Improving public healthcare

I think, universal health care is not achievable, because tax payers couldn't support the same level of heath care to every society or towns in Canada. Some villages have a few hundred families. Many villages have been closed down, because governments couldn't provide the same services as offered to bigger cities.

Canadians are used to public health care, so we can't scrap it. However we should make it efficient as well as leave rooms for health care providers made their own profits to improve overall system. It did not sound right as out health care system is the most expensive, but level of care was at the middle range.

1. Allow specializing services in hospitals. Thus outside town or province patients would get help by governments to find treatments from a specialized one.

- Perhaps using helicopters stationed strategically across Canada for this services and rescuers at the same time for close location in case of emergency.

- Because of specializing services by each hospital, governments should cover full cost for Canadians seeking special treatment at a hospital outside of their town or city.

2. Hospitals are allowed to get international patients for additional [internal] R&D budget as long as they provide maximum required Canadian patients, i.e. accept Canadians including out-of-town Canadians and don't charge government [tax payers] overtime rates.

Each hospital has a cap on number of patients be treated annually. Therefore they would be allowed to receive patients across Canada, if they have extra quota and the other hospital full, i.e. a patient will be allow taking treatment at another hospital in another part of Canada earlier according to the waiting list.

- Subsidizing 50% - 80% of airplane tickets, if patient have to travel to another province for operations or treatment.
- Perhaps subsidizing partly accommodation for the out-of-hospital patient, thus this is their choice to get their treatment earlier. If hospitalized, accommodation was covered anyway.

3. There is a waiting list by hospitals for special treatment, and governments have a cap on allowable cases, I think. Some wealthy individuals said that they would like to get "qualified" treatment somewhere else and get refund by governments. To be fair, they must advance their treatment costs, and wait to get reimbursement [by Canadian rates] by the time their cases be considered according to the waiting list. I heard that there was other requirement by government or health care officials, too.

-> There were many Canadians sought treatment with US hospitals, which were very expensive as compared to Canadian hospitals. Therefore Canadian rates must be considered.

-> It’s likely that Canadian hospitals will be allowed to receive international patients at higher rates than they charged governments for treating Canadians. Thus Canadians in the waiting list could also get early treatment by a Canadian hospital at “international” rates. They would get reimbursement at later date [according to waiting list] with rates charged to government in regular cases.

4. Public health care provides peace of mind to Canadians, i.e. don't have to worry if we had to see a doctor or to be hospitalized.

5. There was a speculation that many people have abused system by visiting a family doctor regularly without a cause. Governments have to pay doctor a fee per visit, thus this is not a social service.

Government could try to impose a small fee per doctor visit such as $5 each. This is a small sum to discourage the above scenario, but it didn’t impact others who wanted attention of a medical doctor.

In order to partly subsidize costs of running a hospital, hospital could charge $100 per month, if a patient has to be hospitalized. The minimum charge would be $100 per check-in, i.e. if be hospitalized less than a month.

è Usually a bed was charged more than $120/night plus attention by nurses, doctors, meals, and medication. Thus this fee is really a small charge.

è Check-in a hospital should be considered as “at least couple of days” in an official hospital room. Sometimes we showed up at an emergency department during a weekend for a temporary stay. We may need to check-in as a procedure, but we’re not officially hospitalized.

6. Private health care for Canadian public

Many analysts said that Germany had the most efficient private health care system, where insurers negotiated costs and fees with health care providers.

Obamacare system also provides an inexpensive private health insurance.

Our system is a public health care; it would take a lot of work to convert our system to a private system. Americans paid less income taxes and sales taxes as compared to Canadians, thus they could afford to pay health insurance out of personal pockets.

If we wanted a private health care system, we would need to lower taxes and let people chose the health insurance tailored to their needs. Therefore it would be easier to modify our systems to make it efficient, i.e. [overhead] costs less and better services.

Housing market impacts economy

Concentration of jobs and population in a big city caused social problems and unbalanced in housing markets.

1.      Why big city is overcrowded

Many companies have located in big cities with abundant of graduates from universities around, thus they could pick top candidates. This caused big cities like Montreal [4 universities and 20 colleges] and Toronto [4 universities and 4 colleges] over crowded.

Many people are relocating to Montreal and Toronto for jobs. Montreal is different, because companies had requested bilingual work forces, thus most of workers have moved to Toronto, where English is the only requirement.

