Slashdot Mirror
County-Wide Wireless To Be Deployed in Michigan
alien88 writes "Late last week, the Washtenaw County Board approved Wireless Washtenaw Advisory Board's recommendation of 20/20 Communications to cover the entire county with wireless by the end of 2007. This includes Ann Arbor, the home of University of Michigan and future home of Google's Adwords division. The wireless network will be free for speeds up to 85kbps and $35/month for 500kbps. 20/20 Communications estimates it will take around 6,000 radios to cover the county.
This initiative is being funded without taxpayer dollars and is one of the most ambitious wireless deployments in the U.S. Will it succeed or will it fail? Check out the county's wireless website for updates on the project." Of course, the real reason this is worth posting is it's because this is the county where Rob, myself and a number of the others live.
This initiative is being funded without taxpayer dollars and is one of the most ambitious wireless deployments in the U.S. Will it succeed or will it fail? Check out the county's wireless website for updates on the project." Of course, the real reason this is worth posting is it's because this is the county where Rob, myself and a number of the others live.
and the telcos used their lobbying dollars to CRUSH the effort. Good luck Washtenaw!
I am not left-handed, either!
I am a HUGE fan of the county/city wide wireless programs that are popping up all over the U.S. And Canada. While I do love this, I do have a few reservations. One reason why I do not live out where I want to (The Catskills in NY) is I cannot get broadband service without paying a huge amount of money. However, I am wondering how well a system like this would work in a mountainous area such as the Adirondacks or the Catskill Plateau... Does anyone have any information on a town/county/state implmenting a wireless network over ruggard terrain to reach the rural people where wireless might be blocked by hills, mountains etc? I would be very interested to see how something like this would be put into good use.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
I lived in Ann Arbor for 5 years and just moved to Austin, Texas for graduate school. Damme!
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
They had the MERIT network there practically before Al Gore invented the Internet.
Where were you when the voynix came?
...this is the county where Rob, myself and a number of the others live in.
... and work as professional editors.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
I felt a great disturbance in the Network, as if millions of Washtenawans suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
If this can work in the U.S., presumably it would work even better in the UK with similar internet usage and a much higher population density.
Perhaps someone out there knows the answer to this ... if I were to fly over this region would I (briefly) be able to access the internet from my laptop? If the Access Points have miles of range, does that range extend *up* as well as *out*? Just curious. And of course, by extension, as more and more cities roll these things out, will we have access to the net wherever we fly? Assuming the answer to my question is yes, could this begin to impact airplane design (especially small planes), by assuming net access? Planes could report their position (on board GPS tells them where they are, then they use the wireless net to communicate to "Air Traffic Controller" servers, which could then send back flight instructions). Just a few random thoughts for a Monday morning ...
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
What we can hope, however, is that this initiative spreads much like public radio and that one day internet access will be more or less a right.
The spread of knowledge is good, if I may opine.
$35/month for 500kbps? The precedent will worry the telcos, but these prices are hardly any competition for broadband. The dial-up providers will definitely be against it, but I don't think they have all that much muscle.
City/countywide 802.11 a/b/g is POINTLESS!!!! I really don't understand why all this money and resources is being spent on it. They have horrible range and were never meant to cover an area this big, so you have to buy an insane amount of AP's to get decent coverage. I bet when all is said and done they end up with 8,000 AP's and the project ends up costing a few hundred thousand dollars. On top of that, constant maintaince that ends up not making it economically viable.
Calm down with the citywide wireless. I know WiMax have been dragging their feet, but my guess is by 2009 we'll have usable WiMax that is ready for city wide deployment. You are going to waste all this time and money now, so that in 3 years you are superceeded by WiMax (which will do the job better and have less maintaince). Hot spots are fine. If you want to drop 200 access points around the county to get some coverage for popular places, that's ok. 200 access points would probably be viable. 6,000 (or in reality 8,000) aren't.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
In addition to Washtenaw County, Hillsdale and Lenawee Counties are also setting up a similar wireless network, although these two counties are concentrating their efforts on the most populated areas and kissing off everyone else. (Did I spell kissing correctly?) And none of it is free.
Fata viam invenient.
This could also negatively impact the adoption of high speed cellular data networks, which are becoming popular with businesses.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
...and here I thought Michigan was in Canada.
Like a suburb of Saskatewan, right?
LegendMUD
Are these networks going to require some type of login for the basic speed or will it be completely open for anyone to use?
