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Comment Re:Of course it does (Score 4, Insightful) 19

SpaceX knows exactly where each terminal is because they have to for radio timing to work correctly with the moving satellites. Russia has to test those terminals somewhere. SpaceX could be giving that location to Ukraine. SpaceX could be permanently destroying any terminal that turns up near there and hasn't been cleared by Ukraine. SpaceX could be reporting the incoming locations of missiles and could be cutting service as soon as they realize that there's a surprise terminal moving rapidly towards a Ukrainian city.

Due to their lack of accuracy which makes them ineffective against hardened military targets, most of the Russian missiles are used in strict terror campaigns against civilian buildings: Power stations providing neighborhood heating, residential tower blocks with hundreds of families living in them, independent churches, nurseries often at times of maximum use and of course hospitals.

Getting on top of this and ensuring that Ukraine is a key supported customer that feels it gets what it needs could have allowed a real feel good story showing a company that took abuse and murder seriously. In fact it's pretty clear that some working at Starlink tried to do that at times and the management made it more difficult. Elon Musk is literally a baby killer.

Comment Re:The century without a summer (Score 1) 46

To be fair, they don't. They want to slightly reduce the sun's output, so that it offsets the greenhouse effect we have caused. So no famine, just less catastrophic climate change (which causes famine) than we would otherwise experience.

The two biggest dangers are that we screw it up and dim too much, with no way to undo it, and that we use it as an excuse to keep polluting.

Comment Re:If _sharing_ cars is so expensive... (Score 1) 32

Horseshit.

I spent decades never spending more than a couple of hundred GBP (Slashdot Classic still ddoesn't let me type £ properly... see?) on a car, then throwing it away and buying a new one when the MOT failed. They often lasted years.

What now everyone can afford to do is BUY IT FROM NEW or lease the damn thing. Both are ridiculously expensive ways to "own" a car. Honestly, that's a modern disease thinking that you have to lease the thing, with balloon payments no less, and then have it serviced exactly according to their schedule. It's horseshit. Just buy a car.

Stop buying from car salesmen with huge lots and a minimum of 4 figures on the crappiest of cars, stop paying £1000's (grrr!) for a basic cheap shitty old used second-hand car with a history you have no idea of, and stop getting into ridiculous finance arrangements or thinking you have to preserve a service history that NOBODY gives a damn about.

Comment Zipcar (Score 1) 32

I did the maths on the BBC article and it turned out that they made something like £76 REVENUE per customer per year. God knows what the actual profit was per customer. You'd literally do better just selling oranges by the side of the road.

They were clearly just haemorraghing money from the start and it just never took off.

I know of only one couple who ever used them and they lived a weird lifestyle. Lived in a stupidly expensive part of London and had to get a Zipcar or similar to even go grocery shopping. Every time they went somewhere, they had to find a Zipcar. Even if they were planning a week away, they spent a long time trying to book and track down and GET TO a Zipcar if there wasn't one nearby.

Irony was that, unusually for those kinds of places in London, they lived in a gated community with parking and so could have just... bought a car and parked it there.

Comment Unregulated (Score 1) 33

Unregulated currency = money laundering.

It's the only reason for Bitcoin to exist.

Comparatively, nobody touches the regulated cryptocurrencies because... they don't facilitate money laundering.

It's like cash in that respect. The only reason for any business to choose to deal exclusively in cash is to facilitate money-laundering. And all the big money laundering operations are usually hidden around cash-only businesses.

Comment Re:first step... (Score 1) 32

It's not though. But if it were, that's solvable through reforms initiated with democratic representation. Assuming the people of the nation actually care enough to run their own government. Of course that only occurs when people actually have power and representation. Perhaps that can be solved by removing a class of people with more money than everyone else and who are getting much more "representation" than the average.

Comment Re:One silly law causes problems (Score 1) 58

Should this requirement apply to autonomous vehicles equipped with sensors that would prevent it from hitting a pedestrian when reversing?

Until they are infallible, yes.

the city should have banned charging stations in these locations via zoning before one was built there

Life is chock-full of "should haves", alas. Instead of each new project being better than the ones before, many people and organizations seem to think they know everything when they should have learned from others. I'm quite sure someone else had figured this out already.

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