You thought food was expensive now? Just wait. CA ag is built on cheap water. Arizona ag is the same way and farmers use something like 70% of all water in AZ to "irrigate farms in the desert". We need to rethink how and what we grow. Far too much corn is planted to make ethanol. More hydroponics, less water waste, less corn, and the big one - less meat. I said it, yes, you may need to cut back on steak. Livestock eat an enormous amount of feed crops.

1. Environmentalists would rather save the Delta Smelt than have farmers produce food.
2. Toilet to tap is distasteful, literally, so it's not used. (yet! It could be, but nah)
3. The state hasn't built a major water storage project, well, almost in my entire lifetime, 1979.
4. Water desal is expensive mostly because of electricity. I guess you could keep a nuke plant open or something, probably a good place for a co-generated desal plant, but what do I know, Morro Bay mothbolled their desal plant.
5. You'll need that water anyway to prevent saltwater intrusion into existing aquifers.
6. It only takes 1 big earthquake to take out a major pipeline.
7. Climate change, whether you believe it exists or not, is resulting in unpredictable precipitation. You don't know whether your draught is going to be 2 years or 2 decades.

In short, you better build it now because you will need it, regardless of whether it adds minimal salinity to your oceans. CA needs to be building 15 desal plants and 15 Gen4 nuke reactors to power them. The least of their problems will be the extra salt in already polluted waterways. I fully expect them to crash their transmission line network if electric cars become mandatory. Nobody wants a power plant in their back yard, so its piped in on overburdened transmission lines.. Just try to put a new major powerline in CA.

Radio altimeters on planes suck. They really do, they spatter 4.2-4.4 GHz signals from their antenna and they frequently interfere with satellite reception at the top of the C-Band receive segment. (4.2 Ghz) God help you if your antenna farm is on an approach flight path. This has been happening for decades and good luck getting these planes to fix their units so they don't splatter into C-Band... But, no longer my problem, C-band is being slimmed down so you can have 5G, and if you take a hit on your phone, so be it, it'll be a quick hit.. It's also just you, as opposed to everyone served by the cable companies national head end.

(Washing Hands Of Problem)

Bandwidth Contention Ratios are an interesting topic in that, you use to be able to get away with more. In a cable plant, the downstream capacity is no longer an issue, it's hard to saturate 1-2 Gbps of BW between 300 households. It's not hard to saturate the 5-42 Mhz return that yields 120 Mbps with 300 households.

Maybe I can do 30-1 on the downstream, most people aren't downloading huge files all day, they are streaming ABR content, I can give 100 Mbps to everyone and likely get away with it. On TCP content, if I have to report ACKs, that would take a bit of my 120 Mbps, maybe I have 90 to really supply to the upstream. 90 Mbps for those 300 households who are now stuck at home on Zoom calls all day upstreaming 500 kbps all day, You run out of space quickly. Good luck delivering the 10 Mbps you promised. Maybe you could oversubscribe 5x in the past, now you can only do 2-3x. Cable companies who didn't upgrade their plants ended up with huge numbers of complaining customers.

In the case of the airlines, if they didn't push the seats so close together, I could deal with someone reclining. They took that away and I need every inch of the 29" they give me.

You can only get away with so much for so long, and we've hit the breaking point. Maybe you can't shove an extra row of seats in.

Those who don't bother to google their history are bound to repeat it.

Someone else tried to deliver short form "webisodes" that nobody wanted to watch, and it failed spectacularly too.

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

DEN's goal was to deliver original episodic video content over the Internet aimed at niche audiences.[4] DEN was one of a crop of dot-com startups that focused on the creation and delivery of original video content online in the late 1990s[5] prior to wide adoption of broadband internet access.