Currently Toronto is on the top list of worry for housing market bubble. The average house price is around $1M, which is out of reach for many residents. The house price kept going up due to shortage of listing or lands for new development. As history proved, housing market did collapse, i.e. impossible to go up forever. The later the crash happened as in USA, the worst we would get for the economy and people’s mental health and personal wealth.

2.      Solution proposal

We could try to divert job’s concentration in big cities such as Toronto and Vancouver. The housing price’s issue with Toronto also existed in surrounding areas, i.e. Greater of Toronto Area (GTA). Governments used to give tax breaks to companies to relocate or open an office in a city, thus governments could give higher tax breaks around 2% higher than normally to companies willing to settle or relocate outsides of GTA.

Currently, technology allows workers to communicate with each other by phone, video conferences, and discussion over the Internet. We could review and discuss issues remotely. Therefore housing the whole company under a roof is no longer a mandatory. Having spread to other cities around 1 hour drive from GTA would be a better option as workers may go to Toronto’s airport once a while for travel. Workers could visit Toronto during the weekend without any issues.

Current traffic in Toronto makes daily communication horrible. Living in a Gold Hawk area of Scarborough of Toronto with a job in Toronto downtown would require too much time to commute daily.

-         If we drove to downtown, it would take around 2 hours 30 minutes each day plus bumper to bumper in Don Valley Parkway and downtown streets. Gasoline price was not cheap around $1/L. Parking fee was around $25/day. This is not an interesting option with costs and frustration with pressing brake and then gas pedal continuously.

-         Travelling by bus-subway-street car would require 2 hours 45 minutes each working day. We didn’t have many hours left for other daily activities.

-         The issue was job concentration in Toronto downtown.

3.      Taking a look at the affordability of housing market in Toronto.

a.      For $1M houses in Toronto areas, figure out down payment:

* Family income must be at least $230,000
- Property tax $7,000
- Monthly heating $500
- Minimum monthly loan/credit payment: $3,500
- Monthly Secondary Financing Payment: $0
- Interest rate: 3.2%

Maximum mortgage: $716,894.69
Monthly payment: $3,466.67

Source: http://mortgagecalculatorcanada.com/en/calculators/maximum-mortgage-calculator/

b.      For $500,000 houses in Toronto areas, figure out down payment

* Family income must be at least $130,000
- Property tax $3,500
- Monthly heating $350
- Minimum monthly loan/credit payment: $2,000
- Monthly Secondary Financing Payment: $0
- Interest rate: 3.2%

Maximum mortgage: $394,636.74
Monthly payment: $1,908.33

4.      2008 housing crisis in USA

Canada's housing market is like US housing market before 2008 crash. Currently Canadians were stretching their budgets to buy a house in hope that the house prices would go up forever.
-> Earlier than 2008, US households would only pay interest [not down on capital] in hope for selling their houses at higher prices later. This market was crashed in 2008.

* Over the long run, house prices would go up. However it won't go up more than 10% annually and for many years in a row. It did fluctuate a little bit, too. In the current situation, the housing market would collapse.

5.      Some house price’s figures provided by newspaper

Average Canadian house price of $503,301 in June 2016 up 11.2% from year ago

>>> The average price for a Canadian home was $503,301 last month, a figure that has increased by 11.2 per cent in the past year.<<<

>>> "We would normally insert the standard disclaimer that the national figures should be treated with caution due to the wildly differing performance at the regional level," BMO economist Doug Porter said. "But, the double-digit increases are spreading: Of the 26 major regions covered, eight saw double-digit average price gains in June."<<<

* Look at the charts in the article below, you would see crazy numbers for house prices in GTA. Detached houses has gone up 78% within 5 years, i.e. better than stock investment OR fucked up.

Source: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/average-canadian-house-price-503-131848422.html

6.      Best scenario for home buyers and apartment renters

The interest rate higher and house prices lower, this would allow us to pay off the house completely if we had some savings. Note that our salary is fixed, thus higher house price purchased would make harder to pay off.

First entry of home buyer would be easier, too, as they could afford a house within budget.

As house prices lower, landlords would be able to lower rents to compete with each other. If they paid a house at higher prices, they would likely raise rents to pay off their own costly mortgage faster.

Breaking paradigm

I recalled that we are all stuck in our paradigm, thus it is hard to come up with innovation in our field of work.

1.      Technology

For experts in a technical field, if you wanted to implement a feature, you would have to follow certain steps to achieve that.

Personally I have been working in many fields of technologies such as wireless telecommunication, web based services, RFID field, databases, etc. Therefore I have acquired knowledge or good stuff from many fields.

a.      For my special firewall, I had used my knowledge in cellular telephony with protocol. I had come up with analysis of a protocol message to filter and to analyze unwanted stuff to protect my PC. Hackers threatened to attack my PC while I was away, thus unattended mode was on my paper.

