All this time I thought I was the cool kid on the block with not just cable but HBO. And analog scrambled porn.

I agree. In fact for most cable companies in particular it probably makes little sense to replace anything that can do even just 1 gigabit, because they almost surely have other regions or at least boroughs which are currently underserved.

I suspect it's mostly limited to sizable households with a lot of users. But we keep finding new ways to use available bandwidth...

This is true, but it's also dangerous. On the other hand federal law allows you to expire them after 5 years. Some states don't allow them to ever expire, but most do. So eventually you do get some of that money back.

That's both now (they could have done fiber a long time ago) and also the best case. Remember, "up to 10 Gbps speeds" (from your link) means anything from 0 bps to 10 Gbps.

Yes, but not for the reason you think. He thinks he can have AI do all the work. This is a move to get rid of everyone who will go easily. Paying these severances has surely been calculated to be cheaper than fielding lawsuits for dismissal without "justifiable reasons." You can be sure that they will next move on to a just-barely-not-legally-provable hostile work environment in order to convince more people to quit. There is no urgent need for layoffs, just a dumb CEO idea, so doing a layoff isn't viable.

Same. I've never seen anyone get pissed off at it, which differentiates it from most other examples :)

Fair point, I forget how utterly stupid businesses, particularly large businesses can get about boneheaded requirements that they mandate but do not use or do need, but could better solve it in a separate path rather than mandating it on what should be the 'wrong' product category.

Particularly surprising to forget since I'm basically continuously exposed to that in my job, but guess it eventually faded into the background of me not thinking explicitly about it anymore..

What's copycat about it by the way? It's well known that Elon got the idea for Starlink after WorldVu went to SpaceX for launch services to launch its own mega-constellation. And WorldVu itself was just a extrapolation of Motorola Iridium.

These satellites are hundreds of miles from each other. Furthermore they are in LEO which means the orbit decays in under 5 years if they don't have regular thrust correction. We've already had satellite collisions in space and last I checked space is still fine. The only way for Kessler to be real (and that too temporary) is if someone put hundreds or thousands of tons of ball bearings above a certain size up there.

We don't have anything that works. There are dead zones even in cities. Rural, hilly, or forest areas have terrible coverage. Tens of billions spent and hardly anything to show for it. And I'm just talking about the US.

I don't think we should expect to see steady progress toward a climate solution, I think it's going to happen quite suddenly after some combination of the technology to do it getting cheap enough and the climate producing enough "shit's getting real" moments for a large fraction of the first-world population. At that point either we'll get our asses in gear and set up oceanic and atmospheric carbon sequestration megastructures all over the planet with maybe a little SRM sprinkled on top, or we'll be too distracted or impoverished to do anything about it for some silly reason or another and all the disastrous predictions will come true because this is a problem we're collectively too stupid as a species to solve. That's a real possibility.

Anybody else ever play You Don't Know Jack with three other people? I think that was the first really clean and comprehensible party quiz game, and a YDKJ title seems like it would be a good fit here.

Pretty much any cellphone can now do a decent imitation of a Wiimote (besides the sensors, you could also use camera data) and it would also be hilarious to see people accidentally chuck their phones across the room while bowling.

Stop calling these eVTOLs flying cars. A helicopter is more of a flying car that some of them. If something is to be called a flying car you need to be able to drive it on land, on a road. If it can't do that it lacks any aspect of "car".

Mozilla keeps thinking that they can make Firefox popular without the nerds somehow. But all the shit that makes it better than other browsers is nerd shit, so they need nerds to advocate for it, teach other users how to use those features, etc. Meanwhile they seem to actually be trying to alienate us. Just like in the movie, here it the pulse, and here is their finger, far from the pulse, jammed up their ass. Pretzel?

You are correct, they absolutely, positively do not have a flying car. They have a drone that comes out of a cybervan. And it's six-wheeled to boot, which would be cool in an off road vehicle but absolutely sucks on pavement. I did not bother to look up whether it has rear steering because IDGAF about it even if it does, even though that would be kind of neat. The rest of it is dumb.