Believe it, Ripley!

North Kansas City Public Library
2251 Howell, North Kansas City

802.11g
SSID: NKC library

Good news: It's here, it's free and open (for the most part-see below), and the tables in the center of the building sit next to columns with power outlets. Not so good news: They're using Zone CD for some ridiculous reason, meaning not only that you have to click through their acceptable use policy (a document that, just as an aside, I think they really need to run by a lawyer before it gets them into trouble) and be delivered to their homepage, but that every so often, you have to click back through it and go once again to the homepage, a la the mindlessness ath64 ran into out at the Johnson County Library a while back. (There's a simple workaround; have two tabs open in your browser, using one as a dummy and the other for your real work. Navigate to your homepage or some other site on the dummy and use it to perform the initial AUP clickthrough, then proceed with your work in the other tab. When going back to the homepage would wipe out something important, bring up the dummy tab and refresh it, performing the repeat clickthrough there. That's how I managed to post this.)

As far as I can tell, the connection is unfiltered, thus explaining the AUP's warning that use is restricted to persons 18 or over. Whether they could really enforce this on an open network unless a user was clearly accessing illegal content is questionable, in my view. Why not just close the network and require library card authentication if you don't trust your patrons? That's the question that would come to my mind if I were a juror hearing a case stemming from this issue.

Anyway, it's good to see NKC finally come into this century with the rest of us. Now if a certain library system to the west would wake up and take the hint...