It's time for Congress to do a lot of things. But when was the last time Congress did anything at all? Has there been even a single non-trivial piece of legislation in the entire 113th? Was there any in the 112th?

The bar to legislation is fairly high and there's always a large set of voters prepared to punish their legislators for allowing anything through that would be seen as a victory for the other side or even as a compromise with them, regardless of the issue. Those Congressmen have been trained in a Pavlovian fashion to loudly denounce anything anybody tries to do.

So don't expect Congress to fix this, or anything else.

Looking at the actual research paper, all I see is improved durability, _not_ increased capacity

It's an anode. Capacity comes from the electrolyte instead.

Note that I was only discussing speed of light lag, not lag caused by archaic hardware and other problems that apply equally well to links NOT using satellites.

Fair enough - still sounds like it's not the full ping though. Did you only count a one way trip up? How about down to the ground then back up and down again which is what it has to do to reply? It looks like you did not but were pretty quick with the criticism about being sloppy just the same.

not lag caused by archaic hardware and other problems that apply equally well to links NOT using satellites.

Except it doesn't apply in most other cases which is why the latency observed is much worse.


My point stands - if you care about ping times at all then satellites are not on the list unless they are the only thing available. If you don't care much about latency then they are worth considering.

Iridium orbit is ~780 km. Which means worst case ping times (due to the satellites) should be around 75 ms

Wikipedia to the rescue! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications)
"Latency for data connections is around 1800 ms round-trip, using small packets"

However half way to the moon for a high orbit was a vast exaggeration on my part so sorry about that.

Here's Snowden/Binney. I'm a little frustrated with the extra negative space below the "den" in Snowden, because Binney's name is too short, and the tall "i" and hanging "y" are messing with me, and I'm not a graphic designer. I've moved and resized everything but I keep coming back to the original layout. I'm tempted to change their roles on the ticket because Binney/Snowden fits great. grumble grumble

I guess I just have to remember that I'm making a statement, not an actual political campaign -- it need not be perfect to achieve its goal.

No approach to "programming" for normal people ever has allowed normal people to go beyond the canned capabilities. Excel macros are as far out of reach.

But why would this be surprising or unreasonable? Most people can't change the oil in their car either, or replace the stereo. And most of those who can can't make engine repairs. It'd be absurd to suggest this reflects faulty thinking on the part of car manufacturers.

That's total bullshit. We've had insurance and employment coupled here in my country for almost a century now and none of these clusterfucks have happened. The thing that causes the clusterfuck is a country that can't decide whether it wants to be religious or secular.

But our creator gave us rational minds to solve puzzles with.

You bet.

How about if I look at it in a mirror? Or out of the corner of my eye? Or I have someone else look at it and describe it to me?

Quantum computing sure is hard.

Oh ? You don't need to know the orbit, even ?

Nice try at whatever you are attempting to do there, but it is always going to vastly exceed the time going via the much tighter curve of the Earth's surface even if it's as low as Iridium which is about as low as you get for a long term circularish orbit. (Spy sats get lower for short periods but have very elliptical orbits and don't last long).

So to sum up ping times are going to vary from bad (Iridium) to very bad (nearly half way the the moon for geostationary), thus if ping times are a criteria at all it's always going to look bad.

You call that counterbalance?

What's keeping me, a rights owner of a movie that's a real stinker, from silencing everyone who dared to do a negative review of it by carpet bombing any and all media pages with takedown notices for those reviews?

The US learned that it's more profitable to wage than to win wars. At least for the elite few. It's really win-win in every aspect. You get the masses occupied with an external foe, you get the rabble off the street by dumping it into the army (and at the same time make them feel important because they're doing something important) and you can make the elite rich at the same time.

The US also has the economy to fuel the whole shit, unlike Germany in WW2. And also unlike Germany in WW2, they're not dumb enough to actually engage in a war with anyone who could actually fight back.