And, that 85kbps is more than you would get if the telcos would have free reign with their "500kbps". Because, if there is no competition around, telcos tend to sell cheap "broadband" that tends to go to 500Bps (there's no "k" here... at least the B is capital) anywhen between 16:00 and 24:00 or so.
Most customers don't know how to notice they got cheated due to overselling, and those who do, have no recourse except for building their own mesh.
But, once the telcos have real established competition in the area, the quality of links suddenly increases by over an order of magnitude.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Big congrats to the politicians who have won a great victory in the fight against the fools who think they know better how to spend their money. And even bigger kudos to each citizen of the state who was brave enough to push for this, to say to your shepherding government officials "I want you to force people, at the point of a gun, to pay for my internet."
Way to go yall. Yer setting the way for a much brighter future full of nannies who are there to take care of your every need and want, and asking for so little in return...
Where did you hear this? Just last month, my township signed up for the next phase. Not to mention the networks is owned by a telecom.
This all sounds well and good, but Washtenaw county is the heart of Comcast country. They will find their way into the state legislature's pocketbooks and have this initiative put to sleep like a sick dog.
This is nothing more than election year pipe dreaming.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Oakland County in MI has their 802.11 pilot up already. Causing a few problem w/business's who already had an 802.11 network deployed. It's nice to be able to jump on a non-monitored, non-proxied network from work!!
Let's Go Blue!
There are no obstructions up and down, whereas there are obstructions laterally - trees, buildings, cell phone towers, etc. The range vertically is much, much larger than the range laterally. You could probably go a couple of miles.
You can communicate with the shuttle and amateur satellites (that are 250-500km in elevation, not to mention a lateral distance away) on ham bands on half a watt of power - these transmitters are probably a tenth of a watt. So a few miles would be a fair assumption on these radios that are working on (IIRC) 100mW of power.
No matter how you look at this, if it works as planned it will be good for the residents of the area.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
The wireless network will be free for speeds up to 85kbp
Wouldn't it be cheaper for the county to issue free postage?
thats the sad part here.
People are acting like the money is free. Trouble is a great many people in that county are going to be taxed for a service that a good number will never get to use.
Oh yeah, I know, there will be programs for people of certain groups to get access, most won't take advantage of it. Its another feel good bill that makes it look like a county/city/state is actually doing something good.
Sorry, if even one trailer exist at a local school it should the first thing addressed. Quit diverting money from projects already starved of cash. Internet access is anything but required to live life today and as such doesn't need governments spending money on barely tolerable technology. Next thing we will have 50 zillion connections and jumping from area to area will be a nightmare because none of the wireless providers will agree on any standard. (let alone governments wanting to tax people who are not their own)
The rich get richer by having services they need to do business paid for by everyone else. Wireless is definitely going to be that for sometime until Internet access is actually needed by the general public.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The telco's case is getting weaker and weaker as time goes on. "Broadband" as we know it here in the U.S. is getting fairly old now, but it has not kept up with the pace of other areas of technological advancement in IT, since the telco's and cable companies are reluctant to re-invest their multi-billion dollar profits (i.e. the 18,000 foot limit still applies for DSL in most places, although the technology has been there to extend it well beyond that). I live in an urbanized area in the middle of a medium-sized city, and cable Internet is my only choice for broadband since I am beyond AT&T's 18,000 foot limit. The cable Internet service is $55 per month and not reliable at all. My friends who have DSL are not really satisfied with the service they get for their price either. I don't know of anyone who even has more than two choices. The players in the broadband industry are operating as a cartel right now.
Shouldn't that me the washtenaw-repreSENT dept.?
Listen to more hip-hop!
When I first saw this in FireFox... I mis-read it for Country Wide Wireless To Be Deployed... This is old news... even up here in the Good Ole province of Manitoba, we have total coverage Wireless DSL. This, however is an initiative between a private company, and the Federal & Provincial Governments Good news though, in any case :)
-Chris
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
re%
Here's the proposal:w ireless.ewashtenaw.org/partners/privatesec/rfp_624 4.pdf+Ann+arbor+wireless+802.11+washtenaw&hl=en&gl =us&ct=clnk&cd=6&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:DhXJwaAtDLYJ:
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Actually, it would work for VOIP, if it's a compressed stream (thus, alright for voice traffic, not for faxes or credit card machines). Our VOIP phones here at work UNcompressed use just over 60Kbps.
