goodweeds

I heard some people at a coffee shop today discussing the possibility of convincing facebook and google to shut down all of their services for a day because of SOPA, including google apps. While the anarchist in me was momentarily giddy at the whole idea, the realist makes me assume that there must be SLAs and service contracts for their commercial customers and their larger content providers and advertising partners. As awesome as it would be for Google to shut down everything and confuse the heck out of the world I'm sure the losses due to lawsuits and SLA fines would be massive.

Craigslist SUCKS due to spam, 1996-era search, misposts, an overlimited posting format, a lack of keyword filtering (I could go on for days on why craigslist sucks. So could you, even if Craig gives us happy feelies) but they're really the only game in the bay area. Rent.com and Apartments.com have been a joke since their inception. Padmapper is alright, but definitely hampered by trying to sharecrop Craigslist without an api.

This market seems ripe for innovation and disruption. Before I jump into the game, I figure somebody else, or many other people are trying to build a better apartment search site. So, what's out there?

Since my father passed the duty of taking care of my mother's internet connectivity has fell to me. She lives in a rural area where she is apparently about 1,000 ft^2 too far away from the local DSLAM for DSL. Her only options seem to be 3G from Sprint (for some reason the signal from at&t and verizon isn't strong enough for connectivity) or satellite connectivity which is incredibly lag prone, and unreliable with heavy cloud coverage.

How are other people handling this? I know there's a federal fund for providing access to people in rural areas called the USF that anybody with a telephone or a cell phone pays into. Has anybody else had luck wielding this power to level-up connectivity in the sticks? Got any pointers?