Actually, I work for a WISP. I've done my share of climbing 60-100ft antennae to install or repair the equipment we've got up there, and I've experienced the tower sway at that low height. There are a few other locations where there are things mounted around 250 or so, but I haven't tended anything that high up on a flimsy structure. Lots of things are hanging out on top of buildings that are 120-300ft, but most of those installations have enough structure to remain pretty rigid.

I agree that proper planning can eliminate a lot of the issues associated in most situations, but not everyone else is familiar with it. 5Ghz is pretty forgiving, but 28Ghz isn't.

The problem that was already addressed is the curving of earth, because it can be overcome with height. Let's sustain that increasing the altitude of your dishes will allow greater distance without the sphere's shape interfering, you still have all of the factors associated with those heights: weather, cost of getting there, service, general maintenance.

Maintenance: How easy is it to remove ice? Snow? What about the cost of maintaining the tower?

Service: What do you do when you can't communicate with the unit, and you've ruled out everything except the cable between the unit and it's nearest point of contact?

Cost: This is a broader issue than maintenance, because it allows for not owning the tower/building. Tower space is premium, building roof-tops are premium, labor to install, service, or repair is EXTRA premium. Not only do you need guys willing to climb 200+ feet, but they need to be technically capable. http://www.midweststeeplejacks.com/ charges no less than $250/hr.

Weather: Why don't you see point-to-point connections on towers that are 200ft up on towers? Because the bandwidth requires very high frequencies, and those frequencies are very susceptible to any movement caused by wind. I've seen a gentle breeze (on the ground) turn a wireless link from -45 dbi to -60. Let's not forget rain and snow.

The only good ways to mount an antenna or dish at a height, and ensure reliability, are with a very large antenna (think something with 3 or 4 legs and covering at least 400 feet^2), or a building.

If you track inflation, and compare it to incomes, you will see that technology, and the obsolescence of human labor has actually been a loss for the individual. The generally accepted inflation gauge is the CPI:
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Consumer_Price_Index/HistoricalCPI.aspx?reloaded=true
I think it's pretty safe to say the income chart is close enough to illustrate my point:
http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2006/08/15/average-income-in-the-united-states

The cost of basic necessities has risen by over 2000%, but average income has risen by only about 400%. Mind you, that's just the average income, and I only personally know about a dozen people who earn more than $40k.

It doesn't matter how cheaply things can be made if the consumer cost keeps rising while incomes don't. There are many things at work, so I won't single anything out as the root cause, but the intermingling of government and private businesses is an important factor.

Certainly, this conversation can get very complicated, but I don't think it would behoove us to delve further into it at this time, so take this post with a grain of salt.

The issue is that no one on the list of recipients got the chance to refuse the message.

How can you be certain he is not part of an internet forum dedicated to anonymity? What if he were sending an email with updates on domains that are security risks to a long list of subscribers to his IPsec newsletter?

There is a very long list of possibilities for what he could have been doing that was perfectly legitimate. Basically, USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, $common-carrier should not read your text-only message to determine if there is any information they don't like, and refuse to deliver it based on that alone.

In a nutshell, the ISP where I work doesn't do any active logging beyond the basic router logs. Right now, 90-95% of our customers are NATed, so we don't even lease that many public IPs from the tier 2 provider we use. To my knowledge, the most we do is provide information when it is requested (within reason), or by court order.

There was a customer with some suspicious activity from their modem that connected to (I'm not joking) known international IPs of organizations that are bad news. When we were contacted by the FBI to find out who this person might be, we learned that this activity (millisecond-length bursts of data) is part of a known botnet. Had the company been subpoenaed, we would have had little information to provide, other than the router logs that only track MAC/IP history (I don't think we even use an extensive DNS history).

Is this because the company is fairly small, and the percentage of offending traffic is negligible or not even present? Maybe. I do know that one of the employees has been pretty aggressive with the amount of MAFIAA material he torrents on the network, but I don't know that it's even been something that has caused us to get unsavory attention.

