So there's eight or ten clients for android that support some sort of editing, which is precisely why I asked. Which of them actually has a usable interface for simply and quickly adding POI's?

I'm not going to go through the trouble of installing almost a dozen clients just to answer this question.

On a slightly related note: I wanted to add minor resources like bike repair stations and water fountains in my city, and figured there MUST be an android app that would make this about as simple as "hold your phone over it for a bit to get an averaged position, now click this and then "water fountain".

Nothing that I could see was remotely this simple? Even the web editor is a nightmare of trying to figure out exactly how to do things...and the wiki didn't help much, either, with poor documentation on the various properties one can assign to an object.

This kind of presumes reason is the basis of our drug laws.

Easy-peasy. I don't even have to google it. The Interstate Commerce Clause. All you have to do is find some pretext that says the regulation affects interstate commerce in some way and the feds can quash it.

In this case the issue to use is plain as a pikestaff. By preventing municipalities from providing high quality internet service the state is hinder access by out-of-state vendors to consumers in that community. That justification is WAAY stronger than other that have held up to scrutiny.

Interestingly, when I'm booted over to Windows for gaming, I often put my system in sleep mode so that my USB doohickies can keep recharging. While I was on Comcast, my system would wake up and not be able to resolve DNS names for several minutes. This happened no matter what DNS servers I kept it pointed at (Google's or Comcast's.) I could ping IP addresses like the name servers, but I couldn't resolve any names.

All that went away when I switched to Longmont's municipal service. System wakes up, internet's instantly accessible.

I tried CentryLink's 1MB DSL prior to Comcast but the latency was always shit with it. If my room mate was doing anything, I could see ping times in the 1 second range.

Sure, and the price will be a bit higher for people who decide to subscribe later. It's still very competitive with the other internet services in the area, especially since none of them actually offers gigabit speeds. I'm pretty sure my uploads to youtube go faster that transfers on corporate networks of any previous companies I've worked for at the moment. I'm also curious to see how I'm faring a couple years from now. The city does seem to feel that it'll be able to maintain these speeds, and they also claim they'll be able to turn a profit with the service.

I can also transfer my founding membership with my house if I ever sell it, which is a pretty sweet deal for anyone who wants to move in here.

There has been practically zero progress on handling the demand side. Doing so would require a radical rethink of how Western countries deal with drugs and drug addiction. This is not likely to happen in the next 20 years at least, and it is stupid to condemn other countries to 20 more years of violence by keeping our focus on limiting supply.

The voting public still has to vote for them, something they often seem to forget.

Start a petition drive to put a referendum on the ballot to opt out of the state rule on municipal ISPs. The law specifically allows for cities to do that if enough people opt out. I believe a couple of other cities either have done that or are soon going to. It's taken Longmont a couple years to get everything set up to start deploying it, and they already had a fiber ring in place from the '90's. We'll probably be just about finishing up the last neighborhood in Longmont about the time the other cities are ready to start deploying theirs.

Longmont has run the numbers and thinks the municipal broadband can be profitable. I'm curious to see if they can maintain the speeds once 20,000 people are on the network, but I've also heard them say they think they can do that too. People who get on the bandwagon early get discounted rates as long as they keep the service. After a few months the prices will go up a bit for new subscribers, but they're still going to be very competitive with other services.

If we eliminated the need to grow opium, a some countries would find their economies transformed. Imagine Afghanistan without opium financing various criminal factions. We just need to figure out how to make cocaine without coca, and Middle America would be changed too.

Of course that relies on the secret getting out. Otherwise we are still stuck with the morass of violent crime.

I live in Longmont, Colorado. Couple years ago we had a referendum and opted out of the state's blocking of municipal broadband services. They're currently rolling the service out in my neighborhood and their guys did an install at my house about a month ago. I'm getting the fastest internet service in the country for $59 a month. My youtube uploads go at around a gigabyte a minute. Too bad about all these state legislators who seem to feel the need to protect their constituents from super-fast internet speeds at affordable rates that the private companies never seem to feel the need to deliver. I guess luckily for them, most people have no idea what they're missing, or a lot of those guys would be getting kicked out of office right now.

Sure, but the laser beam itself is less than ideal too, as it its targeting. We're talking about hitting a moving target from another moving target with a less than perfect beam dispersed through whatever's in the atmosphere between them. Adding reflected waste energy to that equation and mirroring might not be perfect protection, but I'd bet it could make the attacker's job a lot tougher.

I have no doubt that at short range under laboratory conditions lasers can burn through any mirror conceived by the mind of man. In real world conditions I suspect it'd be a lot harder to get to work even without an intelligent enemy dreaming up countermeasures.

Urgh. I hate stupid made up names.