble delivering their advertised speeds 24x7 and if you paid for "unlimited" you should be able to max out that connection 100% of the time. Companies cant just redefine words and then shame or guilt people into their "marketing speak" basterdization of basic english words.

There are truth in advertising laws for a reason. This is straight up false advertising / fraud on the part of that ISP.

How hard is it for them to say "100gb a month plan" instead of unlimited? All ISPs give actual rates in canada that I am aware of. eg http://www.shaw.ca/internet/pl... Take a look, you can clearly see all the caps you get at every tier.
But maybe our consumer protection laws are stronger than yours, I don't know.

As they always say on the bus ads: Creativity is subjective, but the truth isn't.

http://www.adstandards.com/en/...

"Law enforcement now believes they can do anything they want to achieve their ends. Because they're idiots who don't know or care about the law.

Not because they are idiots, but because they are right-wing authoritarians. Here's a free E-Book all about their thinking. You will be amazed at the part where the professor wondered if their predilection for forming posses to round up "enemies of the state" had any limits, so he asked them if they would round up each other, and most still said yes! http://members.shaw.ca/jeanalt...

Dear Facebook members, check this page and report if it's a satire or not.

http://members.shaw.ca/rlongpr...

7-11 has a "fan-constructed" website with lots of good info at http://www.speakoutwireless.ca... and their "official" one is at http://speakout7eleven.ca/

You can order a SIM online for postal delivery (maybe only to Canada?) or walk into a 7-11 and pick one up directly. I think they only do regular or mini-SIMs, so you'll need to cut it for a micro-SIM size. https://www.google.ca/search?q...

If you are on the west coast, find someone who uses Shaw for their ISP and get them to give you a Shaw login/email on their account and you'll have access to a whole wack of wifi hotspots mostly in BC and Alberta, but a few farther East. http://www.shaw.ca/wifi/hotspo...

Typo. Up to 250MB/s, though 250GB/s would be cool as well it'd probably be the "wall of diminishing returns" at that point.

The 250MB/s (1TB/mo) is about $120CAD ($110USD).

In the meantime, our generation gave birth to personal computers and cell phones, so it's not a total loss, but there never was another OMFG moment like the Moon walk.

FTFY

No, he is a broke ass guy, with no country to go to anymore. He damaged the country, got criminals to hide better, and distracted government people from doing meaningful work.

If you wondered about the kind of person who would write like that, then you would like the e-book The Authoritarians. http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf

They are much too deep in the Kool-Aid, and almost always deathly afraid of approaching any information that may change their minds.

That seems to be about right.. I am not an anthropologist or sociologist, but the following e-book that is free to download gave me some insight into how that works:

Bob Altemeyer - The Authoritarians (PDF)
It is indeed bizarre, but maybe it has to do with first stating your beliefs and then trying to rationalize what you see in the world around you to fit those beliefs, as opposed to approaching the physical world in a more rational, flexible way. Changing your mind is painful, because you may have to update your beliefs, which is distressing to all of us.

Maybe authoritarian followers just find it a little bit more painful than the others. Maybe the tuning parameters of the E-step and M-stip in the EM algorithm in their head are different. Assuming we have an EM algorithm in our head. Actually I have trouble understanding the EM algorithm is it is.. Anyway.. please let me share, if this idea makes you filthy rich..

If you read the book please consider: he has put large footnotes in about 2/3 of the book. It is a lot thinner if you skip the 30-odd pages of notes between the chapters.

Time to find a better ISP bro.. my ISP's crappiest service is 125GB/month @ 10Mbps. I'm on their 100Mbps plan that gives 500GB/mon.

http://www.shaw.ca/internet/packages/

Or HALO

http://members.shaw.ca/jeffv/halo2600.html

Ever since WW2 (even before, if you are prepared to acknowledge the existence of Wilhelm Reich) psychologists have taken an interest in politics. I've found these sources to be particularly enlightening:
Eysenck ('this country' refers to the UK)
Altemeyer (PDF)
Most Americans, in my view, have been deliberately confused by their authoritarians calling themselves 'social conservatives' and talking as if 'liberal' was the opposite of 'conservative', whereas it is really the opposite of 'authoritarian' and orthogonal to 'conservative' (whose opposite is 'radical').

