This game had some of the most immersive hardware controls and interfaces. It supported a Thrustmaster Mark 2flight stick for your right hand control to aim your weapons:

…a Thrustmaster Mark 2 throttle control for walking speed:

… Thrustmaster pedals for torso twist:

…and even i-glasses VR headset (with head motion tracking that would turn the Mech pilots head inside the cockpit!)

my whatsapp profile picture shows me with an Israel flag around my shoulders

…and…

I literally feel like I’m around a bunch of brainwashed people

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Only to come on here and see… what my country is doing.

Don’t let the bastards of the world do this to you. Go out today and inject some kindness back into the world even in the smallest of ways:

• buy socks and give them to a homeless person
• interact with someone in a service industry face-to-face and genuinely tell them how much you appreciate what they do and that they helped you today
• pick up a piece of trash on the ground and dispose of it properly
• even just hold the door open for someone else

All of these things and more make you a force of good. Sometimes it is very hard to do this for ourselves, but it can be easier to do for others. You don’t need to move mountains, for each of us individually even the smallest pebble is enough. You can look behind you as see the positive ripple effects from your actions. Be a reason the world is a better place today than it was yesterday because YOU are in it.

What is the dollar figure of your highest interest bill and its interest rate?

• A common insurance co-pay to see a Primary Care Physician (regular family doctor) is $40. That could mean going to the doctor or not for some folks.

• $20 would pay for five different 30 day prescriptions of common generic prescription drugs.

• $25 ($5 short) would buy more than a month’s worth of insulin.

• $20 will by 35lbs or rice. That’s well over 2 weeks worth of meals (at 2000 calories a day).

• $20 will pay for one month of mobile phone service with unlimited talk and text along with 4GB of data (as well as hotspot functionality)

• $20 would pay for 100 full charges on a very large ebike battery. Thats enough to go 7500 miles of range on average.

We already have instructions to follow after the President dies. Its all laid out in the US Constitution. trump doesn’t get to decide what the nation does once he’s no longer President.

Dude, you realize the whole ‘going to the moon’ thing was just a way to convince the public to fund ballistic missile technology?

And this was true for both sides of the 1960s Space Race.

• Sputnik 1 was carried into space by the Soviet Sputnik rocket (an adaptation of the R-7 Semyorka Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) on October 4, 1957 source

• Yuri Gagarin was carried into space on April 12, 1961, by a Vostok 8K72K rocket. The Vostok 8K72K was a three-stage liquid-fueled launch vehicle derived directly from the Soviet Union’s R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) source

There was fierce competition inside the USSR for which rocket technology would be best used for weapons. The whole “exploration” or “civilian use” thing on both sides (USA/USSR) was just window dressing for weapons programs in space.

Just wait until you see how much they waste on unused life insurance!

I know you’re joking, but lots of people buy really bad life insurance products (whole life, universal variable policies) that are a horrible waste of money in 99.9% of people’s situations.

A large-ish term life insurance is fine if you have a family that needs to replace your income if you die early. Other than that, you only need enough money to get your remains put in the ground without burdening your family. Estimate $10k or so for full funeral and burial plot if that is your desire. If you just want cremation and spreading of ashes is much cheaper. If you’ve got the cash for that, you don’t even need a small term policy for that.

$250/year starting investing in 2020 into the regular S&P 500 would be worth $3,703 today. So maybe as much as a month and a half of rent depending on where you live. However the point being is, if the subscription is unused, you’re not getting any value for it. A free month (or more) of rent is something you’ll actually use.

it’s already enshittified with many customers reporting consistently double the ping and half the download speeds from their original experience.

I don’t think that is an example of enshitification in this case. In the technical world there are measurements for this call SLAs (Service Level Agreements). This means that if you pay for a specific service with contractually delivered performance. The service needs to deliver at least that level of performance, or you are entitled to refunds/credits/resitution for the service provider not meeting their obligations.

Now, just because a service provider is required to deliver a minimum of service, they can (and frequently do) provide even better service than they are obligated to. This is pretty typical of technology services where a new platform is being built out and there is lots of spare capacity as users are just being onboarded. I have no doubt that there were Starlink users that got fantastic performance when only a fraction of the network was in use by others. If this is their baseline, then from their perspective, they are getting less than they did before. If the performance still meets what was sold to them contractually, then they’re still getting what they paid for they’re just not getting a whole bunch more they never paid for.

It’s not the idea of a truly globally accessible internet that makes it worthless, it is the fact it is being done by a for-profit publicly-traded company owned by a trillionaire. Any one of those three things would mean the product is guaranteed to get worse eventually, all three mean it is guaranteed to get worse as quickly as possible.

That’s … a pretty questionable definition of “objectively worthless” then. By that definition all products or services from non-government owned companies would meet that definition of “objectively worthless”. I’m confident that moves the definition from “objectively worthless” to “subjectively worthless”.