-         With the architect of the APZ of Ericsson central processor, it would be easy to capture and analyze messages coming in or out of our PC.

-         Microsoft Windows programming language was not good to perform this task. The threats or link of functions would be long and stack may be over flow.

Ericsson came up with APY, which is an updated version of APZ, offered databases like MSSQL or Oracle database. This would make developing my special firewall easier. This is to bring best stuff from database into APZ, which only supported file structures. APZ’s best is to support protocol-like programming language, PLEX-C. By the way, Ericsson came up with APY for other applications, i.e. not for my special firewall.

Microsoft is working on a new version of Windows with similar structure as APY to support protocol programming. This would be useful or fast processing for Internet communications.

Why didn’t they see this special firewall before me? Perhaps computer experts [need firewall] was stuck in their programming world. They didn’t apply expertise of telecommunication in computer applications.

b.      Mobile router

I had used knowledge in both computer and wireless telecommunication to come up with this idea since introduction of GPRS, i.e. before year 2000. A that time, we had to connect our PC to a modem using Ethernet cable, i.e. cable running all over the house or room to room. I thought of using a mobile phone as an adapter/modem to provide wireless Internet to a PC, thus we would be able to use a PC anywhere with a mobile phone. Currently WiFi is available, thus using a mobile phone as a mobile router to provide wireless Internet is feasible.

Why didn’t they see this? Again they had separated telecom and datacom as 2 separate fields. They came up with a wireless stick connecting to a laptop to provide Internet, i.e. more expensive to users, because users have to pay wireless subscriptions to both a mobile phone and a wireless stick. If a mobile phone was a mobile router or mobile modem/adapter, users would only pay for unlimited data for his/her mobile phone. The mobile phone would provide wireless Internet for a laptop anywhere.

I was in both world and did apply as needed. Of course we may need to modify this and that to get jobs done.

2.      Economy and banking notes

To be clear, I am not an expert in these fields. I have read many articles and used knowledge in other fields in another field to resolve issues.

Experts in a field didn’t cross the line, thus they’re stuck with their paradigm.

3.      Breaking your paradigms would help you to get something done like what I did.

Try to use good stuff from another field, modify those to apply in another field to resolve issues.

“Trial and error” was the first lesson that we learnt in engineering. Therefore, we should prepare to tailor and adjust our solution as we go, i.e. new data may emerge to change our planned paths, and thus we would need to adjust our plan and solution to achieve our goal.

The bottom line is to achieve our goal. Do we really care how we get there?

Tester's chat

A chat on the first day of test.

Tester 1: Regression test failed. What did developers do? Were they drunk?

Tester 2: Yes, developers had a party last night.

Tester 1: So, we call off our testing. We should go for a few drinks until developers awaken.

What would happen on the next day of test?

Central bank's negative rates

If you asked investors, they would not accept 1%-2% as annual returns for investment.

Thus leaving rates at 0% - 0.5% is definitely a horrible situation for investors. They would find something providing better rate of return on investment such as

- Real estate market: currently in bubble state
- Stocks
- Bonds
- Invest in new business would require expertise. Only capital venture capitalists have this experience. Some business startup did approach billionaires, but it's rare.
- Mutual fund's MER (management expense ratio) is around 2% or more, thus mutual fund managers would be in trouble with parking cash.

Having negative rates would create chaos, especially heavy weights US Fed and ECB. ECB decided to go with negative rates, which forced other countries to follow its steps otherwise their central banks would be flooded with cash by fleeing investors.

Investors like to hold US treasury and Euro to park cash while searching for investment. If they couldn't find anything to invest, they would have issues with their shareholders, too.

USD and euro must be traded at higher valuation as compared to other currencies as a fact. USD is an international currency, and companies like to quote their products in USD. USD is used by 360 million Americans. Euro is a currency by many EU members with around 509.7 million people.  In brief, US Fed and ECB could set any rates that they like, other countries would follow suit, and then USD and euro would be traded high as usual, i.e. negative rates to devalue their currencies wouldn’t work.

I think, the best floor rate for a central bank would be 1% plus QE during trouble times. Leaving rate at 1% would cause less noise and trouble to other sectors such as income investment, pensioners, and housing market.
-> Doing QE would devalue its currency, btw. It’s the same effect as low interest rates.