And for the record, I work for Provide.Net, an ISP based in Washtenaw county that does lots of dial-up, VOIP, Web Hosting, and DSL.
~Donald / Just RTFM
Even the $35 plan should worry the ISPs. I am so looking forward to dumping Comcast because they try to bundle cable tv with my Internet service and keep billing me for wrong amounts due, in part, to their own complicated billing system and the fact that so many of their plans are tied to cable. It will be great just to be able to have a provider that isn't trying to sell me another service I don't want and occasionally billing me for it anyway!
When Dexter's on the internet, can Hell be far behind?
Popups are not required by 5c, and the requirements of 5c are definitely nothing new.
Here is the wording of 5c in the current draft of GPL V3 (7/27/2006):
5c says only that the program must include some type of feature accessible via a menu or command or button or something that's easy to find and use, that tells the user about the lack of warranty and that the work can be distributed (conveyed) under the terms of the GPL V3. Failing that, the program must display the information at startup. This is roughly equivalent to the GPL V2, section 2c, which says:
2c was written at a time when programs were assumed to be command-line driven (think GNU Emacs, for which the GPL was written). The idea is that some notification is required; if the program runs interactively, it needs to display the notice either at startup or by accessing somewhere in the program's interface. The updated GPL V3 language in 5c seems to be more appropriate for a wide range of applications from command-line driven to GUI to Web applications.
Note that neither clause states that this notice must be a popup. The notice requirements are basically the same as for any copyrighted work -- while a notice is not specifically required under the Bern convention, in the U.S. and many other countries the copyright holder has limited ability to recover damages in a lawsuit without one.
My blog
...and your shriveled gonads.
Within 50 years, we will all be mutated by the constant bombardment of Wi-Fi, cell, and high voltage lines. Those of us who survive the cancer anyway.
Scare tactics? Tinfoil hat material? They said that about radon too. And asbestos. And lead. But don't you believe it; you just keep firmly pressing that cellphone right up against your temporal lobe. Keep buying houses right under those huge cell towers. (newsflash: they amp the power ridiculously high in order to get wider coverage; FCC never finds out). Enjoy your brief life as you are slowly cooked from the inside out.
Follow the money on the "studies" that have been done that claim that cell traffic is harmless. Now who would benefit from such studies?
It is easy to make the copyright notice be formed to be an advert, and it takes only a bit of ill will. And, once that popup (GUI) or even X lines of text spam (CLI) enter a program, they are unremovable except for certain very far-fetched tricks[1].
Even worse, we have seen it abused already, for GPLv2. For example, Hans Reiser put a list of sponsors into the copyright notice, and then argued that those who add a GUI over his software without showing the adverts beside their progress bar breach his copyright. This did take a Joerg Schilling-like intentional twisting of the GPL, but with GPLv3, the twisting won't be needed anymore.
[1]. Have a friend turn the program into a library or daemon, without interactive parts. Reimplement the GUI/CLI yourself and add it to the part your friend changed.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I realize that the truth means nothing in the New Republican Dystopia, but please. Gore claimed that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet". In Congress, that means championing an idea and shepherding it through the funding process. It doesn't even make sense to suppose that it means anything else, unless you're being deliberately disingenuous. If someone else deserves more of the credit for that, perhaps you can tell us who that might be.
Years from now Sen. Stevens in Alaska will be able to proudly claim that HE built the "bridge to nowhere", and you won't get any argument from me about it. And yes, we all understand that he didn't physically build it (or even design it) himself. It will stand as a monument to Republican achievement regardless.
The summary says yes, but TFA says no tax dollars are being used for implementation or maintenance. They probably mean local tax dollars, as its probably a federal grant along with private donations. But whats going to happen in effect is a government controlled monopoly, with one or two private companies making a ton of money - probably from fed and state grants and shell-game general fund money that they shift around to make it appear like its not "taxpayer money". They'll provide the free access for a while, then start forcing ads and limiting bandwidth, until finally everyone must pay each month to use the network. Its a sweet deal for the provider, since the local govt controls all the right of ways and can put their APs anywhere they damn please.
Why even mention "Republicans", when the only people involved were Gore, CNN (and millions of viewers)? The Stevens example is enterely wrong. Stevens funded the bridge in Congress. Gore? Others funded the Internet before he was on the scene at all. There are matters of causality and the cold hard facts of the years things were done in that you have no regard to.
