In what way are these "robots"? They are not machines. They do not have any intelligence or programming or locomotion. They have no stored energy. They have no sensors and gather no data and cannot communicate.
They are just particles.
Former teen-aged me was excited for this at first because the headline made it seem like we were one step closer to . . . eradicating acne! There's a huge fortune to be made in little robots to clean pores. HUGE!
...would make Americans healthy?
Single payer healthcare.
Amazon is due to launch 3,232 Kuiper satellites by 2029, with half of those satellites going into orbit by mid-2026.
That gives them something like 500 days to launch 1600 satellites. If they launch in batches of 27 satellites, that's 60 launches -- one every 8.33 days. Who launches at that pace, or even has a credible path to get to that pace quickly?
No one. This is total marketing B.S. There is no way that Bezos & Co. can ever launch satellites at that rate. The FCC license gives Amazon the legal ability to put that many satellites in orbit, but it doesn't give it the capacity to do so. I hope that I'm wrong, but "news" stories rehashing corporate blog posts about the future should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Solomon said it more than 3,000 years ago.
I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.
There's a whole lot of wind-chasing going on in modern society.
"All we are is dust in the wind, dude." -- Ted "Theodore" Logan
Why do we need fucking stupid javascript on slashdot now? da fuck!
Reading this in an incognito window on Chrome (instead of Firefox) with all of my extensions turned off, and I still got a warning pop-up.
It's pretty sad that the old-space companies have completely missed the resusability train. Neither ULA nor Ariane ever even considered reusability when designing their current rockets. Both depend on lobbying and governmental restrictions to stay in business. The other space start-ups are at least adapting their strategies, but they are years behind.
It's sad but predictable. Two words: cost plus.
I attribute my success to intelligence, guts, determination, honesty, ambition, and having enough money to buy people with those qualities.
