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WiFi Gone Wild
b4k4 writes "According to this news release, the Texas Department of Transportation is proposing to install hotspots at all 84 Safety Rest Stops and 12 Travel Information Centers statewide. This would be in addition to the four test locations already in place along US287." Reader polluted notes that Portland is working on free WiFi. An anonymous reader sent in word of this year's wifi-shootout, a contest to maximize the range for an 802.11b connection. And Roland Piquepaille writes in regarding cows wearing WiFi collars, which I'm afraid reminds me of a crummy sci-fi movie.
Seems that in Texas, truckers are the predominant users of roadside rest stops. Since a govt agency will be providing the Internet, you can bet your life that there will be plenty of surveillance involved, so I wonder if this will also be a fishing expedition for truckers who traffik in child pr0n? If you've ever travelled thru Texas on the interstate highways, you've undoubtedly noticed the many "adult" movie stores near lots of truckstops, and how many 18-wheelers are always filling their parking lots..... not to be making any insinuations about truckers being such big-time consumers of pr0n or nothing like that.
Any ideas on how to keep those zap-collars working for extended periods? I'd think that replacing/recharging all those batteries would almost be as much work as herding the darn things.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Personal Story: I have a laptop with WiFi and I went to the only Starbucks in town for some coffee. They didn't have WiFi there, so I went to Panera Bread Company to get a drink. The coffee was worse, but they had WiFi, so I stayed for three hours!
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I live in a state that has these grand taxpayer waysides, that, while being a wonderful place to take a dump, are a luxury for a state that has cronic budget deficits and are one of the highest taxed states in the nation.
Adding wi-fi to the wayside crapatoriums will indeed benefit a few people looking for some highway p0rn, but again, it's a total luxury for a small population of folks who bring their laptops on the road. -- And no need to respond "hey, *I* bring my laptop on the road, so there must be others." Face it. It's a small population.
Not to say I'm (completely) against taxpayer funded hot-spots .. but come on .. put 'em up where there's a steady population of users.
So far, the RIAA's "sue the world" strategy has relied on subpoenas sent to ISPs to identify the filesharer who was using a specific IP address at a specific time. What happens when the ISP has no idea: "Well, it was somebody travelling on I-20."? If the ISP were a private entity, the RIAA _may_ be able to sue the ISP. But, what happens when the ISP is the State of Texas? My one semester of ConLaw says that the 11th Amendment would bar that suit.
I see your point about wi-fi getting you to go there in the first place, but I would think that any shop selling coffee drinks might be more interested in getting you out as well as in. You may have hung out for three hours, but did you buy more than one thing during that time?
It seems like the negatives could equal the benefits for the coffee shop. People come in but they hang out, taking up seating space and preventing new customers from coming in if they need a place to sit and drink their coffee. Unless, of course, the coffee shop is getting a percentange of the wireless access, but everyone apparently wants that for free.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Here in the Computing and Information Sciences department at Kansas State University we have a research project that is using some kind of sensor cluster implanted in cattle. These sensor clustors then take vital signs and other data and respond to researchers who scan the cow/bull with an IPaQ. Kind of like a tricorder, but with the sensors in the cattle instead of in the hand held device.
I don't know too many of the specifics of the project (I'm a systems administrator in the department, rather than a research assistant), but it sounded cool to me. Maybe with some WiFi collars the cattle could make a mesh network and just shoot the data back to the ranch house without needing someone to walk by with an ipaq, heh heh.
Ended up talking to a trucker last week, we'd both stopped on a road with a view of Mt. Hood to photograph, and got to talking. Apparently WiFi in truck stops is quite the rage, just for this reason.
I'm a nature photographer.
After doing a double-take, I realized there was a webcam mounted on the top of the LCD. Behind the live webcam window, there was a fullscreen display of the rest stop's power usage statistics. Apparently, this place was powered entirely by a single wind turbine (which I had noticed outside). They were displaying all kinds of fun graphs and historical data on power generation and usage and whatnot. The poster describing the system claimed they were using WiFi to transmit the data from the turbine to the computer inside.
We were pressed for time, so I didn't whip out my laptop and check to see if the access point was open, but still, I was pretty amazed. We circled the entire country, and of all the rest stops we visited, that little stop sitting all by itself in the middle of the desert was probably the nicest one.
While that's not likely to be enough time to go to a full website, I could configure my home machine to cache the images I want and provide them quick.