Sometime in the mid 1970's I picked up a junked Selectric I spied sitting in the trash. It didn't work. Removing the cover and looking inside I could see what was broken. I went down to the nearest IBM office where I was greeted by a receptionist. After trying to explain what I needed, the receptionist made a call and, a few minutes later, someone brought up a service manual with a parts list. After identifying the part number she made another call and shortly someone brought me the part which only cost a couple of dollars. She said that I could keep the service manual. The only issue was that she was not set up to take cash but could she just send me a bill? Hard to find service like that anymore.

Investment is a gamble and sometimes you lose. Wage earners are contractually obligated to get paid. They do not assume the risk. Taken from a stock subscription agreement I have: "The undersigned acknowledges that (i) no assurances have been made to the undersigned that the operations of the Company will ever be profitable, (ii) the Offering involves a high degree of risk, and (iii) the undersigned could lose his entire investment in the Company." as well as "...investor has a net worth in excess of five times the amount of the Purchase Price tendered herewith;" The economy can't be "stimulated" when it is shut down. What is needed now is maintenance. Corporations, now secretly handpicked by Mnuchin and Trump, could get any loan they want from any large bank at any time. They don't need handouts. If we take that money and add the trillions pumped into a futile attempt to keep the stock market afloat for a few days that amounts somewhere around $30,000 taken from every individual US taxpayer. Compare that to the $1,200 SOME folks will see - maybe someday, if they qualify. A better solution would be to put a total pause on the economy for the duration - pause and freeze the stock market, put a moratorium on ALL bill payments - for all businesses, entities, as well as individuals - and set up a system for an orderly unfreezing at a specified time while everyone shelters with minimal physical contact with others and enough income to weather the storm. Think of it like that extra hour that magically happens for daylight saving time but instead of an hour it might be a couple of months. Use it as a holiday, a time to pause and think about what future we really want to create now. The military, supposedly prepared for biological warfare, should be utilized to provide the discipline, oversight, and equipment needed to help manage and provide the safe flow of necessary goods like food, medical supplies, electricity, water, communication, and other immediate needs and the folks risking their life during this time should be amply compensated and given what they need to be safe. We would get past this much faster with much less pain, suffering and death and at much lower cost and we could restore the economy in a much cleaner and quicker way. Now we just have a shambles that will cost thousands of lives, take years to fix, and vastly increase inequality.

Mesh networks are great and are a good start but they are limited in size. The biggest problem with WDS and similar mesh networks is that they don't scale up very well. They are basically Ethernet bridges and rely on base stations and the current Internet infrastructure to connect multiple locations as they get bigger leaving them vulnerable to the same issues as before. TOR over such networks is a great tool even so. Back in the 90's I worked on a scheme to impose GPS coordinates on the IP address space and actually route node to node globally based on that. See my other post for more details or contact me if you are interested. Turns out that the routing protocol becomes quite simple. DNS and a host of other protocols also need to be modified. There are some apps out there today that are starting to take advantage of a decentralized Internet but it is still the very early days.

You are correct about reaching distant locations. Each node routes traffic not intended for it onwards so distance is not an issue, albeit would be slow, but if there is no hop close enough it is a problem. All in all it is a formidable project and it will take time and effort. A company I started in the mid-1990's was working hard on those problems and I cannot express how strongly it was opposed by economic and political forces at the time. I remember Ameritech's board sent a representative to meet with our board. At one point he stood up and pointed with his finger to each board member and practically yelled "You WILL shut down your operations!" The steady stream of harassment lawsuits and other impediments got very old - and ultimately too expensive. There was much more... This was all before cell phones could use the Internet Protocols and the only routers were made by Cisco and cost $10,000. We were working on a small chipset that could be incorporated in any type of device comprising a digital radio transceiver, GPS, and small CPU acting as a router. What we did accomplish was to impose GPS on the IP address space and built a routing and discovery protocol based on geography and ephemeral connections to any nearby units on a per-packet basis. Packets were encrypted node to node and end to end for privacy and security. One of the more esoteric ideas to reach longer hops was to build into the routing protocol a system that would notice recirculating packets that could not reach their destination and use that recirculation to phase lock multiple transmitters to form an ad-hoc phased array high power beam to transmit to the destination while using a similar scheme for receiving weak signals. It would be certainly much slower than what we are used to today but then at the time 19k Baud modems were considered fast. We've come a long way since then and there is no reason that much could not be improved over time. We just need the will and energy committed and devoted to get it going. Just remember that when the military first looked for bids on packet switched networks AT&T declined saying it was not practical and would never amount to anything.

