Homemade EVDO/WiFi Mobile Access Point

Tamundson writes "Over the last few weeks I've built myself a mobile access point for my car. It's based on a Soekris net2421 embedded Linux box and uses Verizon's 1xRTT/EVDO network as its uplink, resharing it over 802.11b. Wherever my car goes, my Internet link goes! :) I finally put some webpages together on how I built it. The components are pretty cheap and anybody with basic Linux skills can build their own just as easily. I've also got it interfacing with Google Maps to do live vehicle tracking via gpsd. It also uploads pictures from an on-board webcam every five minutes or so."

Comments

Re:Seems like a good prototype.

[Jonboy X]

All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second.
-JF

I call shenannigans on that one. Ya figure, people nowadays are living 2 or 3 billion seconds (60 to 100 years). If each of the ~275 million Americans alive today only paid for 1 of the seconds of your life, you'd have to die by age 10 for the math to work out.

Then again, maybe the US gov't really *is* spending money 10 times as fast as it's coming in...time to cash out my bonds!

Re:Seems like a good prototype.

[shawb]

Actually, it could make sense. Start by assuming that all taxes collected are income taxes:

Assume that the average American starts working at 16 and retires at 55. This leaves 39 years of working. We can round up to 40 years of working years.

with an average of 40 hours wourked out of every 168 hours in a week, slightly less than 1 in 4 hours is spent working while employed.

Therefore the average person works for less than ten years of their life, which comes close to the number for how long you said a person would live.

Or to put it a different way: if one were to spend all of their working time meeting new people, they'd only get a second with each person if they were to meet everyone in the US. This doesn't even include the fact that there is a turnover in those that are employeed during the time that you work.

It is just by a fluke of population size that it works out to about one second. Whether or not the taxes paid out are in the form of income tax, sales tax or property tax really shouldn't matter, as in general a person will pay all of these taxes combined in a manner relative to the amount of money that they make. While there will be some outliers that end up with a much different distribution of tax structure, we're talking about the average person here.

To sum up a career in number of seconds: 60seconds/minute * 60minutes/hour * (40hours/workweek) * 52weeks/year * 40 years/career= 60*60*40*52*40 = 299,520,000 workseconds/career. This is really dang close to the current population of about 295 million people in the united states.