Nature vs. Man, part N

So I'm wondering what we miss by living inside a world of hosted sites and services, of sites mashed together out of Web services and APIs fitted together like tinker toys or Lego blocks. Hard-core free software and open source geeks know the Faustian bargains we make by trading the liberty of building anything anywhere for the cushy conveniences of Facebook's "social networking" or Google's GMail or the strange other-world of Second Life. Sure, we'll take advantage of those things where they make sense, but we'll anchor our freedom and liberty in our rights and abilities to roll our own.

The question is, where's the line across which we give up too much? Where does the balance between independence and dependence tip fatally toward the latter? How can we even tell where that tipping piont is?

This question came to me recently when I responded to a comment on a blog post I made last month, noting that the tower of KFI was on its way to going back up. The old tower, a 750-foot guyed mast, had stood in LaMirada, California, since 1947, and put out what a killer signal on 640HKz on the AM dial. It was knocked down by a small plane in December 2004.

The commenter, one Mad Broadcaster, observed that the new shorter sectionalized tower planned for the site would surely be a compromise, and would not bethe equal of the old full-size tower. Debates over AM tower engineering may seem as remote as can be from the concerns of geeks running Linux, but there's a lot about broadcast engineering that lives on in the hacker DNA pool. My own path to Linux Journal was paved by discussions of radio engineering lore with Phil Hughes, the magazine's founder and long-time publisher, and a native of Los Angeles who grew up no less fascinated by AM tranmitters in his region than I was in mine.

I grew up in Maywood, New Jersey, not far from New York City. Our house was on the slope of a low hill that would have provided a view of the Manhattan skyline had local trees not grown in the way. The only landmark I could see in that general direction was the tower of WABC, less than a mile away. The tower is still there, putting out a great signal, which is explained here. (I wrote most of that explanation, many years ago. It contains a couple minor inaccuracies that are beyond correction at this point.)

Anyway, that tower fascinated me, as did the others farther down in what we now call "meadowlands", but then we just called swamps. Since salt water provides the best possible ground conductivity for AM signals, and since tidal swampland was considered worthless for anything other than dumping trash and hiding corpses, the region came to bristle with AM radio towers. Among my most formative experiences as a techie was "bike hikes" down to the transmitters of WADO, WBNX (now WKDM), WINS, WMGM (now WEPN), WAAT, WMCA, WNEW and WHOM (now WZRC). By then, in the earliest '60s, most of the transmitters were no longer staffed, but I'd still sometimes catch an engineer at one of the stations.

These guys were techies of a very practical sort. They applied their science