Currency traders like job growth reports. If the economy has crunched out many jobs for many months in a row, they would jump in to buy the currency, i.e. beat it upward. The other country with higher interest rate still has lower currency exchange rate. Therefore the interest rates didn’t impact the valuation of a currency as stated. For example, US dollar’s exchange rate has jumped upward after 200K jobs had been reported for many months in a row even though the interest rate set by US Fed stayed at 0.25%. Other countries having higher interest rates observed lower exchange rates as compared to USD as a result.
[Check the statistics, if I recalled correctly, CAD was traded at par with USD at the beginning. Canadian dollar has dropped consistently to around $0.80 USD after many 200K job created per month reports from US economy, i.e. 20% drop in value with interest rate unchanged from both countries. Canada didn't create many jobs during that period.] 

Common euro

June 24, 2016: Probably it has been almost 2 decades since the form of the common euro.

How much time, money and effort have been spent in forming the European Union? How many issues had been surfaced?

1. Greece bailout was the start with billions of euro poured in Greece to save the euro. Of course, EU members have paid that.

* If only CETA was kept, and no common euro. Greece could devaluate its currency by using its own interest rates.

* Months of chaos and years of work in saving Greece. How about your own country?

2. Flooding of immigrants into your country in a short period of time would create shortage of housing, i.e. inflate house prices. More skills than necessary in a field appears suddenly. Usually governments try to balance its work forces.

* In this case, there is no methodology.

3. Can you form a country of EU? How many people would be proud of saying "I'm an EU citizen?"

* They would otherwise say "German, French, Belgian, British, Italian, etc."

* EU policy is gearing toward a united nation, but this would never happen.

* Would you change history in each EU's member?

4. Probably a common language would help in a few centuries from now.

* Which country would abandon their language?

5. We like to trade with countries in CETA for easy trades or movement of goods. Do we care about EU's rules?

6. Decisions by ECB on interest rates or methods to kick start or cool down economy were exceptionally slow. The last time took several months to come up with a rate cut. But when it was implemented, Germany economy picked up.

* There is nothing wrong by ECB to discuss with all members about setting rates. It's just too slow.

* The rate set was not applicable to all members. Each member's economy was in a different state.

7. The common euro didn't help us in trading with EU, btw. We could sell tons of products quoted in USD or our currency. Using conversion rate, we could give a quote in any local currency. After a sale, converting back revenue into our currency is easy. We don't need to keep budget or funds in a local currency or euro.

8. CETA is a large market, thus we'd like to get CETA's members up to speed. CETA members would be able to compete with others (except ourselves). Jobs would come to CETA members, thus CETA members would have money to buy our products.

* We had quality products at lower prices than in EU, this would help to bring down cost of living in EU. Allowing us to sell our products OR not is another issue.
-> We were talking about Made in Canada and Made in USA's products. Our products are good in quality.
-> Products designed by USA, Canada, or Germany but Made in China is a different issue.

* It's up to CETA's members to make themselves competitive.
-> In North America, we started with 2 weeks of vacation. Thus EU could do the same. Let's employers and employees renegotiate salaries accordingly.
-> CETA's members could lower corporate taxes, thus their products would be lower in costs.
-> Anyway North Americans are workaholic, thus we're confident to compete with CETA's members.

* If CETA members didn't have money, then how we could sell our products?

9. Credit cards are getting popular. We could use our credit card while travelling, thus cash in local currency isn't a mandatory. Of course we would pay currency conversion or credit card's commission in this case. So, common euro or a local currency didn't mean anything to North American travelers.
-> It's likely that we have travelled once a year during our vacation, thus paying credit card's commission in this case wouldn't be a huge issue.

* The common euro would help a little bit to EU members if they crossed borders often. However the draw back in common euro is tremendous. EU hasn’t been out of recession since 2008 crisis.

- Probably Germany needs 0.5% to 1% interest rate, but Greece needs -3% to -5%. However ECB applies the same rate to all EU members. This would overheat some countries as well as unbalance in their economy.

WiFi for car passengers

One of features should be good for car travelers was WiFi for in car passengers. The car control center or dash board could connect all WiFi users to Internet through a cellular phone connection.

1. Car control center uses Bluetooth or some kinds of wireless connection to a cellular phone, which was used as a wireless modem and connected to wireless network or Internet.

2. All tablets could connect to the car control center using WiFi. Kids could streamline video or played Internet game.

This way offers the car owner to pay for unlimited data only on a cellular phone.

I heard that AT&T wanted to offer wireless subscription to a car, which made it expensive to a car owner [double plan].

