Here I am, heading westbound on the MAX. The future is not looking so bright these days. You know that you’ve reached the end of the line at your job when just going to work is the cause of tremendous anxiety and before your first break you are already dead inside. Such is life.

Anyways, let me get back to Pandora. I’m only two stops away from the meat grinder. Kiss me, I’m Irish.

Pressed From Android

SOHTANAKA

Cool, no?

Social Security to Start Cashing Uncle Sam’s IOUs

I’ve seen quite a few of my conservative friends link to this article, hinting that responsibility lays at the hands of the Democrats and President Obama but the following quote from this same articles clearly states otherwise; “For more than two decades, regardless of which political party was in power, Congress has been accused of raiding the Social Security trust funds to pay for other programs, masking the size of the budget deficit.”

I’d like to point out that this is just another example of how our career politicians, in both parties Democrat and Republican, have shown total disregard for the good of the people and the country in general.  I have to believe that these fat cat senators and congressmen are quite happy to sit back and let the various grass roots organizations divide the country and attack whatever sitting president happens to be in office.  Think about it people, a president is limited to two, four year terms in office but think about all of the old goats in Washington D.C. who have been in office since before Reagan.  Congress, the voice of the people.  Rather than joining the Coffee Party or Tea Party movements we need to lobby for definitive term limits for all politicians.  The way the game is set up now, there is no benefit to doing right by the people of the United States.  Congress is merely a collection of individuals that are for sale to the highest bidder.

I am a Democrat and I am not pointing my finger solely at Republican politicians, this problem has infected both parties and it is time for we, the people, to make sure that something is done about it.  Not as a liberal or a conservative but as a citizen of the United States of America.  And I am not talking about any kind of radical actions here.  I am a firm believer in our political system, for the most part it works.  Even with the current two party system it is possible to have elected officials who are able to make sound decisions regarding the future of this country.  To date, Congress has not shown me that they are responsible enough to do the job they were elected to.  So I say, term limits.  You can do a search online for the various arguments surrounding term limits, the pros and the cons, so I won’t go into that here but I say there is enough historical data now that shows how poorly an individual congressman or senator performs after his or her third re-election.

Term limits.  Say it with me, TERM LIMITS.  Capitol Hill is rife with career fat cats and it is time for the American people to stand up and say, no more.  Why should you get treated to a nice federal salary, perks, a pension and of course the kickback that comes in from various special interest groups and lobbyists?  If they were making my life any better or showing me that my children would have a chance at a prosperous future then maybe I’d be willing to turn a blind eye.  But this is a one way street.

Term limits.

Also, kudos to Netflix.  I found out quite by accident that Netflix now allows multiple devices to stream instant viewing from a single account.  I do not recall getting a single message from Netflix announcing this new feature and I assume it was a quiet rollout to keep a handle on bandwidth.  But regardless, it works quite well and brings tremendous value to me as a Netflix customer.  At any given time there are at least three PC’s streaming video or music or gaming over our home network and now we do not have to have a schedule set up when someone wants to watch a movie or TV show.  Nice job Netflix!

Another fun but pointless little project that I have been playing around with has been using my old webcam to create time lapse videos.  Nothing award winning so far, just doing it to pass the time.

And as an added bonus, Google added a new biking tool to their already awesome map!

The biggest plus of using satellite internet is when you find yourself living in an area that has not been built up by the local telephone or cable company, if the infrastructure is not in place then you may find yourself unable to order even basic dial-up internet service.

But now we’ll look at the downside of using satellite internet and what some of the causes of these issues are.

Much of the slowdown associated with satellite Internet is that for each request, many roundtrips must be completed before any useful data can be received by the requester. Special IP stacks and proxies can also reduce latency through lessening the number of roundtrips, and/or simplifying and reduce the length of protocol headers. These types of technologies are generally referred to as TCP acceleration, HTTP pre-fetching and DNS caching.

