To be fair, that leg of the TGV happens to be some of the best track in the whole system. It's practically a straight, non-stop shot from Paris to Avignon on double decker cars with panoramic windows.
216 karma · joined December 13, 2019
Imagine thinking that a product that costs $500 up-front and $99/mo thereafter and uses ~100 W constantly is designed for "hundreds of millions of underserved people".
Many people, I'd say especially enthusiasts, were quite happy when AMD was able to compete on a performance/$ basis and then outright beat Intel.
Of course, now the tables have turned and AMD is able to extract that price premium while Intel cut prices. Who knows how long this will last, but Intel is still the 800 lb gorilla in terms of capacity, engineering talent, and revenue. I don't think we've heard the last from them.
I think the original comparison to 'spinning rust' was tongue-in-cheek and not meant to be taken so-very-seriously, but it's kind of taken on a life of its own and, personally, I feel that it's gone a bit far and undeservedly undervalues hard drives.
>> The range safety officer can blow up the rocket if the rocket veers off and is in danger of overshooting the safe area.
I'm confused. Am I not the one arguing for a remote abort command (which, so far as I know, has been standard practice for a while) and you, above, argue that rockets don't need one because humans are bad at modeling rocket aerodynamics?
I would argue there has "got" to be an override precisely because humans make mistakes all the time and so there's no reason to think that an autonomous failsafe should work in all possible situations.
I don't know much about rocketry, but if it's true that there's no remote abort capability, that seems like a deeply misguided decision.
I'm not arguing that access in itself is bad. I'm arguing that new money speculating in the equities market often doesn't go well.
Also, we buy it at Costco for a 5-seat license and split it amongst family. That takes the cost down to something much more edible.
I think the belief that we'll eventually get to a state "wherein we provide adequate resources to everyone without requiring them to work" is wonderful, but unfortunately, unlikely to happen.
I'm sure this has been thought out by people much smarter than me, but I see two problems.
First, who decides what "adequate" is? At some point, a decision has to be made on what resources to allocate to a person. Here, in the US, we "let the free market figure that out", which, ideally, means that people are free to negotiate and enter into transactions as they wish, but in practice, is just another way of saying that the government doesn't intervene in decisions unless laws were very clearly broken, and even then, justice is not quite blind. In any case, aside from laws and regulations on what constitute a minimum level of support for people, we do not define what "adequate" means, probably because it's actually a really tough question. The communists, in theory, wanted to appropriate resources "from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need." Except the people in power were ruthless and corrupt and that system wasn't all that great at incentivizing people. Anyway, good luck with defining "adequate" and then getting people to agree with you on that.
Second, and more difficult, is that the people who control the means of production now will be somewhat reluctant to give that up in the future, so I'm not sure how you'll manage to produce adequate resources for everyone without requiring them to work if someone else still owns the means of production. If you seize the means of production, you're back to communism.
So, I think the main thing that utopian visions like this miss is the messy reality of human beings, that they're born with inherent inequalities and that those inequalities persist over time. Someone, or, probably a corporation, will own the robots of the future. That corporation will control enormously powerful means of production. There is nothing requiring that corporation to pay you for anything, nor for them to provide you with adequate resources.
Does it come down more to an agreement among the team about how code should be written?
Yes, in theory, a terminal with a phased array antenna can be built to emit more than one beam simultaneously and steer them independently. Doing so is currently still costly in terms of research, electronics, and power, so it's unlikely that the SL terminal can do it. It would also require there to be a second PHY chip somewhere in the terminal, which would also drive up cost.
Also, it's not really necessary. Satcom already requires nanosecond-level timing accuracy, so I would think their terminal can probably steer its beams with at most ms lag.
We have to clarify what you mean by "support multiple simultaneous beams". The SL receiver is half-duplex, so it can only send or receive at any given time, and, in theory anyway, it uses beamforming to communicate with just one bird at a time (if it couldn't beamform to within sufficient tolerance, then that would be an FCC no-no.) There's no theoretical reason, AFAIK, that it couldn't rapidly switch between birds, but the actual feasibility of that depends on terminal firmware, the ground network being setup to handle that, the arc between two birds, and whether or not the antenna's scan angle can encompass that arc.
The primary difference between the ground terminals and the antennas in space is the amount of power passing through them, but also their sophistication (primarily the beamforming capability.)
Forest fires reset competition at the ground level while mostly maintaining the status quo for large, established trees.
In passing, I'd note that I don't think cell technology would work without LoS; also, there's no atmosphere to reflect off of.
I guess if they're just thinking of some comm system for the moon, it might as well be 4G. (I guess? I'm not qualified to answer this.)