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Buy Broadband From Your Neighbor
infractor writes "Wired has an article about a wireless project delivering free broadband to a rural community. Using Linux based devices called meshboxes from Locustworld, they've created a local mesh network. More detail in this article. With Wi-Fi friendly ISPs talking about micro-ISP deals for wireless sharers this could be the accelerator UK broadband has been waiting for." Last year we mentioned the MeshAP-05, a bootable CD which "turns a single board computer or laptop into a mesh node and access point," since updated to MeshAP-06. Update: 02/13 19:52 GMT by T : I see from comments that -08 is actually the current version of MeshAP, with -09 soon. Thanks.
Just to say that I am the third comment.
I'm going to sue their asses off when all that wireless Kazaa traffic gives me a brain tumour!
Trolling is a art,
They just sell weed. Good weed for sure, but just weed.
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Maybe you should buy this "premier" slashdot account on eBay.
Deer meat tastes good. Rabbits and squirrels and ducks and geese and a whole slug of other animals TASTE GOOD. However, I am not in any kind of shape to run them down on foot and beat them to death, nor am I able to swing a rock around in a piece of leather and bring down moving prey. So, to enable me to eat those animals that I find tasty, I need access to a weapon of some sort that can bring down my target with minimal effort from me and at this point in techno-history, that weapon is the gun. Here is the process:
I need to be able to protect my home/family/property/person from people/weirdos/freaks/psychos/wandering idiots/wild animals(like deer and rabbits, tough little fuckers)/insurance salesmen/Jehovah's Witnesses(all 144,000 of them)/etc. With these two reasons in mind, try to envision what the U.S. would be like without guns.
First of all, those people among us who don't give a rat's ass about the law anyway will still have guns, so only the law-abiding citizenry will be defenseless. Hmm. Fuck that.
Secondly, if some really bad juju does come down and - as unlikely as it seems - the U.S. gets invaded, how the hell are we supposed to defend ourselves? Do you really want to end up trying to fight off well-armed soldiers with rocks and molotov cocktails? Hmm. Fuck that, too.
We don't need fewer guns, we need fewer idiots. Thin the herd, I say. Let people drive without seatbelts. Get rid of helmet laws. Take the warning stickers off hair dryers and maybe some of the idiots will use them in the bathtub. Fucking Florida especially needs an enema. Those people can't figure out how to read a fucking ballot, but yet we let them help decide who has his/her finger on the little red "blow-up-the-world" button? Hmm. Fuck that as well.
You're friend Mike also let the geeks next door have access to his anus, 4 or 5 times a night. I'd have kicked that sick faggot off of my network too.
> Anyways, this sounds like a great idea on paper. But, it seems to be relying on one thing: human goodness. Communism also sounds good on paper. In fact, it is utopia. But, it will NEVER work as it should because humans are greedy. In this case, what is stopping anyone from geting on Kazaa and using up all the available bandwidth?
The technically-adept people who set up the network can also monitor it if they want/need to. Simple matter to use tcpdump and get the IP addr of said Kazaa hog. From there, get customer ID from DHCP server logs, and let community peer pressure do the job from there.
Hell, I'd argue with that, as well. I don't see anything about "communism" that I could reasonably consider "utopian".
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
This "large enough" network of which you speak... It has a name.
Wait for it...
The Internet.
The people in your little neighborhood mesh network are never gonna have the stuff you want.
The mesh is a great idea in terms of providing the non-broadband available folks a way to get online, and maybe even provide alternate paths for redundancy purposes, but ultimately, somebody is going to have to provide a decent wired pipe, because most of what you want/need is going to be non-local.
It reminds me of Sam Kinison's comments to the people of Ethiopia...
Why don't you freakin people get out of the desert, and GO WHERE THE FOOD IS?!
Capitalism means that you volunteer to work for someone ELSES' benefit (The Bosses' Profit) Competition (capitalism) == Duplication(waste), Co-Operation (communism) == Maximized Beneficial Utility (efficiency).
First of all, you don't volunteer to work for someone else's benefit. You volunteer to work for your own benefit, ie. money, food, clothing, shelter. You also benefit the people who took a risk and invested in the company so you could have a job.
You claim that Competition/Capitalism = Duplication/Waste, which to some extent is true. But, it also encourages innovation which is extremely lacking in the communist system.
Why would anyone take a risk to invest in new technology, etc. if there is no payoff? The answer is: they don't! Is it any surprise that medical breakthroughs don't happen in Canada? They have socialized medicine, there is no incentive to innovate!
Yeah, I'm sure no one in my local area would have cached the latest episode of Enterprise, right? As it is, I have to swarm dozens of slow sources scattered across the globe, needlessly clogging up those distant pipes with redundant data.
Wireless mesh networking will simply be a very very nice addition to the Internet as a whole -- smart, ad-hoc, wireless edges surrounding a wired core for the longhaul VS present-day last-mile bullshit.
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