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Japanese Startup Wants To Rain Down Man-Made Meteor For Tokyo Olympics (sciencealert.com) 106

A startup called Star-ALE wants to create a man-made meteor shower over the city of Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics opening ceremonies. The pyrotechnics show, Star-ALE says, will be visible from an area 200km across Japan, and the pyrotechnics will actually shower from space. Starting next year, Star-ALE will begin sending a fleet of microsatellites carrying 500 to 1000 specially-developed pellets that ignite and intensely glow as they re-enter the earth's atmosphere. ScienceAlert reports: But wonderment comes at a cost, and in this case, that cost isn't cheap. Each combustible pellet comes in at about $8,100 to produce, and that's not including the costs involved in actually launching the Sky Canvas satellite. The company has tested its source particles in the lab, using a vacuum chamber and hot gases to simulate the conditions the pellets would encounter upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere. In its testing, the particles burn with an apparent magnitude of -1, which should ensure they're clearly visible in the night sky, even in the polluted skyline of a metropolis like Tokyo.

Comment Re:Sounds good. (Score 2) 556

Being personally acquainted with at least one of the #NotYourShield folks, they definitely aren't all sockpuppets. There's people in back of there that really believe in what they're saying, There's also at least one developer in there who isn't either.

Now as to whether the people giving them grief are the anti-GG types, or the GG-types running a false-flag, that's another debate entirely.

Comment The license fee thing... (Score 5, Interesting) 82

Being a license fee payer, this years olympic coverage from the BBC was actually good enough for me to consider the license fee to be 100% justified. The lack of ads alone was awesome.

The debate about the license fee tends to rage back and forth on a regular basis over here. We genuinely do get a metric ton of generally good quality tv, ad-free and with free streaming. And a lot of tat too. Although it's interesting to note that the UK really came late to the Pay-per-view party. Convincing people that paid a license fee/monthly fee for their cable or sat package that they have to pay again? The main selling points they used over here were the "when you want" nature of the beast, for movies and such, and for sporting events, likening it to buying a ticket. They worked very hard not to remind people that you'd already paid them for the priviledge.

Guess I'll always sneakily love the BBC as being one of the last holdouts against the paywalling of culture, or the slow posioning of it by 1000 ads for things I never knew I could be irritated by.

Comment Re:Longstanding multiple monitor issues not fixed (Score 2) 455

You know, I'm fairly sure thats not what those bugs say.

Mark says they won't fix the issue that you can't move the panel to the other side or bottom of the screen. Honestly it's down to you whether you feel this is a good or a bad thing.

The multiple monitor bug is something entirely different whereby X is putting the panel on a specific (possibly wrong) monitor due to underlying code issues. Mark has NOT said they won't fix this, in fact he's not weighed in on it. Again, YMMV on whether you believe they're doing enough about it.

But really, he hasn't said they won't fix the second bug, which is the one you're referring to, and conflating with the first bug.

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