Btw, the communication should be secured; otherwise hackers could monitor us for in car conversation.
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[I thought about this probably in 2000 when wireless provider rolled out GPRS. I saw laptop, cell phone, and Internet were good for this application.]

In addition to being a wireless modem for a car control center, I'd like the cellular phone to become a wireless adapter/router for a PC or a laptop, too. This way I could bring my laptop and used anywhere, and connected to the Internet via a mobile phone's data channel.

Perhaps a mobile phone becomes a wireless adapter/router for a tablet, because kids like to play games anywhere.

P.S. I don't like to play neither game nor using a touch screen tablet.

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2018-12-09: In those days, perhaps in the '90s, I saw something on the web and thought about having web phones to communicate with others worldwide for free.

Around the same time as thinking about asking corporates such as Ericsson to give spare capacity to use for Internet communications to their local offices. For example, Ericsson had offices in Australia, England, Mexico, USA, Canada, Germany, etc. by connecting calls using their connections to route calls from Canada to those countries, we would only pay for local calls instead of long distance. Anyway, back in those days long distance calls was so expensive even within Canada. Now users have lots of Internet phones to communicate with each other for free.

- Our dial-up 56 Kbps at home was very slow

- Ericsson's network was so fast.

Polling vs. packet- based applications

Polling vs. packet- based applications
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Do you like polling methods or packet-based applications?
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Actually I didn't pay attention much about this issue until facing an application with all kinds of polling methods, which slow down the entire system. How could we improve the performance if we had to poll for results every couple of hundreds milliseconds at several ends?

I found that packet-based application was a better application as they sent data as needed. The receiving end picked up arrival data and processed as required, i.e. receiver didn't need to send a request periodically to the targets asking for data.

Unfortunately if we had to integrate our products with another product, which requires polling for results, we're stuck. Otherwise we could use TCP/IP as a transportation layer to relay or to send our messages to receiving ends.

Microsoft should provide a TCP/IP stack with instructions on how to use their methods, objects, or library.

Notes: in cellular telephony, we used protocol or packet-based communications. I am used to this kind of communications.

* I prefer protocol based applications, because developers must come up with detailed specification for communications. It is very easy to understand a protocol specification. For example, ANSI-41 rev B for TDMA was very good, and I could pick up details quickly. In other applications using methods, procedures, classes, they only described in high level. Reading their documents took time [not easily figure out what they're doing].

Using TCP/IP protocol for Internet applications

Using TCP/IP protocol for Internet applications or IoT
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Protocol applications are easier to understand and trouble shoot as long as you had the protocol specification. One of the best protocol specifications that I had read was ANSI-41 rev B protocol standard used in TDMA cellular telephony.

Basically the protocol specification described incoming message/packet with details of data, e.g. meaning of the first octet, second octet, etc. The protocol specification also describes the interaction between sub systems. For example, the expected returned message/packet for a message/packet request. They called those Invoke Request and Return Result in ANSI-41 protocol. I like to work with protocol as it simplify things and easy to learn quickly.

If you're using TCP/IP, all you need is to pack your data in a message followed specific/your protocol, and then send the message over the Internet to its destination. The receiver would open/unpack the message and interpret data based on the its protocol. The destination node performed the required task, and then would send back a message with required result.
- For example, in the Invoke Message Octet #1 is the ID of the Invoke Message, Octet #2 is scale indicator if = 1 is Kg, if =2 is lb, if=0 reading in octet #3 and #4 are unreliable; the octet #3 is weight number; the octet #4 is decimal places. Thus the destination would know the scale. The Return Message would perform required operation and send back Return Message including the Invoke Message ID + octets with data.
- Usually we don't shrink the message's length even if one of octet data within the message was unreliable. You only need to find a way to flag the receiver about that octet. For example, use an indicator or maximized the octet value.
- The return message would contain the ID of the Invoke message in order to trigger the right thread or calling party.
- A TCP/IP message comes as a string of octets to a destination node. Thus you would need to specify a message type or ID and length of the message in a TCP/IP request in one of those octets. It's likely that the first octet identifies the message type or ID; the second octet would specify the length of the message.
- This is asynchronous communication, i.e. you send your request and hand-off. The return message would trigger your system to response. This is not sending a message and hang-on there to wait for a response. If you didn't use asynchronous message/programming, you would seize the computer's [tablet or smartphone] processing power until getting a reply.
- If you used the XML file to contain your request/reply, the message could be longer or more bytes. For example, developers must include opening/closing of a tag name, symbols, and data.
- Btw, this asynchronous communication work well with Ericsson AXE or switch. The APZ or central processors of an AXE support PLEX-C, which is a protocol like programming language. PLEX-C doesn't look like C programming language at all.