How long until it is illegal to have an open AP?

Oh no.. Quite the opposite from what I understand. Here in canada, all the wireless phone carriers and even ISPS are encouraging (read as PAYING) businesses to have themselves wired for cable or fibre. They then wire up APs around your business. You allow them to run an open AP (for their customers, and in alot of cases completely free, and they provide you with a roboust wireless infrastructure for your business on another vlan.

What do they get? They get to claim that they have the most network coverage in WLAN. See here for an example of shaw, a doing this.
http://www.shaw.ca/internet/wifi/

Of course there are other open access points everywhere now it is almost expected. Like starbucks, plenty are going totally anonymous to make their offerings even sweeter. Sure they will run some kind of traffic filtering on them, but corporate VPNs will ensure that we always have tunnels available. So naturally I do think that there is more money to be made, by now it seems getting every wireless data user to use your SSID, that the content industries will most likely fight for a while in the courts before anyone sees any jail time over this.

But who knows because, conservatives!!! They can pretty much run over everyones rights unchallenged in this country these days.

and they have Poutine!

http://members.shaw.ca/kcic1/poutine.html

Shaw covers quite a lot of Canada and the prices are the same wherever they cover:

http://shaw.ca/Internet/Broadband-250/

and $190/mo for "unlimited" though you'll want to check the fine print on that word. And speaking of loopholes, for this you get "up to" 250 Mb/s...where "up to" includes the number zero, not to mention every number lower than 250.

This isn't bad, but whatever is decent in Canadian services are due to regulation as the competition is pretty thin. There are perhaps two services in any large city, which amazingly have about the same prices and services.

As somebody who watches the costs on maintaining municipal networks of big heavy water and sewer pipes we have to expensively bury 10 feet down to stay below the frost line, it's painfully obvious what a bonanza providing Internet has been for these companies. The big bucks aren't in the little black boxes at the ends of wires that get upgraded every few years anyway; the big bucks are keeping all those thousands of miles of line maintained. And since we never got fibre-to-the-home out of the commercial world, they've been able to supply this whole new service down the same wires that paid for themselves in the 50's (for POTS copper wires) and the 80's (for TV coax cable).

Every city on the continent should have just declared Internet to be a municipal network, too important to the public to leave to private hands, and built FTTH that way a decade ago. There are private water/sewer utilities (many very good), but in most places, voters get very nervous at the very suggestion of privatizing water - because you gotta have it and privatized utilities in various places have doubled and tripled rates in the past.

A public utility is basically owned by its own customers and has no interest of its own, just theirs. Private utilities love gaming the pricing model. Every utility network has fixed costs (maintaining those lines cost the same whether more or less product is flowing through) and product-relative costs: the amount of water or power or gas or bytes. Netflix figures have shown that the real incremental cost of bandwidth in large bulk is only about 2-3 cents per gigabyte. Keeping a set of lines to you house running that are lightweight and do not have to be deeply buried costs maybe $25/month in most large cities. And if it's fibre you chose to bury rather than a 40 or 70 year-old network for a different kind of communication, everybody gets hundreds of MB/s. Then your cost is all about the number of gigabytes you care to buy - at a quarter or so per Blu-Ray grade movie. $25+ two movies a day = $40/month.

Instead, you get the fixed and product costs blended together into $110 per month and a bandwidth cap. Note the healthy profit.

Is Portal especially a new IP? I thought Portal's story was set in the Half-Life universe, as a gaiden game of sorts.

Really? Because yours is the only industrialized nation that I know of that has data caps on landlines.

Let me introduce you to Canada and the UK.

Mandrake Linux could save the installation choices in a file that could be used to auto install Mandrake Linux on other computers. This website describes that process for Mandrake. And SUSE Linux could perform the same task.

Surely there is something like this for Ubuntu?

I wish to have mod points to mods to raise the parent post even higher. It is good to see that there are at least some people here who see the difference between justice and revenge.

It is appauling to see to what height of bloodthirstiness people work themselves into. My opinion is that this is a result of very conservative culture and the sheer feer that Americans subject themselves to (Especially since 9/11). They are afraid of their government, corporations, foreign cultures and different religions. From what I read on Slashdot and elsewhere, quite a sizable percentage of the population own and train in the use of firearms because they fear to walk on the streets unarmed due to the perception that criminals are everywhere and house invasions to be commonplace. This gives me the impression that Americans are frightened of even each other.

