Amen. Living in Vermont I often take the "Montrealer" down the NY side of Lake Champlain to NYC. The freight-track is slow, bumpy, and generally in terrible condition. One trip a few years ago took 12 hours to get from Port Henry NY to NYC (about a 5-hour drive).

This past summer I took the TGV from Lyon to Paris and had my GPS running for the trip. We topped out at 195mph for a few sections and with several stops averaged 150mph for the 2.5 hour trip. It was quite a blast (especially at 110 euros) and I wish I could do that kind of trip around New England and the mid-Atlantic.

My last Amtrak trip from Vermont to NYC (a 5-hour drive) took 12 hours because of two break-downs of trains ahead of us. I love the train and not having to deal with parking in NYC, but that trip was exhausting.

Note that the policy allows for exceptions to be made by submitting a waver request to the provost.

If I remember correctly, one of the other articles on this policy mentioned that requests would likely be automatically approved. The waver request submission was simply added to make open-access the default rather than something faculty would have to opt-in to.

No billboards here in Vermont either.

As well, all business signs must be less than 1-story tall. No gas station signs or golden arches on giant towers here.

To make up for the lack of billboards all businesses can get standardized road-sign-sized directional markers just before their turn off the main road. These have the same font as road signs, an arrow, and an optional miniature business logo. I personally find these directional markers very useful for finding and discovering businesses. Its wonderful to have timely and consistent directional information without being constantly bludgeoned with it.

Hmmm.... Doesn't seem to work for me. Just hides the adverts. Oh well.

have ISPs cut off high bandwidth connections from those suspected of spamming? can anyone say privacy nightmare?

Yes, absolutely have ISPs cut those off who are suspected of spamming however you don't have to invade privacy to see that something is amiss - if I'm an ISP, I don't need to read an email on the wire to know that a computer that's leased an address from my residential customer pool is spewing outbound port 25 traffic and that what they're saying probably says "V1@g ra"; a mail server and a client look very different in terms of network behavior. If I'm sending out a ton of spam, I look like a mail server. How many computers on residential customer networks of ISPs send out hundreds of messages per minute/hour/day? How many legitimately have a reason for doing so?

This is very, very easy to monitor, from a network behavior standpoint. Your ISP certainly knows how to blackhole DNS/redirect traffic (or switch your cable modem into a private network) to one of their own web servers ("Your account needs to be set up - please contact Comcast", etc.), so it's a trivial task to block suspected spammers and redirect them to a site informing them of how to remediate the issue and regain network access.

There are a few areas in which ISPs need to step up. spam is one - an annoying one. A bigger one is the issue of spoofing. If even 20% of the routers on the Internet prevented spoofing (packets emanating from their networks with IP address other than that of their network or networks behind them), we'd be much better off (think BotNets). This one is sheer laziness/lack of knowledge on the part of network engineers at ISPs - they make the pipes go, so they're doing their job.