There really aren't that many people around the world that would make Starlink profitable in the long run. Only about 1% of the global population are farmers, so that already limits your market. And the moment a village is formed, the economics favor fiber to that village over Starlink.
I might be biased because I live in an area where it is fairly easy to find locations that don't have cellular coverage and won't have cellular coverage anytime soon.
Globally, there's a lot of places that are sparsely inhabited but too remote to warrant strong cellular connectivity. There's also a lot of "nooks and crannies" geographically that are not well served by cellular. As an example, I have a property in an area with excellent 5G coverage but my specific property is in a valley removing line of sight between me and the local tower, meaning reception is virtually nil. I can't even make a phone call. Without Starlink my only option would be to rely on a local WISP to set up some kind of repeater system that would have far lower reliability/performance and significantly higher cost.
Yes, but the question is what fraction of the population is in these niches and does that provide enough subscription revenue to fund the constellation?
If many others find a cheaper and more reliable path, the customer base collapses.
Well, my point is that these niches are probably more commonplace than people who live in areas blanketed by multiple 5G providers probably assume. I'm sure there are Starlink customers using it as an option in some interim period while they wait for fiber to be rolled out to their neighbourhood or town, but anecdotally, I don't know any Starlink customers who are in that boat. We exist in locations that will not be served by cheaper, more reliable terrestrial options anytime soon.
Even "cheaper" is quickly becoming a question mark. Starlink is offering 100mbps plans for $50-$70/mo. which in my region makes it cheaper or on par with options from cellular providers (which are capped) or options from cable/fiber providers.
I have used Arq for years. It has always been the least problematic, least intrusive, most reliable backup and restore option for me. Appreciative to Stefan Reitshamer for creating and maintaining it.
- Would like the ability to customize colours or themes (i.e. taskbar background, application menu button colour, chip background colour, chip active state colour, etc.)
- In another comment you mention that you haven't figured out how to display badge counts without having the app open, but I am not seeing badge counts even with the app open. For example, when someone sends me a message in Messages, the badge count that shows up in the dock never shows up in boringBar. Strangely, other apps that do not show a badge count in my dock show a badge count in boringBar! (This one is a deal breaker for me given the amount of messaging I do through that app. The badge count is something I rely on a lot.)
- My preference is to have "Show Windows Names" enabled. But in certain apps it does not behave as I would expect. For example, when the Mac Messages app is open, it always has a conversation selected, which means the name of the Messages app in boringBar is always the name of the person whose last conversation you had selected. Messages may be a unique case, but for me I would like for it to just be called "Messages" no matter who I am talking to.
- On the subscription debate: I am not anti-subscription, but the value proposition has to be there. $10/month for a dock substitute is too much for me. That's $120/year. $1200/decade per user, for what amounts to a marginal quality of life improvement to the operating system. I think a proper price for something like this that is fair to the developer and to the end user is a $40 - $80 perpetual license with one year of updates included.
My apologies, I was working off memory from when I first looked at it yesterday. I think that $10 per year is totally reasonable. But given the current extreme distaste for subscriptions, I think that a $40 one time perpetual license is probably going to work more in your favour.
> Both of those people condone(d), support, amplify and drive horrific violence.
This seems to be the point of contention. What constitutes "violence"?
A lot of people seem to define violence as a purely physical act: a missile strike during a war, a fist hitting a face, a molotov cocktail thrown over a property line.
What has become clear to me, especially when I saw the discourse around Luigi Mangione and the public opinion polling on it, is that a lot – a lot – of people define it much more broadly: a health insurance denial, a job lost as a result of some CEO's careless ambition, or mere words.
The problem with a very broad definition of violence is that it permits a pretty barbaric worldview. If I cut someone off in traffic, or if a careless administrative action on my part costs someone money that then puts them in a financial pickle that month, is that violence? Do I then deserve to be tracked and assaulted? What about the doctor who is complicit in the refused treatment because the insurance company won't pay a bill?
"I understand the insurance company isn't paying the bill but you are still going to treat me, and to not do so is a violent act."
The list goes on. Can society function if the default action at real or perceived injustice is to just kill?
> The problem with a very broad definition of violence is that it permits a pretty barbaric worldview. If I cut someone off in traffic, or if a careless administrative action on my part costs someone money that then puts them in a financial pickle that month, is that violence? Do I then deserve to be tracked and assaulted? What about the doctor who is complicit in the refused treatment because the insurance company won't pay a bill?
That's resolved with proportionality.
Cut me off in traffic? No biggy
Cut me off from my healthcare when I have a terminal illness? Biggy
My point is that proportionality and fault seem to be entirely subjective.