And the result of all that buildup of fear is disproportional lashing out at any perceived threat. An analogy would be like a person with mild arachnophobia finding a very scary, poisonous-looking spider in the evening in his bedroom. He can try to capture it to release it outside, but he is too frightened of the possibility that it might get back in again. So he would thoroughly kill it just to be able to sleep comfortably.

When you are greatly afraid, why would you trust mental health facilities to rehabilitate the sexual offender, when permanently isolating, driving him to suicide or execution would bring a guaranteed removal of the threat?

Very sadly even much less hideous crimes result in backlashes. Apperently even if you never hurt anyone but get caught in the act of using illicit drugs results in you being sent to prison. I also find it shocking how prisons are not viewed as a place of rehabilitation but as a way to inflict vengence. I base that on the attitude of how prison rape is viewed not a problem, but as a source humour and almost endoursement since it is people who are accused of crimes that are the victums.

Of course everything above is just my personal opinion and how I explain to myself the reason for such harshness of the American justice system. Another explanation I found was in a freely available, easy to read book by Bob Altemeyer called The Authoritarians. Trouble is that you really can't tell if it is just another biased opinion.

Wouldn't be surprised, in which case, not impressed. Starting sometime very soon, my ISP claims they'll be offering 250Mbps over regular cable, with either 1TB or unlimited monthly transfer. The price is high for a residential connection, of course, but you don't have wait for them to run fibre to your neighbourhood.

I love how all the small-government types - the ones who think that the notions of commonwealth are somehow equivalent to boogieman socialism - get all righteously pro-State, when it comes to WikiLeaks. It is a curious kind of cognitive dissonance.

It is a cognitive dissonance which forms part of a larger pattern. There is even a freely downloadable book on the topic, written by a psychology professor.

Ahh, so the meaning of the words "up to" escape you...

That's what's complete bullshit: the cop-out "up to" phrase in their advertising which does not appear in their advertising except as a tiny disclaimer elsewhere without even a footnote mark next to the claimed network speed to denote that the disclaimer even exists.

Take a look at Shaw Canada's website listing their different internet packages. There's no indication anywhere on that page that the speeds advertised are "up to" the numbers they claim. No "up to", no asterisk, nothing.

or you just figure you can read any old thing you want into advertising and it's not your fault if you're wrong...

How about companies stop the false and/or deceptive advertising and advertise honestly for a change? "e.g. median service is 25 mbps, plus or minus 5 mbps"

No.

That reference comes from a paper written by George Miller covering a memorization study he conducted, that was mostly about memorizing random facts. The 'rule of 7' that was pulled from it has been misapplied to everything under the sun.

In Miller's words:
http://members.shaw.ca/philip.sharman/myth.html

Internet in Canada is expensive and slow

Are you sure? I just bumped up to 50/3 about a month ago, for a price that seems a little high. Check it out. My bill says, "Personal TV + Broadband 50 .... $84.90" (personal TV includes sufficient HD programming for our purposes). Add on two phone lines, and the children's tv stations, plus GST, and it's $128.85 per month. That's actually ~$60 less than before: by removing a bunch of TV stations that I didn't need and increasing my speed from 25 to 50Mbps.

I guess it depends on your definition of "expensive". I consider this "slightly uncomfortable" price for value, not "oh gawd, I'm being financially raped". As to speed, I'm not sure that 50Mbps counts as "slow". Sure, my network is a mix of 100Mbps switches and 1Gbps devices, much faster than this. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect sustained rates that high from across the world for $84.90/month.

Other providers might be expensive and slow. But that doesn't encompass every provider.

Even about balloon-lifted stratospheric UAV... (after most straightforward attempt at news search; I think I've seen more than one "just a balloon" in UK mainstream media few years ago)

Which in itself wasn't unheard of since a few years even in 2005... (BTW, except for "just a balloon" media fad resurfacing in a few years and people forgetting this round, I fully except "OMG it's a spaceplane!" fad relatively soon)

Bob Altemeyer has spent his life studying this phenomenon: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

He has a book called "The Authoritarians" (PDF here: http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf). It's a fascinating read.

