detritus

Because it's their website, not yours?

Perhaps, but not at quite this level of pressure.

This thing is literally a fucking bomb if it fails, through accident or degradation.

The down-force negative pressure aspect they gleaned from McMurtry though? Really cool. Genuinely useful. I just hope they don't claim it as their own invention.

Which they will, because Musk is all ego.

I wasn't, I was asking if it was another bullshit exaggeration from Musk. I though the laser interlinks were fundamental, but I'd as easily be unsuprirsed if they were Starlink's equivalent of 'FSD autopilot'.

I'm generally pro-SpaceX and am impressed with the rate of Starlink's development, but given his long history of ...shall we say... 'over-promising' it seems prudent to check the detail.

Wait. They're not doing the orbital mesh?!

I thought that was fundamental to the whole network?

Not another Elon bullshit?

Gosh.

The dithering on the voxel demo there had me truly stumped, watching as I am on a phone. Colours I never saw in my Speccy days!

I didn't mean the technical safety requirements - presumaby those create a somewhat level playing field as all manufacturers would be required to include them for the EU market - I simply mean all the luxe crap that every car seems to insist upon.

Every car review vid I watch on YouTube has me shaking my head at the sheer excess they seem to have.

Yeah, I really like Slate's ethos, but I'm in exactly the same boat as you!

I was thinking about this last night - the European car industry's ripe for disruption by a nimble car company that can make really basic EVs with none of the pointless, excessive cruft that seems endemic in every new car release.

It's only Dacia who seems to understand that there's big market for basic but half-decent cars that don't bill themselves as infotainment fourth spaces, or whatever the hell it is that they're trying to go for [1].

Give me wind up windows, give me an analogue dashboard, give me a basic interface for my phone, etc.

[1] ok, we know what they're going for - the Euros in our wallets... .

Yerp, sadly spherical maps just didn't work. Imho, obv, but I really did try and persevere with it, believing in it at the time.

'everything looked worse', I entirely know what you mean, coming from a tight, high fidelity Amiga background, but now all these years later it all looks so logical.

It was Comanche on my Dad's shitty office pc that allowed me to appreciate big pixel 'shit' graphics.

Go on?

I bookmarked OP's link for specifically for my kid, but I think she'll much prefer your version, simpler and clearer as it is - thank you so much!

Wasn't that a South Park meme, or did they get it from /.?

Yes.

This is exactly what you do.

But, in metric :)

Absolutely, and beautifully so.

Indeed, if you don't push back and reject it, it just encourages him to repeat the same - see Lake Ontario > Lake America.

Europe doesn't produce any fossil fuels?

Pleb here: the very fact you were able to eke a hexapod robot in the late 80s from OTC technology is super impressive.

Just following your dialogue here enforces why I love HN comments x

My concern is more in the realms of cooling. I know there's the potential for lots of 'free' energy up there, but how do you then ensure your space-based array of GPU farms bleed all of the resultant heat?

Mein Gott, you're not just making this up ( https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/neevcloud-and-agn... ).

But.. why?

Musk bandwagon-hopping? Investor bamboozlery? (Same diff?)

Is my borderline childish understanding of basic physics THAT off because I cannot see the value or utility (beyond a small smear of niche edge cases) of space-based compute?

- ed, disclosure: You seem to have edited your response whilst I was typing mine, adding in valuable links. Thanks!

Oh, don't get me wrong, I love the sound of 80s-era 'lo-fi' sound chips - I just last week remarked on another forum that I realise that much of my adult-era musical appreciation was likely a product of listening to the loading screens on my Spectrum as the data fed in was interpreted as sound...!

(eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv8WfmI4TiI - loading screen for Dizzy)

It's funny, at the time I thought there was a lot more parity between the ST and the 500 but when I watch videos of the two these days, I rfealise just how much better the Amiga was.

I'd always assumed the sound would be great on the Atari because it was midi-compatible, but I was horrified to hear how tinny and bleepy the sound effects were in a game I knew from the Amiga.

Oh, to go back in time and use that in an argument at school with my ST nemesis, Andrew!

See, I'd class those as something like 'follies' or Whimsy, as they don't appear to be actual fortifications, rather forms of affectation.

That said, I'm not sure what definition or list this site uses - as others have already pointed out, there are loads of castle missing I can tell, just from a few that I've visited across Italy.

I'm well aware, but it could as-equally be because a lot of people default to 01/01 of their birth year when signing up to things online.

Sure.

How long's the longest voyage these days?

Mutinies aren't so common nowadays, but they were when ocean voyages were measured in months and years.

Yeah, this is the problem though - ironically highlighted by my still-maintained love and hope for Starship: Beyond Earth orbit, the energy requirement to move even small tens of tons of useful life-sustaining mass is incredibly expensive.

Like, to get a useful amount of people to Mars would be... the wealth of a first world nation for tens of years. Even using nuclear engines.

A generational megaship travelling at some small percentage of c to a nearby useful star (not even the nearest ones, which are all a bit shit)?

There's just nothing within our current projected reality that could even begin to accomodate that possibility.

Never mind the fact you'd need redunancy, and at least a few hundred years of testing to ensure that whatever mega project you could ultimately send wouldn't simply get vaporised halfway through, from realities unknown.

Maybe I'm over-thinking things. It seems like a lot of people's existences essentially revolve around a pocket-sized glowing rectangle.

Future AI and a database of all of humanity's experience before launch might be enough to keep the generational populace amused and distracted for the entiriety of their meagre, trapped existence... .

The difference there being that at the end of your day, having spent it masoning, you could leave the cathedral and go back to your family and have a walk in the fields and drink and be merry with people loved and new. The project wasn't the entiriety of your existence, it was merely the means to pay for it.

Unless we have generational ships the size of small countries, I'm not sure the human brain - unaided and non-forcedly evolved to do so - would be able to handle essential incarceration in a series of metal tubes for its own and its descendents existences.

I have no doubt that even the most republican of cultures launched from Earth would end up thoroughly monarchistic by the time the generation ships arrived at their destination. At best monarchistic - who knows what savage new forms of society could evolve in that sort of context?

Yeah, if your username is any indication of your age, you've possibly taken much the same trajectory of pessimism that I have. As a youth, I assumed we'd be hitting multiple Cs or bending space time when I was an adult; As an adult I thought we might get a percentage of C and conquer the solar system; Now I realise Just How Much Effort it would be to accomplish much of any value on our own Moon, never mind Mars.

I still hold on to the idea that very long term we might make strides in our own solar system, but it is a depressingly-longer timescale than I always used to believe.

Unless we have some magic-level shift in our understanding of physics, we're never getting anything beyond Von Neumann probes to other stars, and even then we're talking thousands of years.