691–700 of 1001 posts
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I had read that some municipalities in switzerland were banning them. Me, I just do what I can and at least trash the ones covering the windows on public transport here.
It is legal to cover windows with advertising?
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Their brightness is a mixture of a lot of things, including the huge PV arrays and the angle they have with the sun when they cross the terminator between night and day. Starlink have already put a lot of effort into their satellites being much less bright than most satellites, including tilting their PV away from earth during the terminator crossing, so from what I've read you'll mainly see them while they're being…
Would the “datacenter” satellites be much larger? I thought each of them was only going to carry a rack or a cabinet worth of GPUs?
Will this be the last generation to remember the night sky?
Starlink short circuits that process. It means newly minted middle income people my dad’s village in Bangladesh can get broadband now instead of in 2050. Replicate that story all over South and South East Asia and Africa.
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It also creates a private internet on which “private enterprise” does not have to abide by the Constitution or any subordinate laws. Sure, it’s just “fear mongering” now, just like digital ID, digital currency, mass surveillance, and speech police were 30 or so years ago, but what happens when terrestrial cable internet gets too expensive and everyone’s subject to Elon’s space internet? It’s basically the similar pla…
It doesn’t. The network is governed by the FCC and any other regulatory agency where they place RF on the ground.
My mom lived with overpriced, underdeveloped, unreliable, and slow internet for years. Now she pays less for fast, reliable, sometimes improving bandwidth that doesn't go down for weeks after a storm. Progress is often gross, but it can be a lifesaver.
Alas, Not In My Low Earth Orbit.
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Why didn't governments try making it? The US has tons of spy satellites, why not make some for the folks paying taxes? Why do we have to sell our firstborns (data) to Google for maps etc?
Can't speak to the world as a whole but the US has we spent 50 years gutting most government functions that aren't part of the police/military/surveillance apparatus (and many of those as well). SpaceX itself is an example of the primary mechanism of this: Diverting funding to private, no-bid contracts that remove both market forces and democratic oversight from those services while also ballooning their costs
Disinformation on the Internet? Never seen it before.
The contracts are not just publicly bid but paired.
Come off this nonsense.
Space is the sphere of government and the launchers and satellites have always been built by companies and SpaceX is very visibly cheaper.
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Recently I flew on a long-distance (so at least a dozen hours of flight time) low-budget airline that had 60 Mbps download/12 Mbps upload and it specifically called out SpaceX Starlink for being able to provide this for free. A video call went smoothly. There was connectivity from takeoff to landing with no interruption in between. This was the best airline experience I've had yet.
I flew Delta about 6 months ago and they had something similar, also for free, but they use Viasat. I think most of the big airlines were moving this way anyway to be honest, Starlink just has a good opportunity for advertising.
I also use Starlink at my house in Italy. I'm in a decent sized town, but there is no fiber available. It has worked great, and more importantly took about 10 minutes to setup.
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so what's the alternative? just don't make any progress?
You are seeing this in this thread. I doubt anyone likes to be described as contra-progress. But nevertheless people would rather conserve the current night sky than see it transmute into a shimmering sea of a million artificial satellites. It's not really obvious to me why one state should be preferable to the other.
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You can see them very easily at dusk. It’s dark enough but they are still in sunlight making them very clearly visible. There is always one or more easily visible (by design).
There's more like 30 always visible... The 1 I suspect is some other satellite