> Thanks to the crew of Challenger, Columbia and Apollo 1.

And Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11 and all the astronauts and engineers of whom we seldom hear who are listed here but who all gave their lives for the cause.

Police are no different but the government and themselves would have you believe they are somehow ethically superior.

It's not "the government" or even police who are trying to make you believe they are ethically superior. It's been an ongoing theme from the right-wing "law and order" crowd for decades. You
hear it constantly from conservative media.

That's because police are authority figures, and American conservatives are a bunch of fucking bedwetters who just can't get enough of that daddy-knows-best attitude -- even it means turning this country into a totalitarian hellhole.

Read this. Skip to page 20 to see what these folks think of the police.

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." -- Sinclair Lewis

I was going to reply to PopeRatzo with a link to the WP article about that book's very topic, right-wing authoritarianism, but you kinda beat me to it. I don't have any mod points, but I can do better anyway by quoting you at +2

/me dons my internet-psychologist's trousers:
Some of the replies in this discussion are clearly from people who are RWAs.

Police are no different but the government and themselves would have you believe they are somehow ethically superior.

It's not "the government" or even police who are trying to make you believe they are ethically superior. It's been an ongoing theme from the right-wing "law and order" crowd for decades. You hear it constantly from conservative media.

That's because police are authority figures, and American conservatives are a bunch of fucking bedwetters who just can't get enough of that daddy-knows-best attitude -- even it means turning this country into a totalitarian hellhole.

Read this. Skip to page 20 to see what these folks think of the police.

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." -- Sinclair Lewis

The amount of effort and precedences counts, too... This one is nice, and more than a bit similar to TFA (though better)

But it's still "another month, another helium balloon story"...

Also: http://www.members.shaw.ca/sonde/

The house phone will become a server, it will run asterisk, and it will host the family/indvidual website and bulletin board.

er... How is this really any different from webspace provided by the household's ISP? I guess what I mean is the infrastructure/protocol is already there, and without the need of local server. So I guess I'm asking why are you reinventing the wheel on a Phone Company system?

(Disclaimer: my basic service account does comes with all this at the moment. Perhaps that's unusual?
http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/No-Cost+Extras/webspace.htm )

Disclaimer: I've formally studied special relativity, quantum, and differential geometry, but never GR. This isn't an expert opinion.

GR takes an arrangement of matter, energy, and momentum and figures out what this arrangement forces distances between points in spacetime to be. If you change the arrangement, distances change--LA and New York are one distance without Jupiter, and another with Jupiter, for instance. The "speed of gravity" says that distances change at the speed of light. More specifically, you can imagine that, hypothetically, moving objects radiate light. As the light reaches a point in spacetime, the distance between that point and those very near it is updated based on the new arrangement of matter.

The "warp drive" paper (which, incidentally, was helpful to me; the introduction is accessible) discusses a related effect. Through clever changes in distance, the ship travels from star A to star B and back in an arbitrarily short amount of time as measured by an observer at star A. Even light can piggy-back on this warp bubble, and so changes in the arrangement of matter near the starting point of the ship's journey can get propagated to star B more quickly than normal. That is, if the arrangement near star A changes at launch, distances at star B are updated arbitrarily quickly, since the hypothetical light emitted by the changing object took a ride on the warp ship.

A gravity wave detector at star B would "see" the hypothetical photons as usual. Part of the machine would have updated distances before another part, since the wave of photons would hit them at different times. However, I don't see anything wrong with that. In all of this, the definition of "the speed of light" has moved closer to "the time light takes to travel from A to B" instead of ~300,000 km/s.

