On what planet can Starlink service such a large customer base with a reasonable amount of throughput per user?

It's real, but incredibly overblown in the popular imagination, especially for LEO.

https://aquarid.physics.uwo.ca/kessler/Kessler%20Syndrome-AAS%20Paper.pdf

The reality is that it's going to be a source of debris going forward, but it's incredibly unlikely to become the sci-fi nightmare people mean when they refer to it. In reality it's just another added cost of doing business, barring some sort of extreme event such a war in orbit, or suicidal nuclear strikes.

Virtually no one on this sub I've met understands Kessler Syndrome, nor do they understand why it isn't a meaningful issue for the sort of orbits we're talking about. Impact on astronomy is a big issue, although it appears that for interesting reasons, many here are unmoved by that.

I would add that the "13,000 objects in orbit" is both a lowball (the estimate from NASA is well over 20k) and not referring mostly to inactive satellites. In fact that number refers to anything 10cm and over, and the majority is junk. The number of inactive sats is much lower, a fraction of that number, about 7500 according to the article we're responding to above. SpaceX accounts for half of that number.

As far as dead sats, they're in a different stat which includes spent rocket stages, and that number is about 3000. There are in fact more SpaceX sats in LEO than dead sats and rocket stages from all other sources in history.

With more launched every year.

Edit: Virtually none of that space junk making up the 25K+ number is visible to the naked eye, nor does it have a material impact on Earth-based astronomy.

It's really just a few, but they have a lot of bots.

...Because that one company accounts for half of all active satellites?

Awww... the slowest horse finally limped across the finish line.

The person is in their early 20's, which is the prime time for the onset of schizophrenia and a host of other issues.

What in that article suggests the recent review started 12 years ago? Why engage in such a transparent deception? Let me save you any further bs.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/09/trans-prisoners-in-scotland-to-be-first-sent-to-jails-matching-their-birth-gender

> All transgender offenders entering the Scottish prison system will first be sent to jails that match their birth gender, in a reversal of the Scottish Prison Service’s (SPS) previous inclusive policy.

> The announcement came in an urgent review into the handling of the case of Isla Bryson, a transgender double rapist who was initially sent to a female prison, resulting in a public outcry.

> While it does not appear to be a blanket ban on trans prisoners ever being accommodated in prisons that match their acquired gender, the new protocol supersedes previous guidelines, developed with the Scottish Trans Alliance. These stated that any transgender person taken into custody should be held in a prison that matches the gender they were living in within the community, pending a full risk assessment.

> After the Bryson case, the SPS announced a full case review for every transgender person currently in prison custody will be completed.

You should have taken a page from /u/Saltire_Blue 's book and run away once it was clear the game was up.

No, because a tank of water isn't the same as a field, it's just a useful way to model some aspects of how fields behave within certain limits. Outside of the limits its designed to accurately model, allegories are more misleading than illuminating.

Take Newton's version of gravitation for example, it's a great model! For everything you're going to encounter on Earth and can measure with the instruments of the day, it was very accurate. The only way you could tell that there were holes in the model was through observation of things like the precession of Mercury's orbit. The reality however is that Newton's model is deeply wrong, gravity isn't a fundamental force which acts instantaneously across space.

That model was then replaced by Einstein's model of gravitation, in the form of his field equations, which describes gravity as an apparent force emerging from the curvature of spacetime. This apparent force no longer acts instantaneously, and these corrections explained Mercury's orbit and a lot more.

If you use Newton's model you can build rockets to visit planets in the Solar system. If you use Newton's model to build a GPS system though, it would be useless, without Relativistic corrections the system fails in days at the most. Einstein's model seems pretty much perfect, you need to go to some pretty exotic places to see where the model breaks down, such as the interior of a black hole.

But it's important to remember that models are what we use to illustrate reality, or make predictions about reality, but models are not reality.

The map is not the territory.

This is the same argument from people 5 years ago when the self-driving push was in full swing, until it became undeniable that the last 1%-2% of that hard problem was faaaar more difficult than the preceeding 98%.

I fully expect it to take a similar amount of time for reality to seep through hysteria in this case.

"The map is not the territory."

"All models are wrong, some are useful."

> Did you watch the Super Bowl? Have you seen the new Indiana Jones trailer?

No and no.

> Hell, have you seen the guy on Facebook who changes all kinds of silly clips so they feature u/GovSchwarzenegger ?

I've never been on FB.

> The AI technology for faking someone’s image and voice are getting very good very rapidly and they’re getting very cheap as well.

I wouldn't normally associate Superbowl ad spend with "cheap", but I take your point. Is there some indication that the ability to fake these images is outpacing the ability to detect the fakes?

> It isn’t about the need to invent from whole cloth. Get a few look alike actors, and some voice and head deepfake AI and now you’ve got Joe Biden on a hot mic wanting to grab em by something even more vulgar. Hell, forget the actor, I could get an audio clip of Biden asking for Arizona to find eleven thousand seven hundred and eighty TWO votes.

> A quarter of the country believes the election was stolen based off lies and zero evidence. Imagine what kind of “evidence” can be produced by bad actors that will be repeated over and over on propaganda networks “just asking questions”.

I think this is a bit backwards, people don't even need evidence to believe what they want to believe, why do you assume that fake evidence would make that problem worse? At least with fakes you have the blowback from them being exposed as fake, with pure fantasy you can't even do that.

Either way calling these systems "AI" is only useful to marketing teams and hysterics, they aren't artificial intelligence. This is to the point that the FTC recently had to release a warning to stop with the bs marketing.

Because the rest of us are adults with lives, and we don't define ourselves by brand allegiance.

Which came first, the Isla Bryson case, or the review of the system?

So far the only downside of what people are laughingly calling AI these days is the endless flood of shit articles using it to scour for clicks, and the people who read them and take them as gospel.

The irony is that the virulent anti-gay stance in Uganda is the real Western influence, specifically from decades of right wing Christian missionaries.

Russia, being Russia, takes that pulls a DARVO.

This is one of those issues with using language to express rigorous concepts, because "medium" has a lot of meanings in English, but it really just means one thing in physics.

For ELI5 purposes a key difference is that in a medium the propagation of a wave is impacted by the movement of the medium. Imagine a tank of water with a whirlpool in it, rotating clockwise. If you generate a wave in that flow it's velocity through the medium is going to be impacted by the velocity of the flow of that medium.

Fields don't work that way.

Light isn't a wave, and it isn't a particle, it's something which has properties of waves and particles. As a result looking at light as just one or the other leads to misunderstandings, such as the assumption that there must be a medium for light to travel through.

If you prefer you could also imagine light as being a localized excitation of the electromagnetic field, which would be more accurate, but less ELI5.

This isn't a workplace, assuming that inmates don't have power imbalances is crazy. The most basic imbalance is the ability of one to physically threaten the other, as individuals or groups. That's doubly true in a context where "snitching" on anything is often met with violence.

This is one of those "read the article" moments, she wasn't trans when she committed her crimes so that isn't even a factor. This is not a right wing "gotcha" in the slightest. This is the person who started transitioning after they were in custody, which led to he row over where they should be incarcerated, a women's prison or a men's prison. At first they were placed in a women's facility.

Just remember that once you sift through the pearl clutching these announcements are always accompanied by, the slippery slopes to Terminator never do appear.

Or: "Why utopia is still as distant as ever."

Turkey has regulations, there's just so much corruption they're poorly if ever enforced. Regulations only work when there's a rule of law and oversight for corruption at all levels of society.

Turkey doesn't have that in practice.

tl;dr Regulations are an absolute necessity, but not enough without enforcement and oversight.