Since the big telecom companies seem deadset on smothering the utterly sane concept of municipal wireless in its crib, I decided to post a few links on building very cheap wireless antennae and suggestions of where you might point them to in Austin. Don't download anything big unless the place is closed, because you'll get it shut down.
Municipal wireless is the elegant and inspired proposition to provide broadband wireless internet for an entire metropolitan region as a public utility, paid for out of tax revenues. Oh god, more taxes! Some say. But back when Philadelphia was seriously considering it, before it got mangled into a corporate boondoggle, the cost estimate per person would have been $6 per person for the first year and $1-1.50 per person EVERY YEAR AFTER for maintenance. So instead of paying $50 a month, $6 the first YEAR and $1 afterwards.
So of course, the companies freaked out, and at the moment the banality of institutional and corporate inertia has won out over the obvious expansion of free internet to whole cities for less than the price of a value meal at McDonalds.
So fuck em. Fuck em cause they're a bunch of pirates, and the only way to fight pirates is with better piracy.