Consider that, according to the release, the community will let the operator install 6000 radios on "water towers, buildings, light poles and other structures". In New York City, operators have to pay to get access to such valuable real estate. Providing access to community real estate free of charge is definitely a form of subsidy.
85kbps is hardly faster than dial-up, and 500kbps for $35 a month? Even the local telco will provide 1.5mbps for that price (I happen to live in Ann Arbor). Am I missing something here, because anyway you look at it, it's hardly broadband. Then again, it might be kbytes, not kbits (however unlikely that is).
This is a bad idea masked as a good idea. What happens when they need a massive upgrade of the technology in 10 years? Or some hacker figures out how to own the entire network?. Taxes will go up and service will suffer. Ann Arbor already has horrible taxes, this will make it worse. Someone who doesn't want or need wifi access now is forced to pay for everyone else. They take what people are willing to pay for, and turn it into a cost center, meaning that they will now get the least-cost service instead of the best service they are willing to pay for. What incentive will private companies have to come in to deliver unique and innovative services if they will just get undercut by the county government? What happens when the folks running Washtenaw County decide to censor websites or emails or blogs that they decide sexist or racist or bigoted? U of M had one of the most restrictive speach codes in the nation, until it was struck down in the courts. Now folks with that same sensibility will have a hand on your access to the internet. I just think this is a bad idea.
This is the strangest of all Geek fixations, the most divorced from reality.
The web appliance tanks whenever it is tested in the marketplace. AOL bleeds red ink with the death of dial-up. Fully half of Apple's revenues come through sales of the iPod and iTunes...
I could go on and on and on. P2P. Games. Communities like MySpace, Subscription services of every sort.
There seems to be a good trend in terms of WIFI going on in, of all places, Michigan. With Washtanaw, there is now 3 counties that are all connected that are in the process of doing a WIFI project. As mentioned, Oakland (to the north of Washtanaw) is doing WIFI. They have already launched their pilot locations. Then Genesee county, to the north of Oakland, is doing WIFI too. They just got their bids back and are in the process of selecting a vendor. All 3 of these counties are doing WIFI without any taxpayer money. We'll see how well it works... 85k is for the birds. I think the other 2 counties are working on a faster "free" speed than that. The good news is that there are some big name companies (ATT, IBM) that are interested in building some of these networks. If anyone can buck Comcast... it'll be them.
I think you underestimate the reality-resistance of the People's Republic of Ann Arbor.
A private company that takes advantage of technology to offer a cheap service is called communist. It's main competitor is a state protected monopoly, labled "reality". Something is very screwed up here.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Most websites (/. included) do not suck up bandwidth. Glancing at America's most popular websites, I see lots of sites that will run just fine on an 85 kbps connection. Of the top 25, here are the ones that will have real trouble: Myspace (only audio streaming should have real issues), YouTube, CNN videos, and maybe flickr. You need to forget that those of us here are far above average information consumers. There are many people who go online simply to utilize e-mail, check the headlines, and perform research. One reason that more bandwidth-intensive sites are so high is the fact that geeks like me visit those sites many times per week using several computers. There is definitely a market for free85 kpbs wireless Internet service.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
What, no telco lawsuits yet?
I'm dissappointed, the pigs are slacking off.
And here I am, just outside of the network over in Wayne County (right next door practically). Maybe other counties in the state will start picking this up. It's not a rival to telcos since it's so much slower than broadband offerings, but it would be nice to sit outside away from my own WAP and get some net connectivity :)
It basically requires an About box that displays licensing and warranty terms. Unfortunately, the wording needs to be more clear -- this can be more liberally interpreted to mean that every interface (i.e., screen) requires such an About box.
I'm not seeing how it requires popups or advertising, though.
install 6000 radios on "water towers, buildings, light poles and other structures". In New York City, operators have to pay to get access to such valuable real estate.
Most people consider NY an example of how not to tax people, but obviously they have their fans. Reasonable places allow use of the public servitude. If the deployment of radio boxes can be done without interference to other infrastructure and without government cost but with great benefit to the people of the county, it would be silly to charge for deployment. The only reason you would tax something like that is to fund something unrelated.
It's also possible that you are wrong. Every one of those structures could be private.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
http://www.wirelessgenesee.com/news.html Michigan will be all nice and wireless and then, everyone will move out to find a job. Its great to have free wireless, but if you don't have a job then who cares?!
