Every accusation is a confession with you lot. People whine about imaginary problems? Fed up of being told you are a bad person for your beliefs?

Good luck with this. Shaming people for being fat worked so well, I'm sure belittling them will get them to have more kids too. It certainly worked when people pointed out the deficiencies in your behaviour.

Maybe they are anticipating rivals entering that space and want to move on to something where they have more temporary exclusivity. One or more of the US ones will get there sooner or later, and Chinese companies are well on the way too.

It may also be some pressure from the US government, with the goal of getting back to the moon before China does. More resources for Starship, which is supposed to be able to do the whole mission (take off from Earth, fly to the moon, land, take off again, return to Earth, land).

It frustrates me that Steam has become the only platform for a lot of games. While not quite indie, the IL-2 series isn't from a massive developer. You don't seem to be able to buy it anywhere else and simply download an installer.

I need to check if has any DRM too, because I'm not installing that shit on my computer.

It's been the playbook since at least 9/11. If the electorate ever temporarily regains control of their bowels, an new threat is quickly manufactured.

I'm just waiting for them to start whining that the Chinese stole the idea that they rightfully stole first.

A better use of those AI tokens would have been to re-work Firefox into something that is easier to build and work on. The code is horrible and difficult to even compile, which really holds Firefox back and keeps everyone using Chromium as the base of their browsers (Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi etc).

Because nobody is going to use this browser daily and the only way to reduce the dominance of Chrome is to get more browsers to switch away to basing themselves on Firefox. At the moment every Firefox "fork" is little more than a mild re-skin and some changed defaults, or unusable due to being so outdated (Palemoon).

I went to Subway and told the lady to give me a 6 inch chicken tikka on Hearty Italian (TM) with cheese and some sweet sauce. My wife was really impressed by the sandwich I made.

The GP is correct, and you're misinterpreting the financial filing.

The industry widely acknowledges that SpaceX's economics are lucrative. Their marginal cost is an est. $15-25m/flight, vs. a typical commercial contract price of ~$65M and a NASA contract price of ~$100-150M. The small (as a percentage) GAAP operating loss on the launch segment is driven by two factors:

1) Starship development. That falls under the launch segment. Starship development is draining an insane amount of money (~$3B/yr), while earning zero revenue.

2) Internal launches. 3/4ths of Falcon launches are to launch Starlink. This books zero revenue for SpaceX launch services.

The fact that the loss is only ~$1/2B despite these massive leaches on profitability is specifically because Falcon launches are so profitable.

As for your claim that Starlink is "only making money due to free launches", no. Starlink generated $11,4B with $4,4B GAAP in 2025. Merely sum the Starlink GAAP profit and the launch GAAP loss and you'll see nearly $4B in GAAP profit, and that's including the huge drain caused by Starship development costing $3B/yr. Without Starship, the two combined would be turning nearly $7B GAAP profit.

The main leach in corporate profitability has nothing to do with space: it's xAI. They had an operating loss of $6,36B in 2025.

To be clear, it needs to get safely to orbit to be seen as reliable for launches. It doesn't need to make it back safely.

I'll take Things That Never Happened for $1000, Ken.

Meanwhile in reality:

1) It was not a case of "WorldVu approached SpaceX looking to purchase rocket launches". Musk and Wyler had been working through all of 2014 on a joint venture. They explored building a joint satellite manufacturing facility and were scouting locations in Florida and Colorado. The talks broke down (Wyler thought Musk's Starlink plan was too ambitious, Musk thought Wyler's wasn't ambitious enough (too expensive satellites, too primitive/conservative tech, too small in number); SpaceX also thought Wyler wanted too much equity ) and each went their own way - SpaceX in-house, WorldVu partnering with Virgin Group and Qualcomm. The former succeeded massively.

2) NEITHER SpaceX nor WorldVu came up with the idea; it was well known in the space industry for decades. It had already had startups try, starting with Teledesic (backed by Gates) in the 1990s. Other smaller LEO constellations like Iridium and Globalstar were already operational. The main scale and price limitations were launch costs, which weren't resolved until the Falcon in the 2010s.

3) SpaceX was already eyeing satellite communications before the JV with WorldVu.. As early as 2004, they hired Larry Williams (of Teledesic) and bought a 10% stake in Surrey Satellite Technology, specifically to explore space-based internet concepts. What WorldVu brought to the table wasn't "the idea of satellite constellations" at all: they owned priority spectrum rights. *That* is what SpaceX wanted from the JV. Not "OMG, this customer has a brilliant idea for a satellite constellation that we never thought of!!!" Wyler had bought Ku-band spectrum from the ITU that was originally allocated to a different defunct 1990s venture, SkyBridge.

Sure, and it's not adequate in many regions.

it's slow as hell.

You might be right. I wonder about the bandwidth too. Starlink is already over subscribed and starting to enforce limits on its unlimited service.

These satellites would be in LEO and fall back to Earth after 5 years anyway. They are thinking like Starlink where they need to launch thousands a year to maintain the constellation. The server hardware will be obsolete by then anyway. What sucks is that then we can't buy it used for cheap, and the fact that all that crap is burning up in the atmosphere and releasing who knows what.

If the cost to orbit is low enough, and there are no land taxes or electricity costs in space, and it solves the locality and latency issues for them, it starts to make more sense. Watching Scott Manley's videos, I was surprised by the thermal and electrical realities of putting stuff in orbit, but it's actually not nearly as bad as you might first assume.