You should read the ANSI-41 rev B standard; you would get a better understanding of a protocol. This protocol spec was written by many top engineers from many telecommunication organizations.

* Why reading ANSI-41 rev B standard, not the latest ANSI-41 standard? The goal is to learn how to write a protocol specification. Latest ANSI-41 [thicker] includes more features of cellular telephony, but you're not learning telecom. Read the last section, if I recalled correctly, would describe the octets and its meanings. The earlier sections described how many sub systems are communicating with each other to perform a task using diagrams.
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2016-01-15

It seems to me that C#, VB. NET, and c programming languages don't support packet based applications mentioned above, i.e. Microsoft didn't support this type of programming.

The receiver has to "loop" forever to catch the incoming packet. This means a lot of processing power dedicated to lopping.

I am wondering how the receiver could catch the beginning of a packet or entire packet, i.e. not the middle of a packet. It's a mystery.

* PLEX-C and Ericsson's APZ supports the packet type programming.

Fleet Management & 5G Technology

Wireless technology applications for smart cities?
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5G or LTE telecommunication standard offers a few Giga-bit data transmissions as I read somewhere. They have compared it to fiber optical networks. They have mentioned that 5G would make smarter cities.
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To be clear, landline communications are more reliable than wireless communication, and so far fiber optical is far better.

Actually wireless communications with mobile phones had made our life easier. Btw, I like a landline or VoIP phone at home for convenience. magicJack is an inexpensive VoIP provider to me with free calls to USA and Canada at low yearly free.

[1] Of course, 5G is faster, thus we should be able to get a smart phone behaved as a mobile router? Many devices including laptop and tablet would share the same data channels of a smart phone via WiFi. This would make entertainment anytime and anywhere, especially kids would be able to play games on a tablet in any car. Users don't need to register a wireless connection to their cars.
- The car's info entertainment center only needs to connect to the WiFi of a mobile router in order to offer services as real time GPS's traffic updates, Internet music, or video.
- Car manufacturers could come up with video players in the back of the front seats connecting with WiFi capability, thus those video players could connect with a mobile routers for passengers watching movies such as Netflix, YouTube, CraveTV, etc.

[2] Public transportation is not convenient in term of waiting for a bus, subway or street car in winter days. City should equip the bus sign with a little panel to estimate arrival time of a bus. It could be a little electronic display powered by a solar panel and a communication device to a wireless network.
- Each bus should be equipped with a smart phone for emergency cases. This mobile phone could offer all passengers free WiFi via its unlimited data plan. The smart phone acts as a mobile router.
- Each bus should have a GPS device, which could relay its GPS coordinate to a control center via WiFi of the smart phone on the bus including the bus ID using wireless networks.
- The control center collects information, and it could estimate arrival time to each stop. It could relay the time to each transit stop, so passenger would know in advance.
- Actually the control center could publish the estimated arrival time at each stop on its web site or using a smart phone app. Passengers could access the information using a PC or a smart phone. Passengers only need to enter the "corner of", address of, and perhaps a bus number for a transit stop - thus don't over complicate the web page. As a transit stop could be used for several buses, the output or answer would be a bus number and arrival time for that transit stop. It would be good if they could provide several estimated bus arrival time, thus users would know the next bus arrival in case missing earliest one.
- There is an issue with capacity of a bus or a street car, i.e. a bus could pass a transit stop due to full capacity. Implementers could implement something like laser beam in each garage door to estimate passengers stepping in or out of a bus for capacity of a bus. The bus capacity could be sent to the control center along with its GPS coordinates.
- Many mobile phone companies have their phone equipped with GPS capability, thus they have both GPS and mobile phone ready, i.e. no need to integrate a GPS navigation device to a mobile phone using WiFi protocol.
- Bus doesn't need a fancy or expensive mobile phone as it only uses in emergency cases. Bus’ company should trade all expensive features for a good WiFi router as nobody seems to have one.
- A mobile phone could be equipped with an icon in the interface. If user touched this icon, the mobile phone would dial a specific phone number and turned speaker phone on automatically. This good feature is not a complicated feature for a phone provider, btw.
- The control center may want to know the location of a bus and capacity. Thus, it could send a packet to the bus with bus ID via wireless network. The required bus would answer with its GPS coordinates and current capacity.
- The backend at control center could be equipped with a map to show locations of all buses. Solution provider could also provide some features for statistics.
- Solution should be less than CAD $1000 per bus. An expensive iPhone is around $700 each and expensive 3/4 horse power garage door opener is $200 each. Solution providers don't need the most expensive iPhone or the whole garage door opener.
- In this application, satellite was communicated in the GPS component to get GPS coordinates. The mobile phone sending its GPS coordinates to control center using data channel of a mobile phone, e.g. GPRS, 3G, LTE, 5G, or any wireless versions providing data channels.
- Since 2.5G, each mobile phone has been assigned with an IP address for Internet activity. Btw, its phone number is unique as an ID.