Rain Fade

Satellite communications is affected by moisture and rain in the path of signal. The effects are less at lower frequencies, L and C band, but become quite severe at higher frequencies, Ku and Ka band. For satellite internet services in tropical areas with heavy rain, C band (4/6 GHz) with circular polarisation is popular. At Ka band (19/29 GHz) special techniques such as large rain margins, adaptive uplink power control and reducing bit rates during rain are applied.

The amount of time for which service is lost is reduced by increasing the size of the dish so as to gather more of the satellite signal on the downlink and producing a more intense transmission on the uplink.

Modern consumer-grade dish antennas tend to be fairly small, which reduces the rain margin or increases the required satellite downlink power and cost.

Large commercial dishes 3.7m to 13m diameter are used to achieve large rain margins and also to reduce the cost per bit by requiring far less power from the satellite.

Modern download DVB-S2 carriers, with RCS feedback, are intended to allow the modulation method to be dynamically altered, in response to rain problems at a receive site. This allows the bit rates to be increased substantially during normal clear sky conditions, thus reducing overall costs per bit.

Latency

Latency is the delay between requesting data and getting a response, or in the case of one-way communication, between the actual moment of broadcast and the time actually received at the destination. Compared to ground-based communication, all geostationary satellite communications experience high latency due to the signal having to travel 35,000 km (22,000 miles) out into space to a satellite in geostationary orbit and back to Earth again.

The signal delay can be as much as 500 milliseconds to 900 milliseconds, which makes this service unusable for applications requiring real-time user input, such as online games or remote surgery. This delay can be very unpleasant with interactive applications, such as VoIP, videoconferencing, or other person to person communication. The functionality of live interactive access to a distant computer can also be subject to the problems caused by high latency. These problems are more than tolerable for just basic email access and web browsing and in most cases are barely noticeable.

There is no simple way to get around this problem. The delay is primarily due to the speed of light being 299,792.458 km/second (186,282.397 miles per second) in a vacuum. Even if all other signalling delays could be eliminated it still takes the electromagnetic wave 233 milliseconds to travel from ground to the satellite and back to the ground, a total of 70.000 km (44,000 miles) to travel from the source to the destination. 140.000 km (88,000 miles) for a round trip (user to ISP, and then back to user). Factoring in normal delays from other network sources gives a typical connection latency of 500–700 ms. This is far worse latency than even most dial-up modem users’ experience, at typically only 150–200 ms total latency.

A proposed alternative to the geostationary relay is a special solar-powered ultralight airplane, which would fly along a circular path above a fixed ground location, operating under autonomous computer control at a height of approximately 20.000 meters. Onboard batteries would charge from solar panels covering the wings during the daylight hours, and would provide power to the plane during the night. Ground-based satellite dishes would relay signals off the plane, resulting in a greatly reduced roundtrip signal latency of only 0.12 milliseconds.

Line of Sight

Typically a completely clear line of sight between the dish and the satellite is required for the system to work. In addition to the signal being susceptible to absorption and scattering by moisture, the signal is similarly impacted by the presence of trees and other vegetation in the path of the signal. As the radio frequency decreases, to below 900 MHz, the penetration through vegetation increases, but most satellite communications operate above 2 GHz making them sensitive to even minor obstructions such as the leaves of a tree. A dish installation in the winter must factor in plant foliage growth that will appear in the spring and summer.

Fresnel Zone

The radio signal width between two satellite dishes is not perfectly straight and uniform, as if it were a beam of light. Instead as the signal propagates away from the transmitting dish, it widens towards the centerpoint between the two dishes and then narrows again as it approaches the receiving dish. This is known as the fresnel zone, and limits the usefulness of satellite dishes in locations where there is extremely limited open sky for using the dish. The signal path through space must be clear not only for direct line of sight, but must also be clear for the expanding fresnel zone, which may be several meters larger in diameter than the ground-based satellite dish.