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Texas Wireless Ban Has Failed
chip rosenthal writes "The effort to ban municipal networks in Texas has failed. Texas House Bill 789 originally had provisions to ban muni wireless networks. The Senate passed a significantly rewritten version, without a ban. A conference committee failed to reach agreement, so the bill died when the Texas legislature adjourned this weekend."
This article (annoying registration required) quotes the HB 789 sponsor as saying he will try again in two years (next legislative session).
The savemuniwireless mailing list kept us all informed of what politicians to email at what times.
I emailed those politicians told them I was going to work for/donate to their opponents when they came up for reelection, if they voted for HB 789.
Now we need to target Phil King, of Weatherford. He is the slimy corporate whore who sponsored hb 789.
We should probably raise money to run ads informing his district constitutents about how he sold out to SBC, et al as a corporate whore.
Here is the url to the Weatherford Democrat, the newspaper for the biggest city in his district.
I say we make an example of this whore Phil King by raising money over the Net to defeat him when he runs for reelection/office again. He will serve as an example for the other corporate whores. With the internet we can focus all our whore-hating dollars on some whore like King.
This guy is just a texas state govt representative. It is not all that big an office. We do not need to raise all that much money or have all that huge an effort in order to make an example of him by kicking him out of office.
After all, how much money could it take to run ads or classified announcemments in a small paper like the Weatherford Democrat?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Uh, no. The bans on lewd cheerleading and gay foster parents failed to pass. The linked page provides a quick list of some of the things that passed and didn't in the last Texas legislative session. Some of the items are pretty funny. Or pretty sad, depending on your POV.
A quick note to everyone from outside Texas - We have a part time legislature. It meets for 140 days every two years. The standard joke in the state is that we'd be a hell of a lot better off if they met for 2 days every 140 years.
Well, the adoption issues in general are very real-- although 802.16, if it can be seen as a successor to 802.11, may be able to an extent to actually ride 802.11's coattails. There are combination 802.11/802.16 chips being worked on now.
However, for this specific case saturation is a little bit irrelivant. One of the interesting properties of a public project such as muni wifi is that they get to dictate their own standards. If the muni wifi project decides to go with 802.16, then well, essentially, the citizens of the muni will more or less have to go along.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
It all sounds nice, but your history is not quite accurate. The government did not invent electrical power or lay the first power lines. It was started in a lot of places independently by private companies arising to provide power. In some places local groups formed non-profit co-ops to provide power to its members. Eventually governments decided it was a good idea to take over the business so they could achieve a desired social good - providing power to everyone - not to spur an industry or replace batteries.
The first major power station in the United States was the Niagara Falls Power Company, which started generating power in the 1890s. They generated way more power than they could use or sell, so they funded prizes to develop long-distance transmission technology and eventually contracted with Westinghouse (another private company) to transmit the power to nearby Buffalo where it could be sold.
Eventually in the 1930s, someone decided that access to electrical power was a "unversal right" and the Rural Electrification Administration was created to provide power even to remote locations where it was not economically feasible.
There are two very good cases for government action - providing a good that cannot be practically provided by private industry because of the freeloader problem (if 10 people pay for a road, the rest might ride on it for free and not pay, so the original 10 won't want to pay either), or achieving some social goal such as universal access which is really not economical but is deemed to be good. Then there are a lot of bad cases for government action which are almost always wrong - that the government will spur technology and "profitably" or "economically" provide services that private companies won't. Let's just be clear about which argument we're using here. I oppose the Texas ban on municipalities providing WiFi because there may be cases where the city decides it's a unversal good and wants to do it anyway, or because the costs of charging for a service in a particular location outweight the cost of the service itself.
"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." -- Olin Miller