VNC can be firewall friendly but not via the browser, I don't particularly think that is that important though. I'd rather quickly download a 300Kb viewer executable that battle with an ActiveX install or Firefox extension. After all, with that single exe you can

have firewall friendly reverse connections
You can create a single click exe
Run a repeater to traverse firewall issues
You can package it up tailor made for your own services
Run it over an SSH tunnel
mirror driver, encryption, java viewer and a bunch of other features make it IMHO a worthwhile addition to any tech support environment

and of course as you say, there's a VNC server for almost every device and OS

(P.S. While I obviously love VNC, we still pay for a single logmeinrescue license at our office for situations where we need to reboot & reconnect (Win32), reboot and reconnect in safe mode (Win32) or work quickly and easily on Symbian, Blackberry and Windows mobile devices)

This link is apparently a port of dig to windows Dig

Get dig for windows: http://members.shaw.ca/nicholas.fong/dig/

While Microsoft did included an nslookup command with Windows, it is quite basic compared to the dig utility. Go download dig for Win32.

But hey, before this actually results in having 1080p videos streamed directly to your computer, the price per downloaded Gb will have to lower a lot. At least here in Canada. You imagine, I am currently capped at 25Gb per month with my current ISP, and it costs me 65$ per month for my Internet access.

I am also in Canada and mine is capped at 60 GB (plan here: http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/High-Speed/) and I pay significantly less than 65$ a month. Do you live in a rural area?

More concisely - a fish rots from the head down.

Nicely put. :-P

Though I'm repeating myself from elsewhere in this thread, some other poster in a completely different Slashdot thread linked through to this introduction to a serious study of authoritarianism -- not so much as a governmental style, but rather as a social and emotional construct. Since we're talking about rotting from the head down, it might make sense to look at the head... :) If the intro linked here holds your interest, the whole online book is available from the parent directory.

Cheers,

Very interesting, thanks for that.

In some other thread here on /. that I ran across earlier today, someone else had posted this link, which I found very interesting as well:

http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/Introduction_links.pdf

That's just the intro, but if you find it holds your attention, the full article / online book is available from the parent directory.

Cheers,

Ditto in Canada. Check Shaw's page on P2P - http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/CustomerCare/InternetSupport/Residential/Sharing/PeerToPeer.htm

Shaw is a big corporate ISP, with a 'no server' TOS clause, and they're fine with P2P. What's more they're refreshingly sensible, because they tell their clients what P2P is and how to do it securely.

This was a link in the article itself, it's a start http://www.members.shaw.ca/halflifestory/index.htm

I'm in Canada. I pay $30/mo for 3mbit/512kbit ADSL, with a 200GB cap. The cap came in really handy when one of my HDDs died, and I had to re-download a lot of steam games.

Canada has had such a law for a long time. After all - the major backbones were funded by the government, and therefore taxpayers, so why should we be locked in to monopolies? Unfortunately for us, just as the US is considering such a law, Canada is considering revoking it.

Sure I can get 30MB access for $65, but that's like buying a 40 seat bus to carry your family of 4. More than you need is great if you don't have to pay for the extra.

Right now you can get 3-6mbit ADSL for $30/mo without a contract. With a contract, $40/mo will give you ADSL speeds of up to 15mbit. $45-$55/mo will give you the same speed with cable.

Considering that we have less population density than the US (and therefore higher upkeep costs per subscriber), I think the law is doing its job quite effectively.

Links/proof:

http://www.teksavvy.com/en/abc_resdsl.asp?ID=2&mID=1
http://www.teksavvy.com/en/resdsl.asp?ID=7&mID=1
http://www.bell.ca/shopping/internet.portal;GEMSESSIONID=vMQVKY3XsKBv1cQyx2xmKTJn322pxDn1LNp2yfw84xGM2wpQNg2n!1182660780?_nfpb=true&_windowLabel=PrsShpInt_NewAccess_internetBrowse_portlet&PrsShpInt_NewAccess_internetBrowse_portlet_actionOverride=%2Fportlets%2Fpersonal%2Finternet%2Fbrowse%2FgetDetailPage&_pageLabel=PrsShpInt_NewAccess
http://www.telus.com/portalWeb/inlineLink/CP_SCS/General/Internet/High_Speed/General/Compare_Plans/?_region=BC
http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/High-Speed/

You're stupid, look up 'Big Pipe Inc', a Shaw subsidiary (It's possibly been renamed "Shaw Business Solutions" now).

Here's a map of the wholly-Shaw owned fiber backbone -- not sure if the red lines are Shaw's, but the rest certainly are. One of my friends used to spend a lot of time out in the bush, getting dropped off by helicopters with a lot of bear spray, surveying back when parts of this were deployed.

