You are correct. What we need is transparency and path control on the Internet. Why should you ISP decide which way your packet routes (and lie to you when you try to find out your packet's paths)? You as an end host should be able to decide your packets' paths (or at least influence the path).

SCION is a BGP-replacement that achieves this. It is an open network and FOSS, not a closed network by a startup. It is driven by researchers, not the latest blockchain hype. I guess that is why it doesn't get as much coverage on /.

Full disclosure: I am a researcher, doing research on future Internet architectures, and SCION specifically.

The Internet should be distributed, that is the entire point of it. The problem that comes with distributed architectures is that they are prone to stagnation. Getting everyone to upgrade is difficult, unless incentives are right. With the various BGP "fixes" that have been proposed in the past these incentives have mostly not been sufficient to move people to deploy them (e.g., BGPSec).
On the other hand, there are clean slate designs like SCION that solve the problems that BGP has by radically changing the way that the inter-domain routing works. Again, the obvious problem is how to get it deployed... a flag day won't work, so the approach is incremental deployment, incentivizing adoption even in a partial deployment stage. The deployment may be harder for a protocol like SCION compared to a small BGP "fix" but the payoff is larger as well. In the long run we will need a clean slate, not a pile of fixes built on top of a fundamentally unscalable, insecure BGP.
(Disclaimer: I am a university researcher studying SCION.)

I thought it was "Administration".

Is this to avoid antitrust rulings such as we've seen recently against Google? If so, great. Looks like the pressure was working.

There are just shy of a dozen companies which try to offer satellite Internet via LEO or MEO constellations. Of course, you can get satellite Internet today already, using geostationary satellites, but the latency is high.

As much as Elon Musk likes to make big announcements with dubious time schedules, SpaceX has really delivered in 2017. Copying from FutureMartian97:

And Falcon Heavy is going to launch very soon, currently scheduled for January.

If Data is the New Oil, then Data Privacy is the New Ecology Movement.

My take on the blooper reel, as funny as it is, is that it's supposed to lower expectations for Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy was originally supposed to launch in 2013, but the date has been pushed back multiple times in the recent years. Part of the reason is that it never was the top priority -- the Falcon 9 upgrades meant that more payloads could be launched using a single booster instead of three. And SpaceX has to keep NASA happy and fulfill their Commercial Resupply Missions to the ISS & the upcoming Dragon flights (first manned flights).

But part of the reason why Falcon Heavy was delayed so much is because it is hugely complex. You can just stick two boosters to the side of a core booster and keep it together with some struts, like in Kerbal Space Program. The structural loads are all different and must be accounted for.

So, I think the timing of the video so close to the scheduled launch of Falcon Heavy in November of this year is supposed to carefully counter the high expectations that the public has, given SpaceX's recent successes. Rocket science is hard, and failures are to be expected. But if you work on the problem for long enough, you eventually get it right. That's the message of the video.

The obvious problem with this is that sending bits is not what costs ISPs money. What costs money is having a high-enough bandwidth connection to the backbone during *peak traffic* time. Your ISP is and should be much happier if you download at 4am.

Ideally, you would pay for a certain small guaranteed bandwidth, which you get at all times, including during peak loads (this is kinda far in the future, but ISPs could use SIBRA bandwidth reservations or similar systems). Additionally, you get "up to X" amount of bandwidth at off-peak times. Your ISP should publish how high this "up to X" is on average during each hour of the day, so that you get a realistic idea of what to expect. To make the most efficient use of the infrastructure, during low use time, X should only be limited by the physical limitations of the network -- i.e. if you have a 1 GBit/s connection, they should give you 1 GBit/s even if your peak load guarantee is only for 20 MBit/s.

That's the most efficient way to utilize the network.

Here are some really cool videos of SpaceX landing the first stage of their rockets (on land and on sea). They've done it 11 times by now, and have already re-flown one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (sped up barge landing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (real-time land landing)

Why not use autonomous ships on the dangerous passage instead? Autonomous ships are expected in the next few years, even before autonomous cars. Granted, this would not solve the problem of transporting passengers safely, but it would mean much less concern for cargo shipments.

That being said, a ship tunnel sounds like a cool idea.

Interestingly, this also has an effect on the moon. The reason why the earth's rotation is slowing are the tidal forces. Part of the energy lost from the Earth's momentum goes into the Moon's own orbit. As a result, the moon is actually getting further and further away from us, at a rate of 38 mm (1.5 in) per year. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the Moon actually gets slower that way, despite the energy put in is in the prograde direction, i.e. increases its velocity. The reason is the higher orbit. Sources:
Tidal effects on the Moon
Earth's rotation

Before someone comments that we don't need humans on Mars if robots can do the same cheaper: that's beside the point. I mean, robots are no where near performing on the same level as humans when it comes to ingenuity and ability to come up with and implement ad hoc fixes to problems that no one could even imagine before launch of the mission. But putting that question aside, the problem with robotic missions is that they will never get the same sort of funding as human missions. A human mission automatically has to have a certain size, e.g. has to develop capabilities to land payloads in the ballpark of 10 tons or more on Mars. Once we have this capability, we can easily send lots of robotic and scientific payload along with humans -- it amounts to simply using the same payload delivery system that we are developing for humans anyway.

On the other side, if there is no ambition to fly humans to Mars, then no one will develop these capabilities. There is simply no funding for a system that delivers 10 tons of cargo onto the surface of Mars, unless it can also deliver humans, and bring them back safely. So we cannot send big robotic missions to Mars.

Human missions generate lots of excitement, lots of excitement leads to lots of funding. Robotic missions can never be on par with human missions in terms of how much excitement, and thus funding they can raise.

It's worth looking at HORNET, which is at this point not much more than a research paper, but it could point in the right direction. Instead of having anonymity for very few people (because of disadvantages to using anonymity tools, e.g. speed and latency), increase the anonymity pool by making anonymous communication less disadvantagous. With HORNET high throughput is achieved by providing Tor-like routing at the network layer (something which is currently not possible in the internet, but it might come with SCION, a BGP replacement that's in the works). I'm not saying that this will be ready anytime soon, but I think it's certainly an interesting idea. [full disclosure: I'm a researcher working on SCION]

I also think that Tor still is the best thing we have. The rumors about Tor's death are greatly exaggerated.

Here's a video of the actual thing, not just an animation.