6,000APs. Lets say those only cost $200 each (AP + DSL modem). That's $1,000,000 right there.
But honestly, that's the cheap part. People don't just want Wi-Fi, they want Wi-Fi that connects them to the internet. So every AP needs a backhaul connection and it needs to be mounted on a post.
It'll easily cost you $2000 each to get these up on posts. That's if a crew puts up 3 or more a day. And then for every unit that is more than a trivial distance from a phone line, you need to hook up the backhaul wire, that'll cost at least $2000 in the city, and far more out in the countryside (which Washtenaw has a lot of). If you have to run a wire a mile to hook up these access points, that's a couple thousand dollars.
And you still haven't accounted for the costs of the equipment to hook this stuff up to the internet. DSLAMs, whatever.
Out in the countryside you'll be paying at least $5K per household, because the houses are too far apart to share access points.
And in the end, you end up with patchy coverage anyway.
I just don't get why to do this when WiMax is already here. Even using WiMax as the backhaul would save hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I'd also note that Washtenaw County used to be the center of the NSFNET.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Hell is in Livingston County - very close, but not quite Washtenaw:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell,_Michigan
Still it is on the Dexter trail:
http://www.hell2u.com/more_hell.htm
The death of dialup isn't just about the speed, it's having to actually dialup, the constant disconnections, the caps on how long you be on, and cutting off the phone. All those things are solved by wireless, even if it's just as slow.
Why wouldn't 85Kbps be good enough for voice? Your POTS line has ony 64Kbps max.
And because the government says they are going to deliver 85kbps, you believe them?
I agree with you that businesses are overselling.
Government has a long tradition of promising more than it deliver at a much higher cost than it promised.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Free for how long? Around 1985 the city of Minneapolis, MN awarded cable TV access to a company. Initially, for free any resident could get cable service with all the channels which one could get over the air -- the advantage was increased quality. Anything beyond that basic service cost a fee. That free basic service lasted less than two years. It was a classic bait-and-switch. I expect the same short life for free, limited wireless.
If you really look at what he said, and its context, you cannot deny that he said he created the Internet while in Congress. That is the only reasonable interpretation. This simply is not a true statement: others funded and created it before he was involved. The reason the Stevens bridge analogy completely fails is that Stevens has actually funded the creation of the bridge. It's not a situation like Gore and the Internet where others did the funding and creation.
And it's not just as slow. It's about four times what I was ever able to get on dialup, and twice the downstream of the average "good" connection (you're not going to get me to believe that most people who have/had dialup get better than 42-44kbit/s on average).
I wonder what impact this might have on arbornet.org, a long-time Ann Arbor BBS. Like maybe lots of BBS's, they've been through having to pay for lots of modems, then getting lean and relying moreso on telnetting over home/ISP accounts. I wonder if the county's wireless plan bodes well or ill for venerable old m-net (arbornet)...
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
The main difficulty I've had is that my PC can see multiple hotspots, so sometimes if I've hibernated the machine and woken it up again, it'll grab a different hotspot than last time and need another negotiation with the Acceptable Use Policy page. (You have to acknowledge that it's free, they might censor pornography, hate speech, and spyware, and you won't sue them for blocking those things. You also have to agree not to download those things - certainly most people I know are perfectly willing to not download spyware :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The main difficulty I've had is that my PC can see multiple hotspots, so sometimes if I've hibernated the machine and woken it up again, it'll grab a different hotspot than last time and need another negotiation with the Acceptable Use Policy page. (You have to acknowledge that it's free, they might censor pornography, hate speech, and spyware, and you won't sue them for blocking those things. You also have to agree not to download those things - certainly most people I know are perfectly willing to not download spyware :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We need to make sure these people have food and clean water before we start giving them wireless inte... wait... nevermind.
I thought Oakland County in Michigan was working on this first? Meh, still cool, but it need to be done in Wayne County!
No, your POTS line is analog, and sufficient to carry an 8kHz audio signal. In asia, that's typically 11kHz or higher, so that they can accomodate tonal languages.
Now, a single B-channel is 64kbps (hint: K is kelvin, k is kilo, try it out sometime) but that has no relation to a POTS line at all.