In an insurance denial, the insurance company does not treat you. The people who refuse to treat you are actually the doctors and nurses and hospital. They have the ability to treat you, but refuse to do so without economic compensation from the insurance company. Within the insurance company, there exists underwriters and individuals who work directly on the denial. Above that are layers of management, above that is a CEO, above that is a board of directors. Above that is an industry and regulatory environment and government.
If you can justify violence against an insurance company CEO, do you also justify violence against the board of directors, employees of the insurance company, the hospital, doctors and nurses who refuse to treat?
Similarly, Sam Altman is just one small component of the AI industry. He is nothing without the team of people he is leading and who have endorsed him (don't forget, Sam himself was fired and reinstated with part of the stated basis being that OpenAI employees were planning an exodus if he was not brought back), not to mention the board of directors he serves under and investors he is working for.
A lot of people will look at this argument and say that just because responsibility for harm is diffused throughout a system of people does not mean that no one is responsible and that accountability is impossible. I would tend to agree. But I would also suggest that just because no one in particular is fully responsible does not mean that one person should be singled out and targeted as arbitrarily responsibility for all harms.
Of course there are different levels of violence. One person inciting hate online is different to bombing a country back to the stone age, but they are both violent. No a traffic offense shouldn't get you assaulted.
But big ceo or president shouldn't necessarily be surprised about consequences to say it bluntly, and to tie it back to our original point, its funny its such an issue now to dang and others here.
Its like suddenly an issue when that violence is directed at someone who does have a lot of power rather than the other way around.
I feel you could argue denying health claims is violent, its intending to cause harm - there is a choice there.
Difficult to reconcile the justification of current efforts of "Iran can't have nukes" with the unequivocal claims made less than a year ago that Iran's nuclear capabilities had been "obliterated".
I helped administer the CheckPoint commercial version of this before 2010 in a large enterprise (Checkpoint Integrity it was badged as). Really good product though we did have some bugs with it - I do remember the developers from Israel got involved and were very capable.
It mostly worked exactly as you would want a desktop firewall to, and integrated nicely with Cisco VPN tech, so you could ensure Integrity was operating correctly before fully opening up the tunnel for access to corporate assets.
Public discourse is a speed bump not an immovable barrier. The proof is in the state of things advancing in the same direction for the past few decades at least. Speed bumps are still valuable but not if you want to block the road. So public discourse alone isn’t the silver bullet you make them out to be.
It's quite a defeatist perspective. You're saying that because we can't fix or prevent everything, then we should choose not to fix or prevent anything?
Many US states do not impose government surveillance or have age verification laws.
But the point I was mainly making was regarding the comment equating USA and the West to Russia or China. Go to one of those countries and we'll see how long you can openly complain about government surveillance before you end up in jail.
I'm not telling you what can or cannot be done. I'm telling you that the example you chose to counter GP's "wild exaggeration" statement, was in itself an exaggeration. It doesn't make the point you think it makes. I'm telling you that if you want to change something, continuing to only do the thing that proved ineffective in the past won't cut it.
> Go to one of those countries and we'll see how long you can openly complain about government surveillance before you end up in jail.
Those people never had it any other way so their complaints are either "the usual", or come from people who can cause real trouble. Those people get silenced almost everywhere in the world. Want to know what Germany does if you "insult" a politician?
In Russia people openly complain about the government all the time, as long as this doesn't cause real trouble no one bats an eye. Russia has nowhere near the capability of the US and China to surveil people anyway. And in China most people don't openly complain because their lives are orders of magnitude better than just a few decades ago, many see it as the price for the better life.
"I'm not that bad yet" is never a strong argument. 50 years ago the press was "impeaching" presidents. Today presidents are "impeaching" the press. See the progress? It accelerates.
They all go in the same direction. Russia and China are closer to the end-goal, but the USA and the West now run faster, so there's a good chance they all reach the end goal at the same time.
> You're saying that because we can't fix or prevent everything, then we should choose not to fix or prevent anything?
No, it is just being realist.
Public discourse is like wind. It comes and goes. But incentive based motivators are like gravity. It is a constant force, and sooner or later, it will win.
Main point is that the public discourse doesn't matter. These lawmakers are jamming what they want because they know Twitter is a rant box with no action.. If we want change we need proper coalitions at the worst and a working government at best. Yelling on social media is useless.
Over some Democratic party campaign wedge issue like illegal immigrants (who I guess are the only people who should be protected from constant surveillance, so special.) They will immediately not care about this at all when they are in charge of ICE, or whatever they rename it. Democrats love Flock (i.e. get paid by Flock.)
That wouldn't really make sense since amount of water could vary. Anyway the article says "Each oat meal comprised 100 × g of rolled oat flakes... boiled in water."
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