By "rural", do you mean people that live 1+km mile from their nearest neighbor?
The closest community is a cluster of 10 houses with a bar/pub?
The nearest place to buy groceries is 30 miles away?
The nearest place to buy fuel is 10+ miles away?

I don't think we're thinking the same things, because some of the people I know would have to pay for over a mile of cable to be buried from the ISP's incoming line. A few were told they'd have to pay for a node, or some sort of junction.

I don't mean for it to appear "whoosh-like", but I found a BA in Philosophy to be something that was fairly useful.

Much like high school calculus and chemistry don't teach anything about calculus or chemistry, but give you tools to solve problems; philosophy equips you with the ability to quickly wrap your head around things that you don't already know much about, and appreciate your own shortcomings enough to realize that you can learn something from almost everything.

I work for a rural ISP, and it is pretty common for ALL maps to get you lost around county lines.
"County road 2? Which one?"
"Why does 157ave become 159ave when it reaches this state highway?"

Not only that, but most people, even people who do live in semi-rural areas, don't understand how directions are given by locals.
"Turn left by the broken tractor." -- I have seen the same tractor in the same place for close to 10 years.
"At the second mud road, turn right."
If you're fortunate enough to be driving near a river, directions get a little easier, because it's hard to mistake a river for anything else.

With the ever-increasing possibility of being arrested for something you didn't do, or something you didn't even know was illegal, or even something fabricated, this seems highly dubious. The more that stuff like the NDAA starts appearing, and with the slew of selectively enforceable laws increasing further, you can bet that people are going to be very paranoid, guilty or not.

The thinner the constitution gets, the less safe I feel using it as a shield against the government.

"Found money!" is the right answer, because there are so many people in my psychographic that don't buy movies, pay for cable, or go to theaters. When I want to watch something, I rent it or use a streaming service (Netflix or Amazon). Will studios ever understand that? No, because the people at the top of every major media company are people that don't know anything about the industry, they just know how to say the right things to the right people.

Why spend $50+/month for something that will net me a lower entertainment/dollar than going to see a film 5 times in a month?

I don't want to seem like a know-it-all, mainly because I didn't make the original statement, but you do know that salt, vinegar, and citric acid all kill most small plants, right? Just because nothing grows there doesn't mean "OMG it's toxic to everything!!1!", it means that something is inhibiting the growth of indigenous plants.

Ever looked at the land around an organic cattle rancher's feed lot? Organic pig farm? There's a whole lot of dead area, and it's not because they use dangerous chemicals, it's because there's just too much feces, urine, or water, and significant plant life won't exist.

Remember, "natural" doesn't mean "harmless".

Under _any_ economic conditions, people with two or three jobs are hard-working and industrious. When there are four unemployed people per open position, the position often remains open because the unemployed are too lazy to apply or management has unrealistic expectations of who they want to hire.

Forcing someone not to work is just as morally deplorable as forcing someone to work.

My biggest complaint that drove me away from KDE was the inability to easily program keyboard shortcuts. Can I bind my "menu key" to open a terminal? Can I access the panel menu with the "super L" key?

Until Gnome 3, I was perfectly happy with it. Now, I'm trying to use CentOS because they have Gnome 2.x, but I've been trying KDE occasionally, and it seems to be getting much better.

I agree with this. As the employee of a small ISP, we don't know about problems if someone doesn't tell us. Almost all of our point-to-point links are wireless, and we don't know about something getting out of proper alignment without customer feedback to help us find the issue.

Granted, ISPs oversell, it's the nature of the industry, but there's a rough formula they use so that 90+% of the customers don't notice. We always tell our customers that peak use times will result in lower speeds for many sites, and we can't help that (because we can't). When they're seeing dismal bandwidth at random times, it's worth investigating.

Akamai is like a company that handles the pedestrian and motor traffic, they don't actually generate anything. Their business model is designed around traffic management and _content_delivery_.

Amazon, Google, et al are generating the traffic.