This sounds like a great idea! A couple years ago I tried to get some people interested in building a community network based on some of the concepts from the Wellington Internet eXchange. Nobody wanted to touch it.

As soon as the people try to flex their muscle, they are immediately shouted down by the corporations. The laws in the USA have become structured such that corporations have all the power and the people have none. Just ask the citizens of Philadelphia, PA or Wilson, NC.

Both of these cities, acting as agents of their citizens, were attacked by the corporations. In the case of Philly, they got squashed. Wilson's system is still alive, but not for the lack of effort on Time Warner's part. At one point TW had someone answering the phone for one of the congressmen the night before a vote. It was only thanks to the dedication of a small group of citizens, many of whom had to take off work to attend the oddly scheduled committee meetings, that the system is still online. We know that at any point TW will try again to scuttle it.

And much like the airwaves, there's the ham bands and the CBers. Besides, I've heard my fair share of idiocy on HF from licensed amateurs. You can't change human nature, you can just change the channel.

73 de N8VNR

Ya know, you had me... right up until "the end user, need to die." In the end it is ALL about the user, without whom all you have is SkyNet, or the MCP. Do you want to write code for your machine overlord, or for a fellow human being?

Ultimately that end user wants his/her computer to _just work_, which would happen if the tenets you laid out in your diatribe were followed. I find it strange that you would contradict yourself so vehemently right at the very end.

I think I know what you're actually trying to say here, but it would be foolhardy for me to infer that you contradicted yourself _again_ by being an elitist (self-righteous) BOFH who is better than the "end user".

The cable companies do their throttling at the cable modem. It turns out this cap can be bypassed. There were some guys back in my hometown that got caught doing just this. The cable company threw the book at them.

It would make more technical sense to do this at the headend, since they could keep the control closer to them. It would also allow customers who wanted to exchange data locally to do so at the full loop speed without chewing through upstream bandwidth. Instead, I'm stuck talking to my neighbor two apartment buildings away at 384kbit/sec. Obviously what makes the most technical sense does not necessarily mesh with what makes the most business sense.