The problem with TOR today is that it works on top of the current Internet transport infrastructure which concentrates traffic to a small number of carriers who are subject to economic and political pressures. What is needed is a hardware transport layer that isn't owned by anyone - actually transiently owned by each and every person and device while using it while providing transport to others passing through - so that it is not possible to control, or apply pressure to control, enough of it to be worthwhile.

The Internet will never be free while it has choke points that can be controlled by entrenched interests. There is no technical requirement that the Internet have service providers at all. It's interesting that the original military requirement for the design of the Internet was for it to be decentralized and not have those choke points for obvious security reasons. All of the routers and cell phones so ubiquitous today can already talk with with each other and route data through each other to more distant locations without the need for any service provider at all if only they had the software to do so. It's telling that they don't. A big project for sure but certainly doable. With encryption built into its core and data traversing the countryside in pieces on random paths and locations it would be extremely difficult to tap, monitor, censor, or control. No backbone or service providers needed. No monthly bills. The amazing things is that all of the hardware needed to implement this is already in place right now! This new free open source global Internet could become a reality in days simply by people installing a free open source app and/or replacing the firmware on their router. It would finally implement the "universal service" that the FCC charges you on your phone bill but has never delivered (the money just goes to the telcos). It would be available to anyone for the one-time cost of the equipment or the installation of a free application on their existing equipment. With "net neutrality" and security built into its core a new global Internet owned by everyone and no one would just appear out of nowhere while the "Old Internet" would be relegated to being a shopping mall on its periphery. It's time for truly innovative and creative people to step up and finally make it happen. It's been too long in coming!

It's sad to watch YouTube's slow implosion taking place. It WAS a wonderful idea and a great implementation. After becoming successful and killing the cable companies with something unique and better using the sweat and labour of thousands of small video creators, Susan and her cohorts are now slapping those same loyal and hardworking creators in the face and shutting them out of what they created over many years and BECOMING a cable company, the most hated businesses in the country, and only catering to their advertiser's and a few select channel's desires. This is a direction that they have been on for awhile now with their subscription and cable channel offerings and incremental impediments to their creative base. Even their AI, which used to recommend many interesting videos is now dishing up lists that have little appeal or interest, at least for me, and I find I now have to dig pages into search results to find what I am looking for. The result is that I spend much less time watching YouTube than I used to and much more time looking for and at alternatives. There was a reason I used YouTube but that reason is fading quickly. The company that used to say "Do no evil" has completed its transformation into that evil. They are becoming an impediment to what I want to watch and an insult to the very people that made them successful. They can coast on their inertia for awhile but it will catch up eventually and someone else will pick up the slack. Creative people remember and help their friends.

Perhaps it is working exactly as it was meant: no central website, no ads, no money, outside of what everyone thinks it should be. Maybe the point is for it to live outside the norm. Maybe you have to work to find it and all you get when you do is the fun of enjoying it and seeing a little light from outside thrown on the tiny cognitive world which we inhabit most of our lives controlling what is and what is not, what is possible and what cannot even be imagined.

