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A Wi-Fi/VoIP Phone Booth In the Burning Man Desert
Brad Templeton writes "I,
(of EFF/ClariNet/rec.humor.funny) along with
Brent Chapman
(Majordomo/Building Internet Firewalls) and the satellite dish of
John Gilmore (EFF/Cygnus/Cypherpunks/etc.)
put together an engaging hack -- a battery-powered free phone booth using
802.11,
VoIP and a satellite IP uplink. This was placed in the desert at
the Burning Man arts festival deep
in the remote Nevada Black Rock playa, exactly where you wouldn't expect
a working phone booth to be. With cheap VoIP people were able to call
all over the world. The reactions of people to such incongruous
technology were great fun and emotional as well. There's a
page about the phone including
details of
building it and
live experiences including totally non-gratuitous photos of naked people using technology. (There, that ought to stress-test my new server!)"
There are some major problems with VoIP. For example, if you make an emergency call, rescuers can't automatically locate you (with cell phones they can triangulate). Also, it's a lot easier for people to manipulate this technology to make anonymous calls and thereby threaten and harass others. These are things people need to think about before concluding VoIP is good for mankind.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
That is all fine and dandy, but your point is moot.
Most people I know would rather carve out there eyes with butter knives then talk on corded phones at home. Off the top of my head myself, my parents and my best friend all have nothing but cordless phones.
We are SOL during power outages anyways.
But then again we all have cell phones and those are backups for power outages.
exhibit A href="http://www.sktfm.tv">sean kennedy.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.