In May 1999, DEN announced that their business model had earned them $26 million USD in investments from Microsoft, Dell, Chase Capital Partners, and others.[6] In September 1999, Microsoft announced that DEN was one of their partners in the Windows Media Broadband Jumpstart initiative, focusing on the creation of video and audio entertainment for the Windows Media format for high-speed connections.[7] By 1999, the company was reportedly valued at $58,500,000 USD and included former Walt Disney Television President David Neuman, Garth Ancier, David Geffen, Gary Goddard, and Bryan Singer as investors.[8][9][10]

DEN was slated for a $75 million USD IPO in October 1999 but the IPO was withdrawn[11] in the wake of allegations of sexual assault against Collins-Rector, Shackley, and fellow executive Brock Pierce. All three executives subsequently resigned.[2] Layoffs followed in February 2000.[12] While a new executive team led by former Capitol Records President Gary Gersh[11] and former Microsoft executive Greg Carpenter[13] tried to salvage the company and relaunch in May 2000,[14] DEN filed for bankruptcy and shut down in June 2000.[15][16]

Ground stations and EPFD. (equivalent power flux density)

In order to hit those speeds, the ground stations (both customer and uplink) need to hit multiple birds for a single location. Which means that those satellites need to be pushing sat power to those locations. You can only push so much power to a given area before you violate FCC regulations for epfd AND potentially cause interference to another party. In SpaceXs case, that other party is Dish Network who they are trying to "share" spectrum in the Ku DBS range with. Dish network has published their analysis for the interference they expect from SpaceX and show it to be illegal. I don't think SpaceX has responded to their report other than to say they'll just use 1 satellite pointing at a spot at one time, which is just untrue, The beamwidths at Ka band frequencies are much narrower and the epfd limits are also much higher. They might get away with it at Ka band.

Starlinks biggest problem will continue to be environmental. When in LEO, it takes a lot of satellites to cover an area, LEO satellites fall out of orbit after a while, and weather causes massive rain fade at Ku and Ka frequencies, Ka is especially bad in weather and SpaceX needs the Ku space.

Cox cable has 400-500 customers on my service group, a few blocks. They have a node, a few amplifiers, and lets say we all pay $100/mo. $5000 a month from infrastructure they only periodically need to maintain and it works in all weather. If the node gets congested, they can split it. How many subs do you expect to have in flyover KS? 500 in a spotbeam? 50? It doesn't really matter, it could be 10. The cost to provide Gigabit service to those 10 households will be comparatively astronomical. At 256-APSK, 8 bits per symbol, 216 Mhz transponder, forget the FEC, you get to 1 Gbps. I might get that with a 5m Dish tracking the bird in the desert and I'm the only one of the transponder. Realistically, it's snowing and I'm getting a lot less, lets try 32 APSK, 5? bits per hz, for comparison I think Dish Network uses 8-PSK and thus 3 bits per hz. That transponder isn't going nearly as far with the modulations you're most likely to get away with consumer cpe. These aren't high gain dishes they are using, rather flat panel electronically steerable arrays, they will struggle to maintain sufficient SNR for high throughput in most weather environments. When it rains, my directional relatively high gain DirecTV dish in sunny Arizona, sometimes goes out. God forbid you live somewhere where it rains regularly.

I think OneWeb, who is not targetting the consumer directly has a better plan, which used active dishes to obtain high throughput and the local areas served distribute to end customers some other way. Cable modem, 5G, etc. This improves efficiency greatly and you might get Gb/s of transit, that will never happen with Starlink customers with poor modulation levels crapping up the channels.

Then there is the economic issue, Cox cable can profitably offer me service at $20/mo, they don't, but they could. Starlinks consumer start up costs will always be multiple hundred or even a thousand dollars.

I've seen a lot of NGSO constellations fail or go bankrupt, I think I might see another.

So, no you won't. Palo Verde uses treated sewage as its process water. Other users like golf courses are interested in it as well forcing Palo Verde to use less. You can't keep adding to Palo Verde without dealing with the water and power line issue, neither have much in the way of current excess capacity. SMRs need to be located near where they will be used and earthquake prone LA is a bad choice.

