Starship is fueled with methane (natural gas) and liquid oxygen which aren't toxic. It does produce a lot of CO2 which is a problem with lots of flights.
Solar and wind are good complements. Solar works during the day and best on clear, windless days. Wind blows best during the night and on cloudy, stormy days. Solar is best in summer and wind in winter.
Wind also works better in some areas that don't have solar. UK has a lot of offshore wind, but less solar. The US Northeast has a lot of wind but lags behind on solar.
Wind has dropped significantly in price over the decades and is competitive in price with solar. I saw article about early Scottish wind farm being upgraded so that one new turbine equals the whole old farm.
I theory yes, but grid storage favors solar. Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities. They are not perfect partners.
The rich/old paticularly hate wind because they do not like looking at it. (The link to golf courses is not by accident. Wind farms and golf course tend to appear together due to them both gravitating towards areas with shallow waters.) We still here stories about blinking shadows interupting sleep cycles, even causing cancer. So perhaps we let them alone for another decade and allow solar+storage to take up the slack. Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
(Shallow sea means no commercial traffic/ports. That means cheap land for non-industrial things like yacht clubs and big houses, which give rise to golf courses. So the rich/old dont like seeing the wind farms that, inevitably, want to live just offshore of their yacht/golf clubs. See Nantuket.)
> Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities.
You still need the grid to exist, so 100 miles one way or the other doesn't affect cost very much.
> Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
NIMBY never goes away. There are some situations where you don't want to burn up your political capital fighting them, but in general if you can get a project through then do it.
With solar you get to overbuild it and charge you batteries once a day. Wind has way more peaks and bottoms, so you can sell your battery capacity several times most days.
But the GPs point is exactly that you need fewer batteries if you have both. Fewer batteries tends to be cheaper than more, and this pair is a very common case.
None of the points you were responding to are “in theory”.
You are proposing something that sounds like killing the US wind industry and then simply bringing it back later. That probably would work well, especially when projects have development lead times of several to many years.
That is the new Shield TV design from 2019. The original Shield TV and the Pro were flat design. Strange that they changed it when old design worked well.
Yeah. Two crewmen, something like twice as much payload weight (originally designed to carry a nuclear bomb or two instead of a top-tier reconnaissance package), and apparently less ceremony in general than the U-2. The U-2 really wants to have a chase car (!) when landing to call out what the pilot cannot see, from the sound of things the WB-57 doesn't do that. (okay, some irony there considering recent events...)
I was thinking about what could replace WB-57. Large private jets (Gulfstream G650) can get up to 51k ft, and maybe could be modified to go higher. Global Hawk drone can go up to 60k ft, and the Air Force is retiring them.
Killfiles were local to each user which is good since each person could control what they saw. It was bad because new users who didn't know about killfiles would see the bad actors. It also meant that could have disjoint conversation so it felt like each thread was its own thing. You would have to keep telling people to not respond to the trolls.
The ideal is to have a global filter by moderators for the bad actors, and user killfile to tune that.
I always wonder what resources from asteroid belt do we need on Earth. We have plenty of iron and aluminum for building things. Lithium and rare earths aren't available in asteroids. Gold isn't worth grinding up whole asteroid.
Asteroid resources would be useful for building in space, but that is getting a step ahead.
Asteroid mining in our current economy is about pointing at the market price of an extremely low supply element that isn't that high demand in the first place and forgetting to talk about what a supply glut does to price.
Everyone is laboring under this subtle belief that space industry will be just like scifi speculated, but scifi stories always treated space like the ocean, with lots of interplanetary trade and easy travel and no consideration of energy (because it makes for good storytelling) but the actual energy budgeting and consideration of gravity wells is the exact opposite of ocean transport.
Global trade works at all because buoyancy and fluid physics make ocean vessels stupidly efficient at transport.
Moving any matter through space is stupidly inefficient.
The tyranny of the rocket equation constrains everything.
That destroys any possibility of finding out if there was or is life on other planets. Life that would be better evolved to handle the conditions.
It is also unlikely to do anything. The conditions are well beyond anything on Earth. Mars is near vacuum; life has survived in vacuum but didn't grow. Titan has liquid organics, but is really cold and microorganisms don't really handle hydrocarbons.
RCS is a standard, but it needs hosted services for providers. Providers can either host themselves, or contract with someone like Google Jibe Cloud. Also, Google provides services for Android for providers that don't have it. iPhone depends on the provider so has less coverage.
Outside of China, it is de facto a Google thing due to Jibe not really in mood to interconnect with others, plus the fact that Google actually shoehorns RCS in countries where they think they can get away with it. Your statement "iPhone depends on the provider so has less coverage" basically bares this one. Two example:
1. Japan has already a different provider-supported thing +Message, (RCS-based but a different flavor because RCS is complicated), but Google is trying to win to them (and if I remember correctly, au actually jumped ship to Jibe recently-ish).
