I live at a place where I needed Starlink so I feel entitled to comment.

Ordered, and it took 6-7mo to allow me to start. In the meantime T-Mobile Home Internet let me start immediately. I kept both because when one had issues the other would be better (storms, updates, tower maintenance, downtime, Russian attacks, etc). But I noticed that Starlink kept getting worse. Lower speed, worse jitter/ping/bufferbloat/etc. it would routinely fail to hit 100mbps down with good sky view, mounted to a pergola. TMHI would routinely be above 250mbps, and I move to using it more often. Eventually a local ISP got a grant to roll out FttH in my area and I got rid of both.

It’s been a bit over a year since then, maybe things got better. But I noticed Starlink overselling their nodes, being non-communicative for support issues, and missing these easily attainable FCC goals to people that often have much less options than I did. There’s no reason for them to get absolutely wiped by a cell phone tower. Hope they made enough by packing on customers, because they just lost $900m

OLED over transflective, do you get all the bright colors but it can go transparent and use the sunlight readable and low power screen when that makes sense

If I understand it right, it’s not a laser shooting heat into space. It doesn’t require a clear sky to function. It’s just moving the heat effectively away from itself by bypassing the atmospheric insulation, wherever that might be. And that goes for pointing it as well, except you wouldn’t really want it under direct sun for best heat transfer

Or, given 10 million years head start plus building time, you could use a Caplan Thruster stellar engine to make that 100% sure

Aw man, I had no idea they sold

Thank you, seriously wasn’t trying to make fascist arguments, I promise. Just trying to make a comparison and why certain things can’t always be grouped together

It’s like Austria. Sure, technically they’re German, but they’re their own thing

I remember Ars Technica had an article or series on his bad decisions called “Apotheker needs an Apothecary” and lit into him for all the dumb things he was saying and doing. I just don’t see how you can have the manufacturing and branding behemoth HP was then, get giftwrapped Palm and webOS while RIM was still in the process of imploding, and fumble the bag so hard