The main benefit of AM is that it propagates very, very far. For emergency use you only need one transmitter working, to cover a very wide area. Not the multiple systems that you need for Starlink to work.

Many EVs support vehicle to load, so you can run appliances off them in the event of an outage. The issue is more to do with the planning that needs to happen for things like that to be useful. If you are going to rely on a battery, you need to make sure it is charged when you need it, which precludes also using it for general driving.

It's more of a nice to have.

Every accusation is a confession with you lot. People whine about imaginary problems? Fed up of being told you are a bad person for your beliefs?

Good luck with this. Shaming people for being fat worked so well, I'm sure belittling them will get them to have more kids too. It certainly worked when people pointed out the deficiencies in your behaviour.

Maybe they are anticipating rivals entering that space and want to move on to something where they have more temporary exclusivity. One or more of the US ones will get there sooner or later, and Chinese companies are well on the way too.

It may also be some pressure from the US government, with the goal of getting back to the moon before China does. More resources for Starship, which is supposed to be able to do the whole mission (take off from Earth, fly to the moon, land, take off again, return to Earth, land).

It frustrates me that Steam has become the only platform for a lot of games. While not quite indie, the IL-2 series isn't from a massive developer. You don't seem to be able to buy it anywhere else and simply download an installer.

I need to check if has any DRM too, because I'm not installing that shit on my computer.

It's been the playbook since at least 9/11. If the electorate ever temporarily regains control of their bowels, an new threat is quickly manufactured.

I'm just waiting for them to start whining that the Chinese stole the idea that they rightfully stole first.

A better use of those AI tokens would have been to re-work Firefox into something that is easier to build and work on. The code is horrible and difficult to even compile, which really holds Firefox back and keeps everyone using Chromium as the base of their browsers (Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi etc).

Because nobody is going to use this browser daily and the only way to reduce the dominance of Chrome is to get more browsers to switch away to basing themselves on Firefox. At the moment every Firefox "fork" is little more than a mild re-skin and some changed defaults, or unusable due to being so outdated (Palemoon).

I went to Subway and told the lady to give me a 6 inch chicken tikka on Hearty Italian (TM) with cheese and some sweet sauce. My wife was really impressed by the sandwich I made.

Sure, and it's not adequate in many regions.

You might be right. I wonder about the bandwidth too. Starlink is already over subscribed and starting to enforce limits on its unlimited service.

These satellites would be in LEO and fall back to Earth after 5 years anyway. They are thinking like Starlink where they need to launch thousands a year to maintain the constellation. The server hardware will be obsolete by then anyway. What sucks is that then we can't buy it used for cheap, and the fact that all that crap is burning up in the atmosphere and releasing who knows what.

If the cost to orbit is low enough, and there are no land taxes or electricity costs in space, and it solves the locality and latency issues for them, it starts to make more sense. Watching Scott Manley's videos, I was surprised by the thermal and electrical realities of putting stuff in orbit, but it's actually not nearly as bad as you might first assume.

I suppose to be fair when it comes to data centres the NIMBYs are probably right.

Scott Manley did a video about this, and it's not quite so half baked.

Teams works?

Seriously, Teams is one of the worst bits of software I have ever used. It seems like it was designed to be unspeakably awful in every way. It's quite remarkable that they made it quite so shitty.

I haven't used Element, but I'd be surprised if it was somehow worse. Teams is like the absolute zero of usability, I don't think you can go lower than that without breaking the laws of physics.