spaceheretostay

I don't understand this logic. SpaceX's bread-and-butter is building technology and setting up processes to lower launch costs to hilariously low levels.

> Those thousands of sats will also need to be replaced as quickly as 10-15% per year, unless they are going to get their own propulsion systems, seriously multiplying their cost of launch/operation.

Multiplying by.....10%? I think they would laugh off those costs and easily pay for that with the huge margin they are likely to be eyeing.

> Take a look at the difficulties in setting up downlink stations at a global scale. To facilitate the dreamed bandwidth the number of hops between satellites will have to be as low as possible. Hundreds of large base stations will be needed. New land must be purchased, new laws passed, and old laws abolished.

Can you cite this? What new laws must be passed and what old laws abolished? Also,

> Unless spaceX intends to have Musk elected to the presidencies of many nations, the regulatory hurdles alone will take decades.

This is hyperbole and clearly not true. Countries make deals with businesses all the time, especially when the business is likely to bring opportunity and money into the country. I have a hard time imagining a world where leaders and countries are anti-SpaceX to the point of stalling negotiations until Elon is 75 years old and already lives on Mars.

Lastly, citing unknown video game nerds and believing their interpretations over the CEO of a public company (yes I'll count Tesla here, it speak to his dedication of running global-scale changing companies) and the specifications of a private company with ~10,000 employees? It just seems less likely to be true that video game nerds know best here.

One method is that your neighbors may report you. In China, part of the social credit system is that your neighbors will report you for doing anything against the law or the rules. So they may not 'block' you from putting it up and getting internet through it, but try going to work the next day you may be blocked from getting on the train.

Edit: Everything I said here was strictly factual. I'm not sure why it's so quickly downvoted so here is a source to back it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkw15LkZ_Kw. And one more, regarding the trains in particular: http://fortune.com/2019/02/22/china-social-credit-travel-ban...

It will not take SpaceX 'decades' to enable widespread commercial and personal use of the network. It is SpaceX's intent to use it as a revenue driver for the early work on the Martian colony, which is planned to get started in 5-6 years. Therefore Starlink must be operational long before then or the whole plan fails.

Also, I think Starlink's launches are planned to ramp up significantly in the next 1-2 years, immediately enabling multiple use cases popular in multiple very large consumer industries (gaming, streaming, etc).

I'm not sure how that could happen. No matter how much money you have, this stuff takes time. There should be multiple independent companies providing satellite internet at low-cost with thousands of satellites each within 2-3 years (SpaceX Starlink, OneWeb, BlueOrigin's, etc).

I'm not sure how China could physically accomplish such a task - to prevent those companies from finding a market, despite being so far behind themselves?

> Have you never committed a bug before?

Engineers who make mistakes that harm people are still responsible for the mistakes they made. You cannot just claim "it was a bug" and get off scot free if your code harms someone or otherwise breaks the law. Also there's no need for this sarcastic tone, "have you never..?"

> I doubt it was an engineer who deliberately removed the text but kept the contact import functionality.

Why would you doubt that? I personally think that situation sounds quite likely. But either way we're just speculating.

Also, don't ignore the part of the parent comment that discusses the manager's (and implied other decision markers) that result in the decision being made to make an illegal change to the code.

Engineer, or manager, or QA assistant - someone or some group of people will have made the change. And "oops that was a bug" doesn't count. Corporations and their employees must be held to the same laws and standards to which the rest of us are held. "Ooops I didn't mean to do that" doesn't fly as an excuse to break the law.

None of what Facebook has done here sounds plausibly legal to me. I'm not a lawyer, but this stuff is plain-as-day immoral and illegal from my eyes.

> Should a developer be responsible because the cookie banner they implemented wasn't compliant with the laws of 100 countries even though the legal team already told them it was ok?

Yes. 100%. "I was just following orders" is not a valid excuse, ever - Nuremberg is the obvious extreme example, but it's true everywhere.

We don't all need to be lawyers to understand the basics of our laws. Knowledge of the existence of the law is assumed for all citizens. Ignorance of the law has never been a valid excuse when the law is broken.

