121–130 of 252 posts
Are there any international agreements covering this stuff? What if China decide they want to launch another 3000 and Russia want to launch another 3000 and India and Japan and whoever else?
not a problem if they are maintained in the way the SpaceX sats are going to be.
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What about debris from LEO collisions moving into higher orbits?
A single impact can't put something into a higher circular orbit-- it can create an elliptical orbit with a higher apogee (max distance), but the correspondingly nearer perigee (closest approach) means that it experiences more atmospheric drag and falls out of orbit faster.
Anyone wanna offer me their hypothesis on what Amazon and other tech companies gain from offering internet to people who probably aren't valuable consumers?
One of Starlink's planned markets is global high frequency trading. The latency of radio and laser transmission in atmosphere and space is much lower than undersea fiber optic cables. (Light moves significantly slower through glass than through air.) Even with the longer distance and retransmission they stand a good chance of being lower latency across oceans than undersea cables.
Someone has since pointed out to me that HFT is currently done by bouncing microwaves off the atmosphere. This, unlike fiber, should be faster than SpaceX's constellation making that business unlikely to work out. (Possibly unless high bandwidth almost as low latency is useful).
Welcome to the dystopian future where no human anywhere on Earth can look up and see an authentic sky, as their ancestors did. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/science/starlink-spacex-a... And thanks to SpaceX (and now Amazon), astronomers will now have to do their observations from space. If only there was a way to get telescopes up there. Oh, wait... SpaceX just happens to have a way to solve the problem it creat…
A world where two billionaires can take the stars from humanity. It's like a fairytale, and yet it can happen.
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Not valuable? Ships, oil rigs, airplanes, remote vacation destinations (e.g. ski lodges), etc have lots of money and a good concentration of rich people with lots of money.
I've been wondering about remote cell towers as well. When I'm out in rural areas I'll regularly get 'LTE', but my downloads will be considerably slower than when I'm in a city (despite a much lower population density). My assumption is that it's very expensive to get highspeed internet out to these locations. This should enable cell phone companies to place a tower as long as they can run power to it (and solar pane…
So in effect all those towers share their Internet bandwidth.
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I did the math on this. It probably wouldn't be good for hft. The highly profitable hft is done on the floor of the nyse. There's some from Boston but they typically use directed radio instead of fiber-optic. Satellites will be even slower, but maybe cheaper if you're sending date from California or Australia. But it's still probably cheaper (and more profitable) to put a machine on the floor or even just in NYC. I'm…
GP is obviously not talking about HFT on the NYT, but HF arbitrage between different global exchanges.
Anyone wanna offer me their hypothesis on what Amazon and other tech companies gain from offering internet to people who probably aren't valuable consumers?
Won't this offer internet to everyone on Earth ?
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What I'm saying is that it's faster to just buy a server in NYC.
They have servers in both locations. If you see that a stock starts falling in London you have a time window where you can still sell it at a higher price in say New York, until the price drops to the same level thus closing the opportunity for arbitrage.
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Terrifying power? Amazon has succeeded by getting customers what they want, and doing it cheaper, faster and more conveniently than their competition. Of all the tech companies to be cynical about, they most obviously make people's lives better , and expanding their reach (along with the "ancillary benefits" of giving people access to the internet...) is a moral good. Really, this knee-jerk paranoia is difficult to u…
"If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business. If it pisses people off it'll go out of business." This is the central myth of the free market. Part and parcel of a massive internet company is having control over the flow of information, how can people protect their rights if they don't even know they're being violated, or if they're being distracted from protecting themselves by lies and manipu…
Tell Sears and Kmart that it's a myth.
Top US retailers in 1970: Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, McCrory's, WT Grant, Genesco, Allied, May, Dayton-Hudson (Target)
Only one of those remains on the list now (in an entirely different form at that).
The Internet has changed nothing fundamental about whether a retailer can be replaced by competition. And no, Amazon's warehouses don't make it impossible to compete with any more than Sears previously having thousands of physical stores supposedly protected them via reach / scale that others couldn't match. For retailers, the Internet is a better catalog. Sears rode the last version to temporary dominance, Amazon rode this version to temporary online dominance.
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High speed trading. You can send a packet faster from London to nyc via a LEO network than an underwater fiber.
Why are there people investing so much money on these things, filling up the space, just for some stupid trading. Why is humanity doing this ??
If we had a way to remove all oxygen from earth, require people to wear astronaut suits, in order to reduce 10ms off the speed for HFT, you'd have companies start sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere.