[HN Gopher] We know a little more about Amazon's satellites
___________________________________________________________________
We know a little more about Amazon's satellites
Author : pseudolus
Score : 79 points
Date : 2025-05-03 09:37 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| 9dev wrote:
| The video of the satellite release looks really eerie; it's got
| something biological to it, like an insect releasing its pods.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| video: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rajeev-
| badyal-807b3233_were-j...
| ghaff wrote:
| To a first approximation, no one is going to forgo better
| Internet for whatever definition of better because they don't
| like some billionaire's politics or behavior.
| perihelions wrote:
| The sibling story has further details,
|
| https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/a-rocket-launch-monday... (
| _" A rocket launch Monday night may finally jump-start Amazon's
| answer to Starlink"_)
| ks2048 wrote:
| Interesting bit towards the end: they need the FCC to extend
| their "network authorization". And the FCC is of course now
| headed by a Musk/Trump ally.
| ralfd wrote:
| I dont expect there to be any problems for an extension. Carr
| is a market friendly pragmatist and Jeff Bezos is friendly
| towards Trump.
|
| Musks influence into space seems limited, he couldnt prevent
| proposed budget cuts to NASA (and NASA is SpaceX biggest
| customer).
| croes wrote:
| So more satellites to block the view for astronomers.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Progress tends to have downsides. Highways and rail tracks
| destroy the environment and make areas hard to cross, but I
| think most people would acknowledge that on balance, having
| them them is a good thing.
|
| In this case, the obvious solution would be to provide a small
| number of orbital observatories to the astronomy community for
| free or with heavily subsidized pricing.
| croes wrote:
| You could turn that around.
|
| Progress in Earth bound astronomy has the downside of less
| satellite internet.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I'm fairly certain that Earth-based astronomy predates
| artificial satellites by at least a few years.
| croes wrote:
| And since then there was no progress?
|
| We can build better, bigger and more sensible telescopes
| but we can hardly use those new capabilities if they are
| impaired by satellites.
|
| Space telescopes are expensive and harder to maintain.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What progress? I gain nothing from this. I have symmetrical
| cheap reliable fiber to my house.
| dboreham wrote:
| I don't, so there's that.
| lxgr wrote:
| You call that progress? I gain next to nothing from cheap
| reliable fiber being available at your house either.
| 93po wrote:
| this reads really strongly as satire to the point i can't
| believe it's authentic.
|
| hacker news poster says "my cheap fiber is working just
| fine, why does anyone need satellite internet", completely
| ignoring the literally billion people who can't access the
| internet reliably at all due to infrastructure failures
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| My point was only that progress isn't so black and white.
| Oil drilling is progress too!
| timewizard wrote:
| > but I think most people would acknowledge that on balance,
| having them them is a good thing.
|
| Of course it is. The next question is "is it a good thing to
| let a single owner completely control access to this
| resource?"
|
| We've actually decided in the case of highways and rails,
| that no, it's not. There needs to be reasonable and non-
| discriminatory access to these resources otherwise the trade
| is not worthwhile. We actually have laws that are meant to
| enforce this.
|
| > the obvious solution would be to provide a small number of
| orbital observatories to the astronomy community for free or
| with heavily subsidized pricing.
|
| Define the "astronomy community." Do we do first come first
| served or do we have a priority list? How do we handle
| disputes? Is it just US citizens or do we need to offer this
| to the entire world? What if the vendor fails to make good on
| their concessions? What sort of penalties should surround
| this system?
|
| There's really nothing "obvious" about this.
| thrance wrote:
| Building a highways is not necessarily "progress". We really
| ought to stop calling "progress" the destruction of a natural
| habitat that we will never be able to rebuild, for the
| construction of a superflous road that will close in 15 years
| because of poor traffic anyway.
| 93po wrote:
| this is such a weird talking about that basically any real
| astronomer doesn't really care about, at all. it just comes
| across as "let's find any way to criticize elon possible" or
| "let's write clickbait based on a couple of terminally online
| comments on twitter". satellites are not blocking views, and
| astronomers are overwhelmingly in support of a healthy space
| industry, which includes satellite launches. the cutting edge
| of astronomy relies on satellites, it would be weird to be
| against them
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| I am entirely convinced that absent LEO comsat constellations,
| people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about
| "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".
|
| If you genuinely care about the field of astronomy, rest
| assured that the same falling launch costs that have enabled
| LEO comsat constellations, will enable the launch of fleets of
| space-based telescopes.