2. African carriers were confused because of RCS shoehorning without the carrier's consent: SMS reliably actually decreased because Google assumes that once you got an Android phone, surely you won't temporarily use that SIM on a "basic" phone for just an hour or two, right? Google just assumes that's offline, but for people still using their Android devices to reach their family on a farm who temporarily switched to a basic phone for its reliability and reach, their messages will still be send solely via RCS (which predictably won't reach the intended recipient because, of course, it does not have RCS).
Apple of course has its incentive to keep its users on iMessage, but it now accepts RCS (whether Jibe or not) and being "patchy" means that there are many, many carriers which did not implement RCS on their volition. I just imagine how would Google handle an oppressive government's request for interception on Jibe after carriers demonstrably shown that RCS was implemented without their consent, with fines and possibly prison sentences for illegally operating a carrier service to boot.
> plus the fact that Google actually shoehorns RCS in countries where they think they can get away with it.
This is the real thing that nails down "RCS" as a totally google thing. Google will forcefully enable RCS for people on carriers that want nothing to do with it. And in that case Google controls the entire process every single step of the way.
Just for the record, I am not necessarily disagreeing with "let's replace SMS", but Google can do it via a value-added service, which is much less regulated in most countries. Heck, Google already had it with Hangouts, and in my personal opinion it was just plain better than with Messenger. It was technically inferior with Whatsapp having E2E, but some people do prefer having a portable archive of their messages stored and access (much to the chagrin of cryptographers). However, killing it, resurrecting its corpse, and doing it again - well, it will not fare as everyone outside of Google predicted. Ron Amadeo had written a great piece about this in Ars Technica in 2021 (A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...)
Messing with what is supposed to be a carrier standard, as I already think what is happening, puts Google to (in my opinion) a legally unreasonable position in some countries, and I won't be shocked it it will be treated as a carrier with licenses et al. (or rather, lack of licenses, which is just plain bad for Google). I won't be surprised if it turned out that many Googlers already knew that this is a bad idea legal-wise, but the higher-ups have approved this shoehorning.
It's indeed hard to overstate how much Google fumbled the bag given their position. Early Android adopters came from GMail and almost invariably used GTalk on desktop. We had video chat over 3G in 2011 before iOS. But somehow they had to rewrite the app and try to ship an half-assed SMS integration in Hangouts as reaction to iMessage. Google should really have tried buying WhatsApp more seriously, at least we'd have seen some real competition between WhatsApp and FB Messenger.
> I won't be shocked it it will be treated as a carrier with licenses et al.
So, the way it works:
The GSMA isn't some kind of monolithic entity with a great deal of power. Industry players with aligned interests come together, form groups and agree on specs and roadmaps. Technically, RCS should be mandatory with 5G. In practice, it took a great deal of time before a country actually enforced that (China).
Google has seemingly been at the helm of the RCS work group since 2015~2016 with the Jibe acquisition first, then the spec revamp, a.k.a. Universal Profile. RCS was essentially a zombie initiative after ~2012, Google saw an opportunity and filled the void. Telcos aren't stupid, they saw P2P messaging being wiped out by OTT services, and SMS is good enough for A2P. There was little incentive for them.
Now, after a lot of failed experiments, and pivoting from a semblance of federated network to a protocol almost controlled end-to-end, Google got what it wanted: iOS support in North America. The rest of the world is mostly lost to WhatsApp and friends anyway.
Carriers that are on board with Google need to enable the standard registration mechanism used by the iOS client. It shouldn't be a big deal by the way, IMS is central to 4G/5G deployments for VoLTE, VoWiFi, SMSoIP, ... but this changes one important thing from a legal standpoint: now the service isn't provided by Google through an ad-hoc client (Google Messages), but by your carrier.
That said, Google can sell SaaS solutions to carriers. It's up to them to comply with local laws when they decide to provide RCS, regardless of the backend.
I think the EU has bigger fish to fry with the DMA. But Google's tactics might eventually come to someone's attention, as they essentially cornered carriers into adopting Jibe, or giving up on RCS. Somehow the only country that didn't let that happen is South Korea.
Moreover Android could separate the RCS client frontend and backend, like it does for SMS and MMS. But realistically most OEMs don't seem to care, and third party SMS apps are fairly niche.
Re: lawful interception, when carriers switch to IMS registration (as required by Apple) they should also get access to Jibe's standardized API for law enforcement tools (there's a spec for that, I forgot its name). However, just the fact RCS payloads are E2EE in Android-to-Android communications (and soon Android-to-iOS too, hopefully) might already be illegal in some places.
Google flip-flopping around its mobile IM strategy for a decade and then around carriers with RCS is getting harder and harder to understand. Pulling the rug under carriers in developing countries, who weren't interested in the drug dealer marketing tactics, is only going to solidify Meta's dominance, as doing business with WhatsApp has proven to be a much safer and saner bet all along.
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