Carltonian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Poli... covers the how.

First and foremost: Antennas and hardware in general. It's one thing to maintain a multi-channel 500mbps connection within 10-20 feet, let alone doing it with multiple devices simultaneously connected to other multiple devices. Even if you scale the speed down, the consumer grade hardware out there isn't targeting this use case.

Second: Protocols. If we had the hardware, the whole mesh has to be trustless while being affected as little as possible by connectivity and pathing overhead. Plus backwards compatible with existing infrastructure (which is less hard I guess).

Third: Gatekeepers. If you get them on board, creating the mesh as a natural extension of the internet becomes easy. Since they invariably won't be on board, it'll be that much harder.

I got in a car crash. If I had Facebook, I could have made a post about it and explained it once. I've explained what happened to 20 people it feels like, all of whom have Facebook. After the first few times of realizing I had basically drafted a script of the accident, I began not going into too much detail with everyone, only for them to ask more questions until I returned to the script. All-in-all though, timeshifting social interaction sounds really bad for everyone, but really good for increasing how much a single person can consume overall (which is again, probably bad for everyone).

As for the laptop, I've got a Samsung Chromebook (the small, ARM one) running Ubuntu and I recommend it. It's ARM, which makes getting things running a bit hard, and it's not the beefiest, so if you want to wait for the new ones this year that will likely be x86 and beefier for $250, you can do that too. I don't take it on the bus though. That was the first bit of advice I got from someone else on the bus.

This crash is an example of just how much money not having money costs. It wasn't an issue of the driver's unsafe driving, but of the driver's unsafe vehicle due to poor maintenance. Well, that driver doesn't even have insurance, let alone money to fix their balding tires. For now I'd agree with anyone that says it's their fault for driving it, because that's my insurance's stance and that's the stance that gets me reimbursed for my vehicle, but I can't help but see how if they wanted to fix the initial problem of poor maintenance and no insurance, then they'd need money, so they'd need to drive to work...

But it gets worse. My car handled the crash like a new car should. I was safe. I got a little whiplash but I felt fine and was back to work that day. Her car, much older than mine, flipped (exploding tires are about as bad as a car accident can get - keep up on your treads and watch the air pressure in the summer folks!) and she left the scene unconscious in an ambulance. Now I don't know what the statistics are, but my bet is if you don't have car insurance, you're note likely to have medical either. So this woman, who started too broke to replace her tires, now has whatever legal trouble one gets for not having insurance, has no drivable vehicle, huge medical bills, and whatever suit my insurance files against her.

Me, I'm fine, but I'm without a car (and I opted out of the rental car coverage, and she has no insurance to reimburse me for one), so in the name of frugality I start taking the bus. I go against traffic on my daily drive, so there aren't many routes, but there is one. It makes 93 stops between Downtown Riverside and my place of work. It takes about 2 hours 15 minutes with walking time. That's over an hour and a half longer than my commute driving. I'm on the bus with a few other people who make the same trip. Right now my life consists of waking up, walking to the bus, sitting on the bus, going to work, walking back to the bus, taking it home, walking home, eating a small meal, and going to bed to repeat the process tomorrow. Not to mention last night the bus was 2 hours late because of flash floods in Riverside. I got home after my bed time. Everyone this morning was taxed by pretty much all definitions of the word. Night class? Studying for that certificate to get a promotion? Reading a fucking novel? Ain't nobody got time for that.

I remember being told about research being done on multi-core processing in the 70's, but no headway there could outpace the standard of shrinking the technology and increasing the clock rate. Now we may as well assume n-cores. It's my hope (because mesh networks sound way more democratized and just "seem" like the next logical way of scaling the internet) that antennas become cheaper at a faster rate than wired infrastructure (given the fairly inelastic cost of digging shit up) and mesh networks start to make sense.

Happy to be wrong.

Having your veto overturned is a bad thing. That alone would be a reason. The other reason being that Obama chose to stay silent on the SOPA/PIPA/CISPA issue the first time around. Coming out against it would have cost him relatively little in public opinion, which must mean there are interests relevant to him that aren't entirely opposed to the bill.