'cheap, disposable microsat constellations'

No, not starlink type, I mean the 'a highschool student made this' kind.

Keeping those OFF the normal communication channel, AND being COTS, would be win-win.

No.

Bluetooth devices (the things being tracked) have a power output measured in single digit milliwatts. Usually around 5 to 7mW. This is why your airpods can last for HOURS AND HOURS on a 75mWH LIPO cell.

Now-- consider that you are usually belting out some 750 WATTS (over 1000 times more energy) using a microwave oven, and your reheated slice of pizza absorbs a significant amount of that, to get reheated--- You have a pretty good idea just how far that energy is gonna actually go through atmosphere.

A few meters. As intended.

Now, statistically, the signal NEVER actually falls to 0. It WILL however, be attenuated all to hell, and reconstructing it will be very difficult.

In order to collect enough energy from space, from a 5 to 7 mW signal on the ground, you are going to need ONE HELLACIOUSLY LARGE DISH up in space, just to even DETECT it.

They would need .... a mac truck sized satellite... for that.

Maybe bigger.

Now-- ASSUMING they mean Satellite to Satellite communication-- (Such as for steering, collision avoidance, time signal synchronization for phased array comm with the ground, etc...)

Sure-- I can see some obvious advantages to using a HIGHLY MODIFIED bluetooth stack, with a bog standard bluetooth transponder.

Namely, bluetooth transponders are made in bulk. They are inexpensive, AND already designed to consume low power. They are being used in a mostly evacuated environment, so attenuation (might.. Possibly. Hard to tell with LEO and ionizing radiation sources up there... Need to see data!!) could be reasonably low enough for effective communication at microwatt rates. The energy use budget of a satellite is pretty tight, so low energy is VERY important.

HOWEVER.

The protocol stack end of Bluetooth assumes distances measured in less than 10 meters. TimeToLive values, retransmit windows, and other variables of the protocol would need to be altered in order to function as the transport for such inter-satellite communications. Bog Standard bluetooth is not suitable. At the speeds satellites are zooming overhead at, the normal signalling radius of bluetooth is laughably small. By the time they managed to handshake, they would be smashing into each other.

Bluetooth is a protocol and frequency combination designed for low power, short distances.

2.4ghz attenuates very quickly through atmosphere, because it also happens to be the frequency that water resonates at. (which is ALSO why it is used for microwave ovens...)

Since it attenuates so quickly in atmosphere, it is perfect for low power, short distance communication of consumer devices, (which would absolutely BOOTSTOMP the spectrum if this was not the case.)

Trying to do this FROM SPACE is.... "So. You want to beam a signal, that is absorbed very intensely by water vapor-- THROUGH the atmosphere, and cloudcover, FROM SPACE?" type dumb.

Now, if they mean "Satellite to satellite" communication, FAR above the atmosphere-- sure-- that might actually work.

But satellite to surface, and vise versa? NO. NO SIR. THAT IS DUMB.

The issue, is that unless you want to fork out 50 to 100% more per month, your typical ISP will go batshit on you if they discover you hosting outbound port 80, or anything not in the far end of the port range (used by bespoke services and online games). Anything in the well known ports range, and they get a butthole puckered tighter than a republican's at a gay day parade.

Even then, they will throttle the fuck out of you if your service gets any kind of traffic at all.

Sometimes even on said overpriced "Business plans"

Would be better if they focused on making desktop environment that force a touch paradigm that is useless for real work. Linux is still typically used on PC on real desktops for real work. Focusing on touch in that environment is fucking idiotic.

Hard and fast rules that don't allow for flexibility are bad. They force everything to the mediocre middle which is exactly the effect they guy in the article is calling out. Yes, it protects workers who don't want to work harder, but it also limits the ones who do. It prevents exploitation but it also prevent people who want to excel and go beyond. The system in America leaves it up to the worker. You can choose to not excel at anything and just coast through and be same as everyone around you or you can choose to go well beyond and make yourself stick out to move up.

Exactly this. Work where you want to work that lets you set your own goals. Work hard and move up or just work and get by. No one MAKES you work 50-70 hours per week, but if you are ambitious, it's out there if you want it. Fuck that nanny state government shit.

The first thing I do after installing ubuntu is rip snap completely off the machine. I love Mint but I tend to update hardware frequently and LTS editions only just do not give me the bleeding edge hardware support that I need. Snap needs to burn in hell. It is the worst of the app store style packaging systems. None of them are good. I want my apps to be lean and mean and not have 10-15 apps whether snap or appimage or any other system that all carry the exact same libraries that have to be unpacked when you use them. But snap goes beyond that with the pure evil of updating or overriding what the owner of the machine wants to happen. Fuck that.

Because law and culture are connected.

Not QUITE correct.

the issue, is that adding nitrogen to soil causes rapid CARBON depletion. This has been observed in agri-science literature since at least the 30s.

https://grist.org/climate-ener...

"Fully Automating" nitrogen addition, without a commensurate increase in carbon addition, will result in destruction of soils, not improvements.

Not that this little factoid would in any way dissuade the big agribiz folks for even an attosecond. They will just slap an "ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY! NOW CARBON NEUTRAL!" sticker on their new active algal fertilizer organism treatments, and people will eat it right up.

SIR, that is NOT ammonia YET-- That is a can of salty piss, sure, but that requires room temperatures and access to air to get ammonia!

No, as others have pointed out:

Get a Gotek drive emulator

And

A greaseweazle raw disk reader

Between the two, there is very very very little out there that cannot be read and supported in a solid state manner.

But, if they DISCLOSE those OH SO USEFUL vulnerabilities, then those will become USELESS!!

How will we keep AMERICA NUMBER ONE if we sabotage our own advantage in espionage!?

We KEEP ON INSISTING that we *NEED* to install backdoors in these software stacks AT THE FACTORY, but we KEEP GETTING TOLD NO!!

**ITS SO UNFAIR!!** /s