You’re very welcome to hold that opinion, but I think the majority of its subscribers would disagree with you.

objectively worthless pet project

Regardless that Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole, lots of folks in working class rural regions around the world would disagree with calling it worthless. As an example, I visited southern Alaska recently and Starlink is very much in use there on working class small homes.

The primary Oneweb constellation exists right now in orbit. You can buy hardware and service today if you wanted to. Also yes, they continue to expand the constellation.

Fiber wouldn’t be a one-time charge though. There’s regular ongoing maintenance needed for a fiber network.

There’s an old joke in the telecom world:

Q: If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and you could only take one thing with you, what would you take?

A: I would take a small bundle of fiber optic cable. As soon as I was on the island, I’d make a small hole in the sand and bury it. As soon as I turn my back there would be someone with a backhoe there to dig it up.

The cost of sending crew out to fix a 10 mile fiber run servicing a single household would wipe out any possible profit from that subscriber for more than 100 years. Now multiple that by how many 10 mile+ fiber runs we’d need to service all those widespread low-density rural customers.

“How can Europe compete with that?” I ask myself more and more often (also AI bubble/data centers). Hopefully in the long term.

The competition with Starlink is the Eutelsat Group with it’s Oneweb satellite internet product. This is a French company. The founder was championing LEO satellite internet before SpaceX was in the game. Oneweb actually has the more preferred orbital slots and frequencies that SpaceX wanted. However SpaceX far outpaced Oneweb in technological growth as well as orbital constellation deployment.

From a consumer point of view Oneweb is massively more expensive to subscribe to than Starlink. 100GB of Starlink data will cost you $55/month while the hardware will cost $300. 100GB of Oneweb will cost you $325/month with the cheapest hardware costing $3800.

Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.

We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.

First, Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole. Now that we have that established, this article is mostly rage-bait with selective truths on the Starlink service. I’m all for calling out bad behavior a company (and there is a little bit here, but not much regarding the customer billing concerns). This (mostly) rage-bait article is (mostly) distracting focus from the very important problem with Starlink regarding Musk’s influence on the government entities that are supposed to protect us from oligarchs. Not only does this include the FCC, but the SEC that let musk bend and break rules to IPO the SpaceX stock enriching himself at the cost of the American people

The narrative of the article is “Starlink has massive hidden fees! Look $1500 charge! Look $500 charge! Look $1000 charge!”

There’s three different reasonable explanations for the situations all three these.

1. $1500 charge - it was a billing software bug, not a policy change, and Starlink reversed the charges costing the subscriber nothing. Yes, I agree customer service could be better and faster.

2. $500 charge - Subscriber was trying to skirt the rules to save themselves money by subscribing to the [long term plan] for [short term] use. When a subscriber signs up for [long term plan] the extra charge is clearly shown before the service is subscribed to. Yes, the fee is there, but its not hidden. Yes the fee is high, but the prior version of how subscription works meant that the customer would simply be told “we’re at capacity for your area, no service for you at all”. Instead if service is that important for a user they can choose to pay the fee. Yes, there should be an extra warning when someone is changing their address for [long term plan] but this should be a minor edge case and the poster would not have even run into an issue if they had been subscribing to the appropriate [short term plan].

3. $1000 charge notice - See detail from the $500 charge explanation why this particular $1000 charge notice exists. The alternative is a possibly customer would just be told to go away with no recourse when they may desperately need the service even with the high priced fee. The fee was clearly labeled before purchase and the customer chose not to go forward, which is entirely their right if they don’t see the value.

Don’t be distracted by the rage-bait from the important concerns of Musk’s government influence.

I’m not optimistic enough to assume that Trump didn’t get what he wanted out of this

I know its yet another flip flop on a trump campaign promise which in itself should cause him to lose favor with his supporters, but we’ve all been around long enough to know how much they forgive him for screwing all of us. I will say that I live in a fairly red area and for months after the election many people around here left up their trump campaign garbage (flags, posters, yard signs, etc). However since the Iran war began almost off of that is gone now.

I’m hoping this will be costly to trump in the midterm elections and that we can get a congress that actually acts as a check on executive power instead of a “blank check” for anything on trump’s horrible xmas list.

The only way Kobo really locks you down if you buy books from their store, which I wouldn’t recommend with any eReader.

What do you do when there’s a particular book you want to read (and you want to buy it to make sure the author is compensated for their work), but its only available from one of the big 4 ebook ecosystems (Amazon Kindle, Kobo shop, Apple Books, Google Play (or whatever the hell they renamed it to this week))?

I had one such book recently and specifically chose Kobo shop as it seemed like the least evil choice between those four.

$110k/year and still paycheck to paycheck with an unreliable car?

BI and Data Governance are generally pretty good career paths right now in the IT space.

Do you live in a HCOL area? Have you explored the differential about moving to a MCOL or LCOL area and how much impact that would have on your potential salary?