build the frigging mesh already

If Ivan is a non-event here (southwest Bushieville), it's not and will not be a non-event else where.

Necessity, if not the mother of all invention, certainly offers some incentives.

I'm for the moment stationed, AKMAtically, outside the closed-in-trepidation-of-the-no-longer-threatening-Ivan public library, where customers keep arriving and being disappointed at being turned away -- not just today, but tomorrow as well, but where the wifi is still running. I have as yet to be accosted by woolgathering gendarmes, net polizei, or, if there is any distinguishable difference, cable/dsl hitmen, but the clock is running on my batteries, so the hell with the long post I was going to write about news media as rococo teapot in a tempest of open source recapitalization of the world as we know it. Or something like that.

The thing is, wireless mesh networks. Period. Posit that the technology becomes available to the extent that we can lay these out to any cut of any jib. Right now the local mall would be drawing lots of attention if it offered wifi in its food court.

Clay Shirky has a lovely piece about The Possibility of Spectrum as a Public Good. Read it. If we all participated in the production process for wireless mesh, we'd have it to redeploy after storms, terrorists, FEMA, or stupidity knocked out dinos like Comcast, Sprint, etc., no? If people owned the network, they would run it smarter than corporations. That's a wager. Care to lay odds?