- A high-school student (kanzure) vents frustration over a school-newspaper article on nanotech that was published without his input, and documents the school’s restrictive internet/computer policies: no downloads, no teacher Wi-Fi, only 35 library PCs for 2,000 students, and confiscation of phones/MP3 players.

- He describes covert attempts to map and activate unused Ethernet ports (room B-099) and considers enlisting a cooperative teacher to hide a Wi-Fi router so students can bypass the locked-down network.

- Discussion of skipping undergraduate education entirely: kanzure has multiple AP credits and 10 k curated links per course; fenn (already a dropout) suggests departmental exams and lobbying professors to waive requirements, estimating that three years of college could be compressed or bypassed.

- A proposed open-source “distributed last-mile POTS bridge”: unused home phone lines (required for DSL) are pooled via Asterisk to let global VoIP callers terminate as free local calls; expansion is software-only, no new hardware.

- DIY optical networking brainstorm: TEA-laser or fluorescent-light routers, cheap photodiodes/LEDs, and repurposed Walgreens digital cameras as detectors for high-speed line-of-sight links.

- Cost-of-living data point: fenn lives on ~$220/month (rent + utilities) in a shared farmhouse with fiber-optic infrastructure across the street, illustrating ultra-low-budget hacker living.

- Plans to file for 501(c)(3) status to fund “educational outreach” projects, turning tax-deductible donations into support for open-source hardware and community networking.

- Link dump: school newspaper scan (heybryan.org), AP literature class blog (hhsaplit.wordpress.com), Pointrel semantic-triple relationship system (kurtz-fernhout.com), and Slashdot comment on voter ignorance trends.