> So you could sell singles with one hit song, and this would propel the "B-side" into people's homes as well
And that's also how Queen almost broke up in 1975. (Roger Taylor making just as much money from singles for writing "I'm in love with my car" that Freddie Mercury for writing "Bohemian Rhapsody".)
From a technical standpoint: amazing achievement, and the tech nerd in me is in awe. But it feels like a lot of people don't understand (or care?) how much these companies are polluting the space.
Before the "new wave", in 2010-2015 or so, Earth had around 1500 active satellites in orbit, and another 2,000-2,500 defunct ones.
Starlink now has almost 9,500 satellites in orbit, has approvals for 12,000 and long-term plans for up to 42,000. Blue Origin has added 5,500 to that. Amazon plans for 3,000. China has two megaconstellations under construction, for a total of 26,000, and has filed for even larger systems, up to 200,000 satellites.
We might be the last generation that is able to watch the stars.
> We might be the last generation that is able to watch the stars.
I'm not convinced this is a major issue, but I'd like to hear arguments for why it is.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't LEO satellites only going to reflect light from the sun when they're at low angles near sunrise and sunset? For night time stargazing, they're going to be in Earth's shadow, too.
The amount of light they reflect back is also small. They can be seen if you look closely at just the right time, but I don't understand how this is supposed to be so much light that it starts raising the overall background light level considerably. The satellites are small and can only reflect so much.
Is it just annoyance that they're up there and showing up in photos?
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't LEO satellites only going to reflect light from the sun when they're at low angles near sunrise and sunset? For night time stargazing, they're going to be in Earth's shadow, too.
Iridium's LEO satellites were sometimes (impressively) visible after midnight.
With the difference that cars can steer and stop to avoid collisions and aren't necessarily in your field of view every time you look at the night sky ;)
I have no idea if the number is actually a lot shrug but it's surely different than cars on a planet's surface
They're extremely sparse. Imagine putting 12,000 satellites randomly over the surface of the Earth. You're just not going to bump into one, statistically. Now expand that into 3D space in an orbital zone above us.
It is already impossible - all the remaining Space Shuttles are in a museum, not to mention all Space Shuttle missions were (and were always intended to be) to Earth orbit. No Space Shuttle ever went past 600 km hight Earth orbit.
Not to mention low orbit being self cleaning and higher orbits being exponentially more space. You can map the junk with radar & plot the launch to avoid it.
Space is huge. Try this trick: the number of satellites in orbit is about the same as the number of planes in the air at any time. (~12,000 [1].)
The volume of space from the ground to 50,000 feet is about 200x smaller than the volume from the Karman line to the top of LEO alone (~2,000 km).
Put another way, we approach the density of planes in the sky in LEO when there are milliions of satellites in that space alone. Picture what happens if every plane in the sky fell to the ground. Now understand that the same thing happening in LEO, while it occurs at higher energy, also occurs in less-occupied space and will eventually (mostly) burn up in the atmosphere.
Put another way, you could poof every Starlink simultaneously and while it would be tremendously annoying, most satellites orbiting lower would be able to get out of the way, those that couldn't wouldn't cause much more damage, the whole mess would be avoidable for most and entirely gone within a few years.
There are serious problems with space pollution. Catastrophic Kessler cascades that block humans from space, or knock out all of our satellites, aren't one of them.
At the altitudes these mega-constellations operate at, kessler syndrome is not a real threat. Even if left unpowered, everything there will naturally re-enter the atmosphere in ~5 years.
Not pedantic enough, actually. European lawmakers don't suspend the deal, they suspend work on implementing the laws that are part of a multi‑step political and legal process that in the end makes the deal implemented in all member states.
The thing why this was only a research project and never came into mass production was regulatory stuff, IIRC?
(most EU countries require, still until today, a "physical connection between steering wheel and wheels" in their trafic regulation)
This was a few years before Sweden joined the EU, but yes, I think the lack of a physical connection was one of the main problems.
From what I've read the test drivers also thought the car was too difficult to drive, with the joystick being too reactive. I wonder how much of that could be solved today with modern software and stability control tech.
I can't find it now, but I do remember a similar prototype with mechanical wires (not electrical) that was supposed to solve the regulatory requirements. That joystick looked more like a cyclic control from a helicopter.