I've been hearing about SMRs for decades. I am opposed to nuclear power, not because I oppose nuclear power, but because it's never been cost effectively deployed and we still have no solution for the waste. You cannot have $2B reactors cost $6B and be 5 years late. SMR won't change that, it will only make the economics worse. You are better off building large nuclear generators on a per watt basis and if you need to use it soon, a natural gas plant will be up in running before you even complete reactor licensing.

This is symbolic bullshit that panders to the crazy left. This doesn't stop violence in Chicago, prevent police abuse in Minneapolis, or ensure that children are able to eat. (Big proiblems these days.) No, this is a stupid idea that makes code harder to maintain.

Somebody, please, stop with whitewashing, err brainwashing.

Cox's bigger problem is that their service groups are too large to support sub split upstream that they advertise. You can get away with selling 100 Mbps up, if your service group is 8 homes. Cox is slowly moving to mid-split 5-85 MHz and that will buy them a good 300 Mbps more on the upstream. However, they've moved far too slowly. They needed to convert over to mid-split years ago. They've known about capacity problems for a long time. At this point, 5-204 Mhz high split is looking smart to me. Anything on their network that can't deal with it should be scrapped anyway.

DOCSIS is a double edged sword, it delivers Internet cheaply using existing infrastructure. The problem is that everything is an upgrade to the plant, taps, or CPE. The only real solution is fiber. Staying on the DOCSIS train only ensures that equipment vendors will have a lot of upgrades to sell.

I'm a big believer in NG-PON2 and operators that bite the bullet and trench the fiber will be rewarded by not have to rebuild for a capacity upgrade - ever. They will also be rewarded by decreased maintenance costs, labor costs, and improved system reliability. But, when you're primary focus is making billions of dollars a year, it's hard to find money for DOCSIS upgrades.

Stop laughing.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to put up a wind farm? The cost of renewables is sometimes equal or less than the power produced at a fossil fuel plant. Coal no longer makes economic sense, and it makes even less sense when you try to sequester the waste. I bet you can buy a lot of windmills for $1B.

Apparently not, 6 GHz is the uplink for the C-Band distribution that delivers TV to your friendly cable company. And 7 GHz? Who uses that? All your TV stations, many moved their ENG to 7 GHz when the 2 GHz was repurposed for Sprint PCS back in the day.

We could make so much money if we could get rid of everyone whose currently using that spectrum!! It'll be great!

Concept has been tried and failed. See DEN

Webisodes nobody wanted
Short clips intended to appear to Gen ___
Run by idiots

Company imploded and there is a great cartoon about it somewhere.

Rinse Lather Repeat

So I have used Roboform for god knows how long, it sync across all my devices. Up until recently the last version, you could stick a version on a USB stick and it would allow you to load up an instance on a computer that didnt have Roboform installed. An when you took the USB out, the app disappears. I have something like 500 different passwords managed with it.

But - I also provide every site a separate e-mail.

slashdot@nuttybee.com
yahoo@nuttybee.com

If slashdot@nuttybee.com starts getting Viagra spam, theres a good chance that they got my address from Slashdot. And when that happens, I TKO the address, it goes directly to trash.

If you're lucky enough to figure out my login - slashdot@nuttybee.com and my password '3l13t3haxor', it is usable at absolutely zero other sites.

I can put their portable app on my thumbdrive, plug it into a Windows PC, (e.g. my work PC) and it plugs itself into to Firefox/Iexplore. When I remove the drive, the application disappears. Nothing is left on the work PC.

That alone is worth $20/yr to me.

As someone who can barely see a 0603 SMD device, I find this quite impressive. He was able to remove the flash from the board, get it to function, watch it communicate, and identify the multiple mechanisms used by the chip to communicate and where on the flash it accessed. I always suspected the way the FBI did it was a brute force attack on copies of the chip data.

Neat!