(Yes, the US does have some new problems with private laws being passed, where the public is not allowed to know the law itself - and this opens up huge scary things. But that is not what is being discussed here and I don't believe is relevant.)

Facebook have broken a huge list of laws. But recently from my reading I think the current issue is a breach of contract. They signed a legal contract with the FTC and then broke it, hence the fine.

There doesn't seem to be any debate that Facebook broke the law - just debate about what the punishments should be.

I have noticed this as well.

AI is a technical term with a specific meaning:

> Computer science defines AI research as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

> “We found that on days when managers reported high email demands, they report lower perceived work progress as a result, and in turn engage in fewer effective leader behaviors,” says Johnson.

It seems this is largely a disparity in expectations of work. The managers self-reported feeling like they got less done when replying to more emails. But isn't supporting their team and being able to rapidly answer questions often part of a manager's job? And if not, perhaps they are in the wrong role.

I would be more interested in measuring overall team productivity, not just the manager's self-reported version. I think you might find that the high-email-throughput teams do get more done with that extra emailing, even if the manager feels like they have been less productive.

How does it sound fake? It sounds lovely to me, especially much of the Chopin+pop piece sampled in the article.

> When Gallup investigated the responses more closely, it found that being under 50, earning a low income and having a dim view of President Trump’s job performance were correlated with negative experiences among adults in the United States.

> But there still isn’t enough data to say for sure whether any of those factors were behind the feelings of stress, worry and anger.

> “We are seeing patterns that would point to a political explanation, or a polarization explanation, with the U.S. data, but can we say that definitively? No,” Ms. Ray said.

The United States is under attack from Russia. We are involved in a propaganda war, a real physical war attacking our election infrastructure, and the President encourages it to continue while cutting/removing our ability to secure our elections and defend our democracy. He states that he is intent on not leaving office peacefully in the future and that he likes China's one-party for life.

I get that this may not be conclusively proven to increase stress on Americans, but I would be _shocked_ if it were not a major contributing factor. Every single person I've spoken to IRL about the Trump-related-stress-and-depression concept eagerly agrees that this is weighing heavily on people in a very constant, deep and personal way.

Obviously, personal finances, job security, and other close things are likely equally or more important. But Trump has also eliminated many people's feelings of financial security or job security, as he has personally chosen to hold paychecks from a million people on a racist vendetta, directly removing those people's personal income while still demanding they work.

Surely it can be said that at least for some large portion of Americans, it is true that Trump's policies and behavior on the job _Are_ hurting us.

I wonder if, with OpenAI's state-of-the-art text synthesis, they could 'relatively' easily add stories with words and lyrics into this music.

I'm personally excited about Flutter largely because it seems the preferred development environment for Fuchsia. People will complain that Google kills projects too soon and too often, but I feel like Google has an MO and when you figure it out you can guess which products will live and die.

I think Fuchsia and Flutter are Google's primary likely plans for the future of their consumer platforms. I don't really know why, it's just a feeling.

A lot of it comes from Google planning 10+ years out a lot of the time. Reader was a mistake to kill, but you could see how Google management thought it would not be a widely useful product in the long-term future (though let's repeat, they were wrong).

I think Flutter+Fuchsia has that 10+ year plan to it. I'm on board with Dart because it seems likely to be a major ease on development along with a likely promising future.

> A massive investigation turned up no criminal conspiracy

That is definitely not true.

> failed to substantiate a charge of obstruction

This is also not true. The events are ongoing, the investigation has not 'failed' in any way.

> I’m really not sure what ‘spaceheretostay’ is on about.

I think I've made my points clearly. Abuses of power that are clearly illegal are common at the top of our government, and it happens because they openly commit crimes that they know will take years to investigate, during which times the goals of their illegal activities can be met. That is a direct example that directly relates to the parent comment in this thread.

I've tried to be as clear as possible.

> Do you think that's the net result,

Yes, 100%.