Regardless, 85kbps is more than enough for VoIP, but not while you're getting other things done at the same time. Using QoS could make it marginally acceptable, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I dunno what's happened since the merger, but last I checked, SBC (now part of att, yes yes) would only offer service to 14,500 feet, so consider yourself lucky. Personally, I live in Lake County, California, and most of this area doesn't even have cable, let alone DSL.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wimax will decrease backhaul cost, like I said.
As to the one guy in a bucket truck and 30 minutes, yeah, you're right. But the type of employees you will get aren't used to working at full speed for 8 hours a day.
The relationship with the county will help with access to poles, presumably for no fee. But I didn't count right of way costs in there. This is pure labor, and the government knows nothing about reducing the cost of installation labor.
Mesh isn't going to work in rural Washtenaw. You're talking 1/2 mile between houses. And using unlicensed bandwidth (802.11a) for your backhaul is stupid anyway. Anyone can legally interfere with your communications and there is nothing you can do about it.
802.16/WiMax will be pretty cheap by the time this network gets rolled out. There's nothing difficult about doing it, current 802.11 chipsets only need a few changes to do WiMax. There's currently no competition in that market, but a few large-scale rollouts and there will be. Plus it seems Intel is going to roll it into their chips soon anyway. Either way, out in the countryside of Washtenaw, you'll have a choice between giving someone a WiMax card or installing one AP per household. The installation costs of the AP will be much higher than the couple hundred for the WiMax card.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It'd be nice if Oakland Wireless wasn't stillborn. Sad, really. Any local firmware hackers want to help us relight Ricochet? The next step involves disassembling SH3 code.
Why even argue with it? It's not true at all.
"but it certainly is true that he took the initiative in expanding and evolving the Internet as we are familiar with it today. From Wikipedia..."
That's called "changing the subject". How better to divert attention from Gore saying statement being false than to get sneaky and switch it with something Gore didn't even say that really is true?
"So, I have to ask, what's your talking point, exactly?"
I have no talking points. I'm just amazed that Gore made a false statement to the effect that he invented the Internet, and years later there are idiots who still insist that the misstatement never occured and/or is really true. Gore deserves a lot of thunder for (as you said) helping expand the Internet after others created it. I'm not being critical of Gore here: misstatements happen during interviews, and Gore corrected himself years ago. That's all he can do. I'm just being critical of the moronic Gore worshippers who think that Gore is somehow superhuman and never makes verbal mistakes. This reflects badly on the Gore worshippers, and not badly on Al Gore himself.
The Cerf quote is not relevant at all. Cerf apparently did not even know what Gore said. He shows he is ignorant of Gore's actual statement.
""is this just another case of Republicans..."
Republicans were not involved. A Republican did not make the statement. A Republican did not ask the interview question. A Republican did not make it part of CNN's archives. Nor does Kerry's false claims of swiftboat exploits (things that Republicans also have nothing to do with that Kerry has yet to correct) have anything to do with it. No idea why you mentioned that one! The only way Republicans can be involved with THIS one is if Al Gore is really a secret Republican.
Politicians will ALWAYS make statements that will come back to haunt them. President Carter made an odd statement that he "lusted in his heart" for women other than his wife back in 1976 (granted it WAS a Playboy article!). And the elder President Bush made the inopportune statement in 1988 about http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/Geor ge_Bush_1988_No_New_Taxes.ogg "Read My Lips: No New Taxes". The fact that they DO make errors like that make them human. And situations like the younger President Bush saying some great ones, just makes me giggle at times...
The wifi really isn't consistently reliable up here on the 5th floor :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If this can work in the U.S., presumably it would work even better in the UK with similar internet usage and a much higher population density.
Higher population density is actually an argument against wireless.
Given a particular cell on a particular frequency, there's a shared amount of bandwidth available to all users in that space (11 Mbps with 802.11b, 54 Mbps with 802.11a or 802.11g, though actual throughput is far lower than that). In a very sparse area, like a rural county, it's extremely expensive to run cables, especially fiber cables, out to each person. Meanwhile, there's only a few people to divide up the radio bandwidth. Now for the price of a well-maintained tower, you can feed 500 kbps to 20 people.
Looking at the other extreme, it's not that difficult to get access to telco lines in NYC, since there's tons of fiber and muxes and COs all over the city, and they're not far from each apartment. However, if everyone in the Wall Street area was forced to share 50 Mbps of bandwidth, they'd go crazy.
I'm obviously over-simplifying, but as a general rule, wireless becomes more compelling as population density decreases.