Depends on the city. Where I live Shaw owns a fiber backbone that comes through the city that stretches all across the country and down into the US. See the network map

WARNING! ANNECDOTAL EVIDENCE BE

Never mind the fact that where I go to college they are lobbying for better fiber rollout, and trying to get the Shaw and Telus negotiators INTO THE SAME BUILDING is almost impossible, let alone the same room.

Also Telus got bitchslapped by BC Hydro (gov't power utility) because they share poles, with Shaw piggybacking on the power company's portion. Telus was tightening the wires so they could "push" Shaw off. BC Hydro stepped in when the tension was a) damaging the poles and (b) when they realized what kind of monkey business was being pulled to annoy Shaw.

Hell, residential cable here in the Southwest is 28Mbit and even that is considered pathetically slow to the 100Mbit I have at work which is about par with residential Internet in South Korea or Japan.

I HATE YOU!

Also, 3 kg is wrong, according to this, NASA says 0.84 kg a day.

here is some information from Canadian providers -- none of them specifically state what information they will or will not provide when requested or what is specifically logged. Most pages include contact information for a privacy rep. I suggest you contact that person(s) and see what information you can opt out of having tracked.

I have excluded TELUS because they are wh0r3ish and don't listen anyway.

From http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/AboutShaw/PrivacyPolicy/Index
3.3 How does Shaw obtain your consent? Consent is required for the collection of Personal Information and the subsequent use or disclosure of the Personal Information. Consent can be either expressed or implied. The form of consent sought by Shaw may vary, depending upon the circumstances and the type of Personal Information. In determining the form of consent to use, Shaw takes into account the sensitivity of the information and the reasonable expectations of the Customer, Employee or Web Site User. Shaw generally seeks express consent when the Personal Information is likely to be considered sensitive. Implied consent is typically appropriate when the Personal Information is less sensitive. In exceptional circumstances, as permitted by law, Shaw may collect, use or disclose Personal Information without a Customer, Employee or Web Site Userâ(TM)s knowledge or consent.

In general, the use of products and services by a Customer, or a Web Site User, or the acceptance of employment or benefits by an Employee, will constitute implied consent required by Shaw to collect, use and/or disclose Personal Information for the purposes identified in this Privacy Policy.

Consent may be withdrawn by Customers and Web Site Users at any time, subject to legal or contractual restrictions and upon providing Shaw reasonable notice. If you wish to withdraw your consent to certain collection, use or disclosure of Personal Information, please contact Shaw at privacy@shaw.ca.

and of course Rogers http://your.rogers.com/privacy1.asp

I'm far from the only one who got unlimited data for $15/mo via Telus when they were struggling to retain customers who otherwise might've run to the iPhone. And I assume you've also talked to Shaw's BigPipe, not just Telus for DC data? I know they offer 5 Mbps symmetric w/ 200 GB transfer for 200/mo retail (+10 per static IP > 1), but have no experience with custom pricing.

Look, I know you guys are having fun floppin' it out and having a good ol' measure, but I can see the point that you don't need a whole lot of money to make something that kind of works. I can actually see how for around $1000 it would be possible to build a plane that could be launched and flown manually to around 300m AGL, carry 400g of explosive and another 600g of misc nails and bolts and glide autonomously to 10m above a preprogrammed spot before exploding above a market, for example, or barracks.

It wouldn't have to be military spec. If it crashes along the way, hey just set it up to explode anyway - this obviously is not a precision type project.

I think the summary is a bit confusing in that you have clearly interpreted "build you own version of" as "build something of the same quality as".

BTW, for the record, I would never condone building a device such as mentioned above and people who do are evil shits, no matter what the motive. I am however interested in the subject of automonous aircraft and in particular thoroughly enjoyed reading a link posted to an earlier story on /. which I share now for your enjoyment and my own karma whoring.

Try http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844%3ABlogPost%3A788. It seems relatively current, and offers some GPL'd software and lots of links.

This is a bit outdated, possibly a dead project, but it was cool when it was new and going on. Check out http://members.shaw.ca/sonde/ [High Altitude Glider Project]. Might be enough interesting pieces there to continue a similar project, or at least contact the original site-owner and ask him a few questions to get you started.