* Btw, a solution provider should come up with a protocol solution to lower demands in wireless networks and Internet networks. Some notes at https://plus.google.com/+TVinhNguyen/posts/hNpYuXEJpdy
- A sample of protocol for this case [of course we must add the octet to identify the length of this packet and packet ID at the beginning of this packet. The packet length indicator would help receiver to determine content of the packet. You could also expand the protocol later by adding new octets and change the length indicator.]
- Octet #1: =0, octet #2, #3, #4, #5 are unreliable, =1 octets 1-5 have GPS coordinates
- Octet #2 #3: longitude coordinates
- Octet #4 #5: latitude coordinates
- Octet #6: =0 meant octet #7 is unreliable; =1 meant Octet #7 has bus capacity
- Octet #7: current # of passengers on the bus
- Octet #8: =0 unreliable of octet #9; =1 Celsius; =2 Fahrenheit
- Octet #9: bus temperature
- of course, you could expand for wind chill factor, etc. We haven't used too many bites in this sample protocol.
--> The bus ID should also be included in the protocol. North America's phone number includes 11 digits including country code and area code. Thus if include an indicator, 12 bytes are needed. Other countries may have longer phone numbers, i.e. more bytes.

* Each 4 bits could present a number between 0-F, thus we could compact by using an octet for 2 digits, if wanted.

* Having connected to Internet and other services using a mobile router connected to cellular telephony's networks is an easier task. Having connected to satellite network is harder as military owned those. Upgrading satellites' hardware and software are harder.

[3] Having free WiFi to subway car is harder as the wireless signals couldn't penetrate the tunnel concrete. Unless they have the radio base stations, RBS, across tunnel, passengers would have free WiFi. So far, many subway stations could estimate time of arrival of each subway to any station. This is not hard as people thought.

[4] Electricity smart meters have been communicating with its centers via electrical wires or power lines, I think. I hate this stuff too much as we have to wait until 7pm to do laundry. Having kids at home is making this huge trouble. Sick. Especially governments have spent money like crazy or idiots to renewable energy. Double shits. Actually they're using cellular telephony for a smart meter, i.e. subscription fee's issue as the meter id not a mobile phone? How much do I have to pay for this, i.e. they passed on cost to me?

[5] Having self-driving cars with features connecting to 5G networks? You must know that telecom providers are allowed to upgrade their networks around 20 minutes within a year, i.e. down time shortly at each upgrade. Telecom network is reliable as of today, but don't bet 100% on it.

- If I recalled correctly, Ericsson's AXE has an executive central processor and a standby central processor. The executive side handles real time data and updates the standby side with data, so if the executive side is faulty the standby side would switch over automatically to handle telephone traffic. During an upgrade, the executive side transfers real time data to the standby side, which holds new software. After transferring done, switching the standby side to executive side, this process may take a minute, i.e. no communication with wireless network unless the new version of Radio Base Station, RBS, could handle data on its own without the switch, APZ. Btw, an RBS could be down for an upgrade, too.

- Btw, the central processors with 2 sides running in parallel are expensive. Should a self-driving car cost a few millions of dollars with similar computers?

Mobile router by a mobile phone

During late 90's or early 2000's probably, I was working for Ericsson on mobile telephony, thus I was kind of familiar to mobile phone. At that time we only had DSL Internet with telephone cable to a modem and Ethernet cable connected many computers in house from room to room. Probably we had laptop, too, but very expensive.

Perhaps we were working for data channels [similar to datacom for a computer network] for a mobile phone [GPRS] at that time. Suddenly I looked at my desktop PC and wondered if we could use a mobile phone as a mobile modem to a PC or perhaps laptop. This way we would be able to get Internet anywhere we went. We didn't have WiFi or Bluetooth at that time.

[By the way, I couldn't recall many things clearly.]