> I have a very hard time believing that the total harm of devices that watch us (actively or potentially) exceeds the actual benefits delivered by those devices.

This is a false dichotomy logical fallacy. You are incorrectly assuming that all of the good from smartphones comes at a forced, dramatic reduction in privacy. I know this is false because even a kitchen timer with no permissions is a useful element of smartphones that can have 0 privacy concerns.

The invasion of personal privacy at scale has indeed caused enormous societal harm that I personally think quite obviously outweighs any "good" that could come from it - and I also personally think that any "good" done from the direct causing of suffering of others is not in fact good at all.

A common feature of our modern society is that bad actors will take illegal actions and rarely/never face repercussions. This emboldens them to further do more illegal things. Meanwhile, the courts take months or years to reach decisions (especially regarding technology) and in the passing time the practice becomes normalized [1] or already the damage is done. Perhaps in that time new technological paradigms create fuzzier muddier waters and the same crimes "can" continue "legally" while the courts decide, yet again.

It is a flaw in our current system. It is most obvious at the federal level, where the President and many Republicans routinely break laws in obvious manners, while the courts fight it out for years.

[1] Some of our laws are based on what is 'normal'. So after some years of a practice taking place clearly illegally, it can become to be seen as 'normal' by society and therefore legalized de facto. For example "cruel and unusual punishment" does not outlaw the death penalty because it already exists and is sufficiently common to not count as unusual.

Surely you can - that could amount to criminal negligence which is definitely a crime.

Isn't that just like 1 month's worth of revenue? That amounts to absolutely nothing in today's world, not even an incentive to reduce the bad behavior.

Jail time for lawbreaking executives needs to happen. The financial penalties do not dissuade bad behavior or act as a deterrent, so the same crimes will continue to be committed.

Are there any peer-reviewed studies looking at deterrence of financial/tech/privacy crimes in the modern era? I would expect that in every case the penalty is lower than the profit, making it a continued incentive to break the law.

The only thing these people value truly is their time on this Earth to be free and breathe fresh air. If they risk jail time when breaking these laws, I think we would see a reduction in intentional and repeated lawbreaking by large corporations.

The harm done by surveillance societies is not completely subjective. People are suffering. Their suffering due to surveillance-pervasive society is objectively bad. And if you want to argue that people should suffer and that is a good thing, we have gone off the rails into a discussion of morality, a discussion I would be shocked to have here.

I think it is safe to say that intentional and targeted suffering of minority groups directly due to our surveillance society is objectively bad. The only wiggle room here is, as you said, the existence of people who believe that targeting minorities for suffering is a good thing but I surely and dearly hope that we can still call those abhorrent ideas "objectively bad".

Reality has already slipped further than I described.

I did not give a "political rant". I gave a run-on sentence (for effect) factual description of why privacy is a societal concern above and beyond personal concerns. I did that with historical listing of events. I am not injecting opinion or ranting, but providing needed context to demonstrate why the parent comment was incorrect - and dangerously so.

Also, the topic I wrote about was introduced by the comment above mine, not my doing at all. Stating that nothing bad has come from a lack of care about privacy is an inherently extremely political topic, given that our current government was installed in part due to this exact cause.

If you don't want politics on HN then you don't want HN to exist - politics is inside everything and drives most of the decisions that affect HN user's lives and their work. Talking about startups and hacking culture will always - by definition - be political. To ignore the politics of a situation is to invite totalitarian, fascist rule by specifically catering to them via choosing to ignore their lawbreaking even when it is on-topic in an HN thread, just like this one is.

> To be clear: there's no assertion of real-time access to microphones anywhere.

Well yes I know, I figure this data is likely years-old or whatever, I don't see how that matters? I didn't bring up real-time access and I'm well aware that Amazon doesn't (likely) even have that capability. Nobody here is asserting real-time access to microphones!

> Technically true, but... is it actually worse? I can see convincing arguments made either way, frankly.

Yes, it is much much worse, because it is a direct violation of their own statements about privacy. Amazon makes no statement about their box packers or labellers not knowing your address, because they obviously have to know that in order to put the label on or knock on your door.

