This headline sounds like something you'd hear coming from a news report on a TV in the background near the start of a horror movie.

We went from "Reusable rockets? That's Nuts!" to "who can stop Elon" in about 10 years.

Rocket reuse wasn't a real thing until Falcon did it in 2017, Starlink came in 2018. It was a chicken egg problem, people just don't realize how close the rocket reuse was to the first Starlink.

Getting stuff into orbit is one thing, rocket reuse is another. Lots of people are still trying to get reuse, and SpaceX is slowly retiring Falcon 9 for the Next Big Thing, reuse of two stages of rockets. Three years ago, that idea was still considered nuts. V3 Starlink can't ride on Falcon 9. They (Starship/V3 Starlink) are tandem projects.

Light is light.

Starlink V3 is not using radio, it's using Lasers. The coherent beam is the key to Terabit speeds. Which they already have. Multipath Terabit Low Latency World Wide Network? Nobody has that right now. Earth bound pathways are limited, especially across the huge H20 Holding tanks between land masses. Space offers nearly unlimited pathways, redundancies unimaginable using earth based fiber.

Here's an article explaining some of the problem: https://arstechnica.com/gadget...

"What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak" - Agent Smith

Long Term thinking isn't profitable in the short term. And it is much riskier to bet long term than short term.

The correct view a blend of aggressive short term with long term values.

Comcast could have taken the aggressive short term and built out before anyone else, AND THEN CHARGED MORE while they were still a monopoly. They still have cable in my house, and I've replaced it with faster fiber for less. They simply dropped the ball.

The problem is not overall capacity. It's that they're all crowding into the same areas. Most places in the US (let alone the world) have nobody building datacentres anywhere near them. They all want to go into the places with not merely cheap power, but cheap property taxes and other incentives. Some places will tax everything, down to the servers themselves, whereas some will only tax the land and the building shell, not even the power interconnects or cooling systems.

When everyone wants to rush into the same place, it overtaxes the local grid; they have to build not just more generation, but power lines, substations, etc. And all of this has to go through permitting. There's no real limit to how much generation can be built, but none of the datacentre operations want to wait, because they're all worried about missing out on the opportunity. Hence the reason that they try to come up with stopgaps, like installing their own generators, or... this approach.

ECL MV1 / Lambda is 3,5 miles from the Googleplex. And 10-12 miles further to the southeast, Santa Clara is one of the densest datacentre hubs on Earth.

If you care about where they actually live, and distances to datacentres:

Sundar Pichai: Los Altos Hills, CA: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-6mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub (CoreSite SV9, Vantage, Colovore), 9-11 miles

Larry Page: Palo Alto, Ca: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 4-5mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 10-12mi.

Sergey Brin: Los Altos Hills / Bay Area: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-7mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 9-12mi

Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind CEO): North London, UK: London Docklands Hub (Telehouse / Equinix), 7-9mi; Slough Data Center Hub (Equinix, Yondr), 18-20mi

I don't know about you, but they're all way closer to datacentres than I am.

The reading comprehension fail is you failing when reading the GP. They were talking about Falcon 9 replacements being two decades behind. The implication was that nobody will catch up to Starship any time soon.

Falcon 9 did not launch first in 2018; its first launch was in early 2010.

The mistake you seem to be making is your assumption that Falcon 9-lookaline development would begin tomorrow and be bulk launching payloads to orbit just a couple years later. Development takes far longer than that. From conception to first launch may only be a few years, but from there to actually being reliable, cheap, and rapidly reusable takes many, many years. Anyway, here's the playing field:

Tianlong-3: Started in 2022. Almost a direct 1:1 copy. Failed launch this spring; they're redesigning.
Zhuque-3: Started in 2023. Stainless steel and methalox, and a bit wider than Falcon 9, but otherwise a very Falcon 9-like design. First orbital launch and booster landing in August of this year.
Terran R: Started in 2021, pivot in 2023. Larger diameter, 13 engine cluster. Integration/testing phase, no launch attempts yet.
Pallas-1: Started in 2018-2019. Sort of a mini-F9. Flew to orbit for the first time in September of this year.
Nebula-1: Started in 2019-2020. Another mini-F9. Doing small hop tests, of mixed results.

(Amur-SPG isn't worth taking seriously ;) )

There IS work on Starship clones/competitors - Long March 9, Cosmoleap, Xingzhou-1 , Astronstone, Project Jarvis , Nova - but they're varying degrees of long timelines, less ambitious, paper-concept-for-now, etc. Long March 9 is the most likely to be fully realized, since it's run by the state-owned CALT, but they're not even expecting to start their first test launches until the early 2030s. And we've seen how hard test launches can be on a Starship-style vehicle (though at least others can make use of lessons-learned). But who knows, some of the startups may succeed with accelerated timelines.

"Off the top of my head, I cannot do it fully accurately."

Correct. You cannot. Courts are in disagreement, the police take advantage.

There was no warrant here (as you pointed out). They are claiming to not need one, even in light of the 4th and 5th Amendments.

RAS is a legal requirement. What was the Reasonable Articulatable Suspicion. They lied either by claiming Kiddie Pron or they had no RAS at all.

Can cops lie? Legally yes and largely without boundries. That is the end of any conversation.

It's more like guidelines.

And here comes Node.js....

The split was massively beneficial for GE. Post-split, GE Aerospace went from ~135-160B to ~300B. GE Vernova went from ~35B to ~240B. And GE HealthCare went from ~25B to ~30-40B. The aggregate return of the split was ~300-400%. The new companies have a total market cap of approximately the same value GE had at its absolute peak during the Dotcom boom, dramatically reversing decades of decline. Their value is ~40% more than before GE's Dotcom surge; double that of GE's pre-collapse level (~2016); and ~800% of what it was post-collapse.

It's not just GE. Siemens. Johnson & Johnson. United Technologies. DowDuPont. 3M. Kellogg. Daimler. It's just been the trend to unbundle. Musk's empire is going in precisely the opposite direction. He sustains it with a cult of personality.

Did SpaceX build rockets to fuel Starlink, or did Starlink fuel the need for cheap launch vehicles?

This is the classic chicken egg problem.

IMHO SpaceX was building Rockets and when they finally got it working and relaunching boosters, it needed something to put on them. A bunch of satellites in LEO creating a super network of communications was obvious. Now they have launched everything those rockets could ever launch, it needs the next big thing AI in Space (Outside geo-political lines) makes sense. Who's laws does SpaceX XAI have to obey once in space?

Can you define exactly what they are allowed to lie about and what they cannot lie about? Are you 100% positive you cover everything?

I'm not being a dick here, because I don't think the courts even have a good grasp of this.

"We think you have kiddie pron on your phone, let me see and prove that you don't or else you'll be arrested for obstruction"

Where is the acceptable lie here? Where did it go over the line (if at all)? This isn't outrage bait, this is the exact scenario found here. A cellphone is the modern "secure in their papers" IMHO. He was a US citizen on US soil, the right apply or we don't have rights at all.

I am a libertarian. The state has accrued too much power. This case just proves it again.

What even is the point of Europe?

It took you 2 1/2 centuries to get as centralized as you are. We're still in our "Articles of Confederation" phase, and being just as crippled in crises by it as you were under your Articles of Confederation.

That doesn't mean "give up and die"; it means "work to try to get the extremely high level of agreement needed to unite better (nations, like the early US states, are loathe to give up any sovereignty), while simultaneously doing the best we can with the system that we have".