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FCC to Permit Complete Media/Telecom Consolidation
rhwalker22 writes "Today's Washington Post has a piece reviewing some of the major decisions the Federal Communications Commission will be making in the next few months, moves that could fundamentally rewrite the rules for the broadcast media and Internet service providers. Excerpt: 'Opponents of the proposed rules fear that, taken together, they ultimately could lead to a few powerful conglomerates controlling the flow of electronic information, from programming of television and radio news and entertainment to owning the pipes that connect people to the Internet.'"
Someone had this quote in their sig on another thread:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power" -- Mussolini
Needless to say, I saved it!
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
In a hurry, messed up the links. Sorry for the repost.
Of course!
One promising GPL one is Locust World, which combines a bootable Linux distro with the AODV routing software, 802.11 drivers, NAT functionality, and more. The AODV libraries are open source, and you could apply this to just about any wireless medium. More info about AODV in general here.
And of course, the company I work for has a proprietary solution, but it is dependent on using our 802.11b card for the time being. That, and we aren't mass producing hardware at the moment. The tech is certainly there though! Mesh networking with 802.11 is just extending the topology of the wired internet to the wireless world.
As far as routing goes, ad hoc on-demand routing (implemented by the AODV libraries I mentioned above) is probably the best solution for building a scalable network. Wireless links are inherently unreliable, so a pure distance vector algorithm like RIP isn't the best solution, and routing updates on a large network would have a lot of overhead with many nodes.
Forgive me if I glossed over the subject, hopefully other can fill in the blanks =).
i just spent two weeks vacationing in snowy canada (i live in california) and while i was there i had the opportunity to learn about canada's internet. in short, it kicks ass. it is very fast, very resilient, very regulated, and most importantly, very cheap. the canadian government has been developing and regulating broadband since before anyone knew what broadband was and their investment has surely paid off. how does digital cable service AND broadband internet for $40/month sound? that's 40 candian dollars, or a little over $30 dollars american currency. not only that, but it's purported to be more resilient than the internet2 project that is just barely getting off the ground in the states. canada's regulated deployment scheme has made it one of the most wired nations in the world. we could learn a lot from them.