But Amazon does make a privacy promise to not do what they are doing here. So they are totally different things and it matters due to customer expectation and their own written words.

Edit: I'm "posting too fast" and am not allowed to reply to the user below. I will state that I do care about privacy, I was simply taking the simplest debate stance to demonstrate that the two concepts are quite different (package delivery knowing your address and human reviewers of your voice commands knowing your address).

If you look at my comments on this article you will surely see that I care about privacy.

> I'm so so so tired of these articles.

What do you mean, isn't this the first article on this topic?

> So a dev can listen to conversations because they write software to transcribe voice to text?

That has nothing to do with this article. This article is about exact GPS/location coordinates, has nothing to do with "a dev can listen to conversations".

> Sigghhhhh....

I think you have misread the article, this is new information about a new topic. There's nothing repetitive about this news item and there's no need to sigh so heavily about people who care about privacy and the honesty of corporate statements.

> It seems like there's a legitimate use case for this data

Maybe, but you haven't found it. To resolve your query, simply fudge the locations by 50-200m in random directions. You'll still get good local results and won't pin the exact room or house down with needlessly accurate location data. Amazon can keep that data of course, it just need not be shown to human reviewers.

Edit: I'm "posting too fast" and so cannot reply to the Uber comment below. I'll say, I still don't understand how human reviewers would need your address or GPS coords to improve their service after you get an Uber. How would they even verify the Uber came to the right place, they don't have the verification info there.

I just don't see this as a valid use case at all.

The people who are packing the boxes and knocking on your door don't have access to the microphones inside your house. Hearing conversations and search requests from customers is quite different from knocking on their door or packing a box.

Combining the knowledge of what you say inside with knowing where you live is different than the knowledge of a purchase you made and where you live.

Also, I would certainly assume Amazon to know my home address if I bought Alexa and shipped it there. But most people wouldn't assume that Amazon actual employees are listening to their conversations who also know where you live. HN might expect that, but Amazon makes a privacy promise that is violated here, as described in the article:

> In an April 10 statement acknowledging the Alexa auditing program, Amazon said “employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow.”

Bloomberg is saying that this statement by Amazon was false, because the location information from the Alexa devices can, in some cases, identify the individual or account "as part of this workflow".

This is not a debate, it is a waste of time.

> Show me the increasing temperatures since the 1930s and I'll concede I was wrong.

What does the 1930s have to with any of this? Nobody who is making statements about climate change has the 1930s as a key moment, why do you? That date has nothing to do with any of this. You are using logical fallacies and wasting people's time and energy by making false statements.

Here are some graphs if you're truly curious, from a quick Google search: http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/

But surely you won't be convinced by some graphs someone posts online, in 2019, because all of this has been public info for decades now. I think it's unlikely you will really change your mind once you see this evidence, but here you go.

I think you have based this all on false assumptions, which is why we have a communication breakdown. I still don't get it.

> Thus my planes are carbon neutral,

How though? The carbon went into the atmosphere first. Then - some time later, how long? - an equivalent amount has been removed. But that takes time and that time is lost forever, the heat has been captured and the Earth warmed, already.

> Emissions avoided are as good as emissions removed from the air.

These two things are not equivalent. Emissions avoided are fare better that emissions removed from the air. Emissions removed from the air have already produced a warming effect on the Earth, while avoided emissions have not.

> So again, in net, flying my planes produces carbon, but a ticket on my plane also pays for solar panels that save carbon.

This doesn't make any sense though. You have still made a large carbon output, and your assumption is that without your plane, the house would never convert to solar but that simply isn't true. It's a false dichotomy and I don't understand how these two things could be equal to each other (removal vs. non-output). They are physically different processes with different consequences.

> to help them install solar panels when they couldn't otherwise.

This doesn't make sense to me though.

> REC's help send more money to the renewable energy industry, bring more capacity online faster, and advance their R&D quicker than would otherwise.

That's good! But it has nothing to do with Cloudflare "reducing" their carbon footprint.