If you read https://tools.ietf.org/id/draf... which is linked in the article it makes the suggestion of allowlist and blocklist instead of whitelist and blacklist. That is both more accurate and not racist. White space isn't racist when it literally refers to the color white. Just like black hole is not racist because it refers to the literal darkness. I guess the exception would be when you call it white space and are using a dark theme (lol). Having an honest and open discussion is okay. No one is coming after you if you want to use the legacy language. The reason a lot of this is coming up is because some things are so systematic and ingrained that most of us don't even think about it. In the open source world it literally costs almost nothing to change a couple terms and the value add from being more technically correct while encouraging inclusivity is great.

A globally interconnected world is about cost equivalent with the 1 James Webb Telescope. The James Webb Telescope budget is ~10 Billion, has grown from $1.6 Billion and still expected to grow. Each Starlink launch of 60 satellites is at most ~90 million. That is a ~62 Million launch cost + $500K per satellite. Real launch costs are probably much lower since SpaceX is it's own customer. Assuming the maximum cost for the full 12,000 satellite installation then you would be correct. $18 Billion vs $10 Billion. However the costs for SpaceX are going down over time which is how they probably arrived at their $10 Billion estimate for total deployment. (I only checked Wikipedia).

I would like to see James Webb working since Hubble has been a true inspiration but I think a truly globally connected world is a much more amazing achievement. My other hope would be with the commercialization of space there are now opportunities to radically reduce the costs and increase the capabilities of orbital astronomy.

If it were rotating then we would lose a lot of the benefits of the experiments being done in space namely weightlessness. Also (from wikipedia) we don't know the long term effects of living in a centrifuge. Finally at a practical level the ISS isn't designed to be rotated, likely doesn't have the fuel to start the rotation and slow the rotation for the dockings and would introduce a whole new set of engineering problems.

The definition of 3G is 3rd generation. Sprint has been using the term 4G to mean 4th generation. 3G was only loosely defined and the ITU has now decided to arbitrarily specify stricter standards for 4G. The confusion is already here and this isn't a black and white issue. It's similar to the USB Highspeed, fullspeed or wireless N debacle. Yeah it's annoying but for the most part consumers don't care and anyone technical enough to care is going to do the research anyway.

Your time scale is off. It would be more like wait between 100K and 500K years before a probe reached the closest habitable planet.

It's great that we could expand to many different planets. The leap between the Moon, Mars and an extra solar planet is so enormous though that the only thing this tells us is that we may be able to more closely identify where we should listen to for signals.

Games now have sliding scales of difficulty. Hard / Hardcore / Ultra for experienced / sado-masochists and easy or medium for the rest of us.

What, the movies have lied to me? Next you'll be telling me that you can't enhance a photo so many times that you get more information from a reflection in it then was originally taken.

Would you like to know more?

Or, you can have many countries with different laws and global organizations that create treaties that specify how those laws impact other countries. What would be nice is, freedom to move and live in all these different countries easily so if you didn't like a certain countries methods you could easily leave.

Won't corporate transition to IPV6 free up IPV4? For example once IBM, Apple, GE, Ford and HP transition to IPV6 for there internal networks will they not give back their class A networks. They can move to class b networks since I doubt they have 16777214 active connections to the internet at any one time.

I could have had a 24 inch screen for under $200 4 years ago if it weren't for the price fixing.

In areas where prices are dropping rapidly its interesting that they are able to find price fixing. It used to be memory now I guess it's moved on to screens.