This is one of the very few non-money-laundering use cases for crypto.
I would support a “5 cents per unsolicited email” email system, in a similar way. If you make it a mildly enjoyable $5/hour task to read the first sentence or two of your spam folder, the overall internet would be better.
The Apple TV (the device) has a “stuff this user watches” app (called Apple TV) which has a tiny subset of its features dedicated to AppleTV+ (the service).
Netflix refuses to participate in “stuff this user watches”, it would be trivial to do, but Neflix jealously guards its viewership numbers and I expect this is the main reason they don’t do it. That and… they’d rather you just browse Netflix and not watch other services.
The “stuff this user watches” app is very useful! I like it a lot, when I’m not watching Netflix stuff! It works with every service except Netflix!
But the moment the family shifts over to watching some Netflix show, it forces us out of the habit of using the TV app, and then we go back to the annoying “spend 90 seconds trying to find what we were watching on Hulu” experience, which is worse in every way.
Yeah. A City on Mars made me want to throw the book at the window so many times. Building and tearing down straw-men right and left. Almost every legitimate note of caution suffered from the nirvana fallacy.
There’s a weird thing in discussions about space. Lots of people just don’t like space, it makes them think they’re being blasted with science fiction.
So much criticism of space seems to fall into a few categories:
1. They think there were ever any serious engineers who thought STS was a good idea, (rather than congressional-pork, which is what it always was), and thus assume actual space technologists are basically always wrong about the possibility of ever creating anything new and reliable
2. They think cost/kg to LEO is somehow a physical law, and can never be improved on
3. If they accept that SpaceX might actually have better technology that allows new things, they still refuse to wrap their heads around 2-3 orders of magnitude cost reductions due to improved technology, they update, but mentally on the order of “it will be 50% cheaper, no big deal”
4. They just hate Elon Musk. On this one, I’m at least sympathetic
Space based data centers are probably not going to happen in the next decade, but most criticism (including this article) just reads as head-in-the-sand criticism, not serious analysis. I’m still waiting for more serious cost-benefit analysis assuming realistic Starship mass budgets.
If I worked for SpaceX, I imagine I’d focus more on just getting more Starlink mass in orbit for at least 3-4 years, but after that, we might have spare capacity we might want to spend on orbital power loads like this.
You mean, not very much? Everything about space-based anything is dependent in the short to medium term on Starship making mass to LEO cost about as much as air freight.
Starship, at least as a rapidly reusable second stage, may fail, rockets are hard. But you aren’t really engaging with people’s dreams if you start from “we don’t have access to the technologies that appear to represent a one to two order of magnitude cost shift”.
We’re the same age, and I had exactly the same reaction.
AT&T and the baby bells were widely loathed (man I hated Ameritech…), so the idea they would extend their tentacles in this way was the main thing I reacted to. The technology seemed straightforwardly likely with Dennard scaling in full swing.
I thought it would be banks that owned the customer relationship, not telcos or Apple (or non-existent Google), but the tech was just… assume miniaturization’s plateau isn’t coming for a few decades.
Wow! I just spent a good chunk of time last week setting up headscale and split horizon SSL behind my network, and I expected I was going to just expose a Wireguard UDP port, but discovered no, it’s DERP or nothing. DERP has been OK, but I think just exposing a UDP port on my local network is better.
If we’re really confident in the security of that UDP client, that is. I feel very comfortable exposing a Wireguard bastion, time will tell how secure whatever protocol tailscale is serving, here, will be.
I would support a “5 cents per unsolicited email” email system, in a similar way. If you make it a mildly enjoyable $5/hour task to read the first sentence or two of your spam folder, the overall internet would be better.
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