

Ask HN: Think Obama would approve a wireless network cloud owned by the people? - pj

I'm talking about storage space, wireless receivers in every home. Wireless receivers for every individual. Data centers in every community for local storage of bit torrents.<p>With a $700 Billion stimulus package, we could hire 1,000 of the best engineers in the world. We could open source the software.  We could spend lots on hardware prototypes.<p>We could wirelessly enable nearly 50,000 miles of railroad, 20,000 miles of interstate. Build out a local CDN for every community of 10,000 or more. All wirelessly.  The wired infrastructure could be used for Fiber, there's lots of fiber.<p>Why should we leave something so important as knowledge in the hands of a few gate keepers?<p>Imagine how much we could learn if all the public research in the world, funded by public dollars was in the hands of the public?  All that data.  All those aggregates.<p>We could do a /lot/ of work and I can't help but think our productivity would improve and we'd innovate more just because we have more knowledge available to us.<p>We wouldn't even need $700 Billion.  Imagine what you could do with just $10 Million.<p>With $10 million you could find enough people to design a robotic rail system that would exchange spent servers or disks.  You could build remote monitoring stations. It could all be automated.<p>The people own the network, so they could maintain a relay in their homes or their communities.  How many people would /volunteer/ for something like this if the funds were there to complete the project?<p>Something like this is bigger than any one country. It's for all of us here on the Internet and all of those who aren't on it yet.  It should integrate with televisions and emergency broadcast systems.<p>It could be really really good and it would be a real /investment/ in our country and our world.
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shutter
That would be _awesome_. If only those with the dough felt the same way...

Granted, there are hurdles -- concern for theft, infrastructure for
loss/repair/upgrades, etc. But it would be incredibly exciting nonetheless.

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pj
Well, I think if we can keep "bad" people inside prisons, then surely we can
keep "bad" people outside a solid concrete block with no windows and nothing
inside that is really useful outside.

We don't worry about people stealing a chunk of sidewalk for example. They do
steal signs and road equipment and reprogram emergency signs, etc.

But if we look around the world, the benevolence that arises from innovative
products is almost always greater than the destruction it causes. Nuclear War
vs. Nuclear Energy for example.

This would be a project as owned and loved by the people as Hoover Dam or the
Interstate System or Golden Gate Bridge. A wireless cloud built by the people,
for the people, has the potential to make our lives better, collectively, than
any of those indivdual projects. In comparison, those projects benefitted
relatively few in the big scheme of things, but a public cloud would benefit
all and we would make sure it would by providing access for all.

I think at this point, our ability to provide the technology services is
increasing faster than producers' ability to fill it up. There is enough
content already to entertain most of us for many, many lifetimes. We could
record every second of our life on two video cameras every second we are alive
and still have plenty of space left over...