Now we have WiFi, thus a mobile phone connected to wireless telephony networks could offer Internet WiFi as a mobile router to other devices like a tablet.

* Is this hard to do? I guess, "No". All technologies are there. Only to combine or integrate those.
-> a mobile phone does have WiFi already to connect to a home WiFi router.
-> a mobile phone could connect to wireless telephony Internet.
-> tons of WiFi routers available for home users.
-> mobile phone's OS is like a computer OS, i.e. powerful enough.
-> Anyways there should be something like WiFi protocol stack and 2G/3G/4G protocol stacks. We could use those to develop applications to offer mobile router on a mobile phone.

Btw, having good applications to offer better life to people is a better option for engineers and scientists.

* By the way, a mobile router would be a good device for entertainment with affordable cost. However it would give those crazy out there more tools to attack others. What else could we say?

* I knew that many mobile phone users would select unlimited data plan if a mobile router is available.

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2018-12-09: In those days, perhaps in the '90s, I saw something on the web and thought about having web phones to communicate with others worldwide for free.

Around the same time as thinking about asking corporates such as Ericsson to give spare capacity to use for Internet communications to their local offices. For example, Ericsson had offices in Australia, England, Mexico, USA, Canada, Germany, etc. by connecting calls using their connections to route calls from Canada to those countries, we would only pay for local calls instead of long distance. Anyway, back in those days long distance calls was so expensive even within Canada. Now users have lots of Internet phones to communicate with each other for free.

- Our dial-up 56 Kbps at home was very slow

- Ericsson's network was so fast.

Time to invest in oil replacement such as hydrogen?

Oil prices have been trading around $50 USD/barrel for months.

- Oil producers have said that oil prices have been depressed.
- Oil producers have been producing lots of surplus oil in the market.

Oil producers have been worry about electric cars and hydrogen cars that would make gasoline cars obsolete, thus they pushed down oil prices. However the gasoline prices have been up recently around $1.00/L in Ontario, Canada. Therefore this low price gasoline price doesn't exist.

1. Tesla's electric cars are getting into $30K USD range, which could be affordable by many users.

2. Hydrogen cars such as fuel-cell car by Toyota and smaller version of hydrogen snow mobile by Bombardier are promising.

a. Toyota's fuel-cell car is more expensive in the range of USD $60K, thus it's hard to get into mass users.

b. Hydrogen's snow mobile by Bombardier has proved that they could reuse the gasoline engine, and at similar price ranges. This is a crucial point to replace gasoline engines.

- Making improvement for car engines would be the next step.

- As the governments have been pushing for clean environment, hydrogen filling stations would be built quickly. Hydrogen engines only release water vapors, i.e. clean.

3. Hydrogen car, automobile, and bikes would be in needs in countries like China, Viet Nam, and India, where cities were highly polluted with smokes. Mexico City is also on the list.

- We have no reasons to support oil industry, which wanted to get our money on gasoline to compensate lower oil prices. Basically consumers got choke for high gasoline prices, which crippled economy indirectly.

4. Hydrogen is the abundant source in the universe. We should build nuclear power stations or ocean wave turbines to generate energy in order to extract hydrogen.

- Hydrogen would be used in cars as well as heating after natural gas depleted, unless natural gas prices were as high as gasoline currently.

5. Canadians do support oil industry for jobs in Alberta, but it didn't mean that oil industry could choke us as well as Canada's economy.

Communications using power lines

Communications using power lines
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Communications using power lines should be banned as we couldn’t control or monitor those easily.

Using traditional phone lines, cable lines, or satellites ways for communications we would have a method to monitor TCP/IP or packet communications. We should be able to track down senders of those messages.

If we couldn’t track those down due to transmission’s issues, we could shut down the entire networks in case of emergency, e.g. shut down satellite transmitters, cutting main lines of telephone or cable lines. A few days without communications wouldn’t bother everyone in case of emergency. However, cutting power lines during cold days would be troublesome.

For transmission issue with signals spreading over the wires or air waves, we could come up with signal strength’s measurement devices to track down senders.

Technical Services

We are providing technical services to the City of Peterborough. Our services would include

a.      Repair computer related products such as PC, laptop, iPad, iPhone, and Windows phone.

b.      Discussion of your technical specification or business specification.
c.      Design a blogspot account.
d.      Contract services for software development including QA tasks.

If you’re located outsides of Peterborough, communications would be provided by telephone and emails unless you’re located near Peterborough.

Our contact is Mr. Vinh Nguyen at Peterborough of Ontario, Canada.
- Email address: canvinh@gmail.com