I’m sitting here in my log cabin in the woods east back of nowhere. There is a 48″ jack frame loom on one side of me, a spinning wheel in use on the other side, and high speed on my lap.
Yes, that’s right, high speed internet has finally landed here in the back woods. After dancing with Storm for well over a year, they finally said they could bring 2 Mbs to me if i would put up a 50′ tower. Then I noticed Rogers has extended 3G (that’s the network technology the iPhone uses) coverage from a tower just across the way and they offer this nifty wireless 3G hub. I picked one up, plugged it in, turned it on, and it just works.
Okay, not only does it just work, but it gives me 5.4 Mbs download speed at exactly half the price Storm was asking for 2 Mbs. Without a tower.
And that, my friends, is sweeter than the maple syrup boiling away over on the woodstove.
The house in which I live was randomly renovated over the years by a tribe of do-no-good piskies. These wee folk managed to rearrange the waste pipes that run between the main stack and the outlet to the septic in such a way that it actuall runs up hill for about 5 metres. As you can imagine, this roguish trick is the root cause of some number of problems.
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They‘re getting closer and closer. Soon we shall move into the 1990’s.
Over the last few decades NASA, the American space agency, has fumbled the ball pretty badly on getting people off the surface of the earth. Rumour has it they’ve lost the plans to the original Saturn V spacecraft used to launch the Apollo missions to the moon and couldn’t build a new one within a decade if their lives depended on it. It took them less than a decade to build the first one from scratch.
Since the original Apoolo program various branches of technology have progressed radically. Materials science and electronic in particular have progressed to the point where the technology used in Apollo looks like stone tools. Can you imagine what could be accomplished in terms of setting up a permanently populated colony on the moon today? The benefits that could be accrued for all of the earth’s population in the solving of the various problems presented?
It’s such a good idea that capitalists are getting involved. What the railroads were to the nineteenth century, space access will be for the twenty-first.