Enel is currently doing exactly that with their electric car chargers (the Juicebox), they’ve decided to pull out from the North American market and just shut down the servers. Like WTF, at least open-source the thing…

They always force me to get the 80$ lenses… Still pretty cheap, but it ends up more around 100$ so I only change every couple years.

Connecting more people to the Internet, giving more options in rural areas.

I’ve personally been a Starlink subscriber for about a year while I was traveling, and it really was a game-changer. Rock-solid internet in remote places, fast enough to have Zoom calls on, all for a price that’s only about twice what I currently pay now that I’m back home (people complaining about Starlink’s price don’t know what they’re talking about, this is 100+ Mbps statellite internet we’re talking about. Other options are ten times the cost for less than a tenth of the speed).

It just drives me nuts when I see progress being blocked for stupid reasons. Examples in other areas would be wind power (“but what about the birds”), electric cars (“but cobalt = slave labour”, “akschually, when you charge the car with the dirtiest fuel possible and take into account all externalities it’s less green than just the tailpipes of a gas car”), space exploration (“the potable water sprayed on the launch pad leaked into the environment, here’s a fine”). There’s some stuff that’s been disproved years ago by anyone with half a brain that keeps being repeated, it’s infuriating.

“Just asking questions”… It’s just a bit suspicious that as soon as the safety aspect was proven to not be an issue, you immediately switched to another angle.

But to answer your question, yes, vapourizing someting made of metal and plastics in the upper atmosphere could certainly count as pollution, and we don’t really know the effects it might have on it because no studies have yet been done.

What has been done, though, is a study of how many meteors fall on the earth every hear: early estimates in the 60s were of about 100,000 tons per year, but further studies (1) showed this was grossly underestimated and more accurate values would be about triple that.

Starlink has launched 6,054 satellites in orbit (2) that total about 3,838,042 kg or a bit below 4000 tons. Even if they all fell in the atmosphere tomorrow, it’d only amount to less than 2% of this years’ “stuff” that burns up in the atmosphere (the rest coming from natural sources). Honestly I don’t think that’s significant, but I’ll concede that we don’t really know for sure. I just think that there are other more immediate, much worse sources of pollution that people should direct their anger towards.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110512174406/http://static.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Moon-Dust-and-the-Age-of-the-Solar-System.pdf 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches

Man, you really are looking for any excuse to hate on SpaceX, right?

If you’re that worried about pollution, just look up the mass of a starlink satellite vs the mass a coal plant burns every hour… Even if the satellite ends up vapourizing as 100% pollution, I’m pretty sure it’s orders of magnitude below other industries like coal power or aviation.

They’d burn up / vapourize. This is partly why it took them so long to get their space lasers to work (for satellite to satellite communications); these things usually are usually based on a crystal that wouldn’t burn and could hurt someone when the satellite falls.

Shortest answer is that even if all Starlink satellites suddently exploded at the same time for no reason, they’d fall back to Earth in a matter of weeks. They’re waaaay lower than the other satellites you’re thinking of (see discussion on geo-stationary satellites for why), so they need to be actively pushed every few days just to stay up. They’re so low they’re still subject to atmospheric drag.

Respect has always been at the core of my wife and I’s parenting philosophy. Children are fully-qualified persons in their own right, they’re not an extension of their parents. They have their own tastes, dreams and aspirations. They’ll test to find the limits of what they can do, and it doesn’t really matter where it’s actually set but it’s really important that they do find it. They can understand why we have to say no to them, and if you communicate the reason they’ll respect it.

All of this continues well into their teenage years, BTW.

I keep telling my wife we have to write a book on parenting, but she thinks it’ll be too controversial (especially our views around daycare and schooling)…

Owner of 2 pinecils here, there are buttons and a display that shows the current temperature and other stuff. I only just learned that there’s an app, it works more than fine on its own, out of the box.

I got that specific iron because I needed to power it from 12v, and it works very well on the USB PD power supply I already have for my laptop.

Well, someone did it at least partly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdPRhkbeQJk

Altough in this case it’s to improve acceleration, not anything related to privacy.

The motherfuckers who do this take said turn at like 2km/h, they’re not racing at all

Oh, my sweet summer child…

From this thread, looks like you’re right, sadly…

Even if Assange himself was openly interfering in US politics, how is that relevant? If he isn’t a US person, and he’s not on US soil, why would he be bound by US law? US law isn’t universal law, you know.

Yes, but that’s not treason. It could be treason if he was American, but he isn’t.

I fail to see how that’s relevant here. The guy isn’t a US national and wasn’t in the US when he committed his alleged “crime”.

He has absolutely no duty towards the US and is 100% free to associate with whoever he wants, and yes, even Russia.

US has no standing whatsoever in this situation, and it’s a travesty of international law that Sweden and the UK even entertained the idea of extraditing him. The response should’ve been “go sue the American who actually committed that crime on American soil. Oh wait, you’ve already convicted her, and she’s already out after serving her sentence? WTF are you going on about then?”

They say it themselves: SpaceX specializes in turning the impossible into merely late.

When Starship was announced, people were saying it wouldn’t fly with so many engines because the Russians tried and failed with their N1 rocket. Now that it did fly, it’s that the heat shield will never work.

Are they late compared to what they announced? Absolutely. Are they still faster than anyone else? Look at Blue Origin and you have your answer.

It’d probably depend on the tide.

Yes, they do. I think the Swiss partly do a as well.