It's a divorce. By definition someone is going to be a vindictive twat. Every divorce I've seen has been a race to see which party can be the bigger baby.

I spent years believing I was allergic to bananas because one time when I was really young I supposedly ate one and then got the shits. So therefore it was the bananas and my mother beat that into my skull.

Now I realize what a psycho my mother is and how much of my childhood illness was either because of Münchhausen's or just because she was a pathological liar. Or the fact that both my parents smoked like chimneys in the house.

And then they get all get there and find out some jackass in a blinged out Ford Excessive has parked diagonally across two spaces.

I used PGP to sign my emails. I stopped because too many people were pissing and whining about "all the extra crap" in my emails and they didn't know what it was for and dammit will you just stop it you're confusing my little brain. Granted, that was a couple of years ago so I don't know if mail clients have gotten smarter about presenting the messages without the PGP signing info (but you can damn well guarantee they know how to render HTML in the client).

Meh. Nothing beats Jeff Wayne's musical version. Richard Burton *is* the Journalist as far as I'm concerned and the invasion cannot happen without Justin Hayward doing the vocals.

We've bought everything on the PS3 these days. Last thing we bought on the Wii was LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean several months ago. Now it just sits there and does nothing. I even Homebrew'd it to make it useful for something and that was a fucking joke. The homebrew channel apps look like they were written by a 6th grade computer literacy student and MAME couldn't run anything more than Space Invaders without frameskipping and losing audio sync. We considered selling it to Gamestop in trade for Skyrim or Portal 2, but a full system with 4 Wiimotes, 4 Classics, and 4 Nunchucks nets you about $25 store credit (yes, I know Gamestop sucks, but its tons better than trying to fuck around with Craigslist or a pawnshop).

Depends on who's engineering the link. Our Ku VSAT links could close the link with a 7-8db Eb/N0 on a 90cm dish, but we opted to go for a 1.2m dish for the extra rain fade margin. We also opted to spend a little more on the space segment to be able to transmit a hotter signal.

If your C-Band dish is Ku-capable, sure. That means no mesh dishes, and stricter manufacturing tolerances. Satellite owners get cranky when you splatter across 2 or 3 birds because of a dish that is out of tolerance for what it is being used for. Plus there's the potential problem of overload. I've had instances of having to pad down a signal because the system was engineered for 1.2m dishes all around and someone pops up with a 4.5m dish because that's what they had already. The receiver would overload and we couldn't turn the transmitter down far enough to not splatter all over the transponder.

If you want rain-fade-free-reliability, C-Band is the only way to go. Our C-band links rain faded twice in the 4 years I was there. Once because of a 6-inch-per-hour springtime thunderstorm and once because of a hail storm. The latency on those links were about 750ms because they were long-path hops to transatlantic birds down into Africa and yet they ran constant VOIP, HTTP, and SMTP traffic.

Acceleration is the key there. When I was Network Guy(tm) for a satellite provider, we could easily push 15-20Mbps of a single stream of TCP traffic over the bird using TurboIP boxes from Comtech/EFData. It did tricks with TCP windows and ACKs that let you overcome TCP slowstart.

And I don't understand the whole "OMG 520ms latency kills VOIP!" argument. We had hundreds of Cisco IP phones out at the end of our VSAT links and nobody complained one bit about it. It takes about 15 seconds for your brain to realize "Oh, there's a bit of lag" and adjust. i think people are complaining about jittery connections that have latencies that bounce around between 520ms and 3000ms because of how you're sharing both the uplink and downlink channels with everyone else. Our systems could detect SIP calls and switch you from a shared channel to a dedicated channel big enough to handle your call + additional overhead.

Wanna shut down a satellite? Just need a bigger antenna/more power. Witness Captain Midnight and HBO. And he was just a bored operator at a teleport.

Power vs Bandwidth.

Want lots of bandwidth? You need lots of "received power", either via high power transmitters or large aperture antennas. DBS satellites (Dish/DirectTV) have large solar arrays/batteries and high power amplifers for their transponders. The video streams are also run on fully saturated transponders, so they can use every bit of power available rather than share it with other transponder users.

Can't generate that much power? You don't get the bandwidth. I've run 45Mbps+ full duplex over a satellite link, but that was using 5m dishes and decent sized amps with full transponders. I've also had to try hard to squeeze 400kbps out of a link using 1.2m dishes + 4w Ku band amps via a shared transponder.

Only if you provide the materials and the painter provides only labour. Otherwise you're depriving the painter of his stock of paint.

Especially if your income is already tax free. I'd love to put a PV solar system in here, but there's no way I can foot the bill. All of the cushy 30% tax credits don't apply because I have zero taxable income.

I got written up once because my ticket stats were radically different than the other people on my team. 15% lower "total time on tickets" but 20% more tickets closed. I was apparently fudging numbers and closing unresolved tickets.

Fortunately, a trip to HR with a ream of printouts from closed tickets proved otherwise.

Still left the company a few months later.