Makes me remember when I was doing a project on the then new IBM PC back in late 1981 or early 1982. Things were new and undocumented and there were three OS's for it that were available but none had anything beyond simple terminal support and we needed to interact with the hardware to do what we wanted. We spent a lot of time disassembling the BIOS and probing with a logic analyser to find what was where and how to use it. At the time only the green text display was available and mass storage was limited to floppies. It turns out that that video hardware required a bit to be set on a port during boot to start the horizontal sync on the video card. Also, the floppy lead screw on the steppers did not have a stop. I remember putting together a floppy with a short machine language program in the boot sector that would turn the video sync off which literally caused the monitor to howl and burn out with smoke coming out of the case while at the same time stepping the heads off the ends on the floppies (making very satisfying clunks inside the main box) and finally loading up a really loud noise into the shift register feeding the speaker, setting it to free run, disabling interrupts, and halting the CPU. It was a hoot but we only booted on that disk once - it was a several hundred dollar repair bill to fix things - but kept a copy under glass in a box on the wall with the sign to break open in emergency.

Chevrolet president William S. Knudsen said Nazism was the miracle of the 20th century and Hitler had a portrait of Henry Ford hanging in his office while the Union Banking Corporation headed by Sen. Prescott Bush (father of presidents Bush senior and grandfather of George W.) made millions funding his rise. GM’s wholly-owned Adam-Opal Co. was producing Nazi tanks, trucks and bomber engines while IBM tabulating equipment was used to select who lived and who died in concentration camps. James D. Mooney, GM’s vice-president for foreign operations, was proudly joined by Henry Ford and IBM chief Tom Watson in receiving the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler for their considerable efforts on behalf of the Third Reich.

The regularly scheduled programming on FTA satellite is certainly not everyone's cup of tea unless there is a channel you are particularly into in which case it may be worth it just for that. It may be the only way for you to see some International programming. On the other hand, the unscheduled unannounced stuff can be both rewarding to find and sometimes very interesting. You may find broadcast shows being fed to stations hours or even days before public release, one side of an interview being fed to be put inside another broadcast (sometimes with the interviewee picking his nose waiting), or live news feeds. What can be interesting here is that you get to watch what goes on during breaks and commercials and hear what the news reporters are talking about before and sometimes after they go live. You have to have the time and patience to search that stuff out, though.

There is. It's called "Free-to-Air" of FTA Satellite. You can get started in it for a couple of hundred dollars, maybe less depending. You might want to read a little on it at https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... and then check out what's being broadcast at http://www.ftalist.com/ and finally, if this is interesting to you go have a look at the equipment you will need at http://www.sadoun.com/Sat/Chan... to figure out how you want to do it and to get an idea of how much it will cost. Search out "Free to Air" and FTA satellite for lots more info and other sources of equipment.

Quintronics! Yes! The best of times in that smoky shack of a store with Mike (in his hat) dealing and Bill showing the ways!

I remember spending many a pleasant Saturday out at the electronic junk store at the Oakland Airport back in the early 1970's where Bill worked. I can't think of the name of the place at the moment but I'm sure it will all come back later tonight for surely I'll be remembering him and his personal contributions to my life. I remember helping him sort and test parts in between spending hours perusing all of the amazing things there. Bill could explain it all and he was on top of everything going on in the industry back then and I learned much from him. He handed me the first microprocessor that I ever held in my hands. Sometimes he had rejects from the new companies down the road and he would come up with things to do with them anyway. Later he went on to design many things and had success at S100 memory boards but I had gone in other directions and never saw him again. So sad to hear this news. I've often wondered where he ended up. He was one of the people instrumental in making the better parts of the world what they are today. RIP.

If you somehow manage to put a frame around something, literally or figuratively, and call it "art" it's art. The frame sets it off from the mundane. Whether or not someone observing it calls it art is up to the observer but only applies to them. One person's art is another's trash. AI is still in its infancy but today it is just as much a tool for art creation as a paintbrush, camera, or Photoshop. This question really belongs to a future date when AI's actually have volition and consciousness, after we have figured out what that actually means.