Having played enough video games that use joysticks for steering I don't want to drive a real car with a joystick. Crashing in Mario kart or Grand theft Auto because I sneezed is fine but not in real life.
Exactly. The control needs to have both an intentional and major motor movement from the driver. Modern steering wheels have the same benefit as the original iPod wheel. Easy for small movements, even accidental ones; possible for big movements.
Also funny that they had the ability to swap to the passenger to drive it. So acceleration/break for one person, steering for another? Really not a good idea.
On Sequoia this command shows you the history of SSIDs, not the current SSID you're on. For easy verification turn off your WiFi and run the command, you'll get identical output.
Is Tahoe doing something different? If so, honestly that only exemplifies my point of how Apple is creating a difficult ecosystem to navigate through, where the correct incantations change, even through minor versions.
*IT IS MADDENING*
> There's also get-ssid: https://github.com/fjh658/get-ssid
I think the README is quite illustrative of the problem here. Seems like John ran into the same issue I was! He even mentions the issue with the `-getairportnetwork` flag for `networksetup`.
But get-ssid still has a problem... it requires root. For my original use case I was wanting to run ssh proxy jumps and rsyncs based on the SSID I'm connected to. This doesn't really work for those cases. Escalating to root just creates a major security concern and I definitely don't want automated processes doing escalating unless absolutely necessary.
Don't dismiss the yearning for space/new frontiers/adventure that a lot of us have. If you offered tickets to the moon today for the price of a cruise, you would probably have people standing in line from Cape Canaveral to Tallahassee.
Mac OS was though. OS X 10.0/10.1 were sold for $129 as an upgrade for Mac OS 9 users. Apple continued to offer OS X as a paid software product up to 10.5 or 10.6 (though it was also bundled with new Mac purchases).
> Gizmodo reached out to Grok-developer xAI for comment, but they have only responded with the usual automated reply, “Legacy Media Lies.”
European here, so perhaps not my place to have an opinion on domestic U.S. legal policies, and I don't want to make this political (although I guess it kind of is…) BUT:
Why are no media outlets on the offense when companies use these kinds of statements? Shouldn't Gizmodo, or its owner Keleops Media, treat this as slander and take it to court? If Grok's behavior can be objectively verified, why is it so easy for a company to get off the hook so easily just by saying "lies" and move on?
USA citizen. I've so much lost faith in our media that this hadn't even occurred to me. You're right. This should be front and center and embarrassing the owner (that guy) every day.
To get anywhere filing some kind of claim over this, Gizmodo would have to prove in court:
- The "Legacy Media Lies" was targeted at Gizmodo
- It was a false allegation (i.e. they might have to go through huge amounts of discovery as the defense tried to establish a single instance of dishonesty in past reporting)
- Grok/xAI knew the allegation was false
- The allegation caused such-and-such amount in damages
Fellow european here, the problem is they need to prove both than the statements are false ("legacy media lies" probably means you need to prove you haven't ever lied) plus show actual malice (intent to harm the plaintiff, in this case, Gizmodo, or acting with reckless disregard for the truth).
You’ll find it easy to prove that the legacy media has lied an uncountable amount of times, so it’s going to be hard to prove that this statement is slanderous.
For example, "Mom, there's a candy wrapper under (my brother)'s bed!" is a true statement, but the pure truth is "Mom, I ate a candy without permission and put the wrapper under (my brother)'s bed so he would be blamed for the missing candy!"
I am attempting to convey a lie by telling a truth and omitting details that would give context to that truth.
I believe you are referring to "whole truths," which yes we teach to children and swear on the stand in court. A "pure" truth carries different connotation here I think, and is not said in general.
Since GP might not have English as their first language (their post points out that they are European) I assumed the choice of "pure" was a translation of their language's equivalent to "whole" and therefore being treated as equivalent.
When you have the pure truth, why would you silently dismiss questions about your truth bot and not blast it 24/7?
Because right wingers cant handle criticsm. They dont want to correct, they want to silence their outgroups. Professionals would have at least replied with some meaningless PR text wall.
And that's also how Queen almost broke up in 1975. (Roger Taylor making just as much money from singles for writing "I'm in love with my car" that Freddie Mercury for writing "Bohemian Rhapsody".)
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