| timewizard wrote:
| > fleets of space-based telescopes.
|
| Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do
| quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a
| nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these
| people?
|
| > people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining
| about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor
| people".
|
| You've constructed a strawman for the purposes of
| gatekeeping; meanwhile, there very much is a reason to have a
| rational conversation about the trade offs of these large
| commercial ventures that impact literally the entire planet.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| > Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you
| can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment
| and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have
| to these people?
|
| It doesn't, and admittedly I don't really care that much.
|
| I care far far more that remote communities can now have
| meaningful access to the internet, one of the most
| transformative and enabling technologies in existence, than
| niche hobbyists being mildly encumbered. And most people
| likely fall into the same camp.
|
| As already mentioned, I find it really hard to believe that
| the common person whining about "the poor amateur
| astronomers" are being sincere. Some of them likely are,
| but "finding any reason possible to whine about
| billionaires" seems to be vogue these days.
| timewizard wrote:
| > I care far far more that remote communities can now
| have meaningful access to the internet
|
| Then can you tell me how many remote communities were not
| being served before that are now suddenly capable of
| accessing the internet now that these particular
| constellations exist? I mean just looking at Starlink's
| current availability map shows how little you might
| actually care about this particular outcome.
|
| Even so was this the most affordable and sustainable
| option for these countries? Was there absolutely no way
| to achieve both goals at once?
|
| > I don't really care that much.
|
| Noted. We're just picking sides today, I guess. Bummer.
| IshKebab wrote:
| You can still do that.
| croes wrote:
| Space based telescopes have limits Earth bound telescopes
| don't have and they are easier to maintain
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| Yes, I am quite aware that the current generation of space-
| based telescopes are quite limited. And it's solely due to
| the historically extreme cost of mass to orbit.
|
| The largest proposed ground observatories already use
| segmented mirrors. One can use the same approach in space,
| it's only a matter of launch cost.
| ks2048 wrote:
| I wonder how competition will play out against StarLink. People
| just choose which billionaire they like better?
| gus_massa wrote:
| Nah, people will chose on price, reliability, price, speed,
| price and free gigas.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Ah, yes. A low barrier to entry market with many competitors,
| like ISPs, cell phone companies, etc.
|
| Uh oh.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Well, there will be at least two, and people will have
| terrestrial options as well.
| thrance wrote:
| The myth of the rational consumer again, of _homo
| economicus_.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I wonder what "earth observation" opportunities there would be
| with such megaconstellations, from simply having a camera with a
| telephoto lens pointed down to a giant, sky-spanning Synthetic
| Aperture Radar utilizing multiple satellites.
|
| Anything like that would explain the secrecy...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Probably few. The US has excellent observers and comms sats by
| the dozens are not very big. It's true you can get some photos
| but the kind you're thinking of, where you can track vehicles
| in a meaningful way or something, has to be done by something
| closer to the hubble telescope (pointed backwards).
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Even if it would just deliver 1 or even just 10 meter
| resolution, I would imagine the high revisit frequency would
| make it commercially valuable, and potentially also provide
| some value to military/intelligence groups because it would
| make it harder to hide activity through careful timing and
| the data would come with fewer secrecy requirements.
|
| And I have no clue what is doable with SAR, but I'd imagine
| multiple satellites following each other would enable some
| interesting features, as it essentially gives you a giant
| antenna.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Other companies do this already, and better. E.g. Planet.
| perihelions wrote:
| The observation _cadence_ could be game-changing. Instead of
| once-, twice- daily revisit times, in principle you could
| contemplate _continuous_ observation, of large parts of the
| Earth, from LEO, with enough downstream bandwidth to make
| interesting use of all that data.
| entropie wrote:
| Ive seen a video around 2005 about USA spy satellites/drones
| where they kind of disclosured what was possible at this
| time. Having a very wide area with realtime object/person
| tracking and multiple terrabytes of data every minute while
| beeing able to go back in time with all this features.
|
| This all was like 20 years go. 20. 20!!
|
| Than I see my upper consumer grade canon camera, a r6mkII
| with 70-200mm lens (mk1, 20 years old) that is able to make a
| photo of some dog in high speed motion, with a 1/800 shutter
| with 200mm while its dawn and you are still perfectly able to
| zoom into the photo and see and identify a midget [1]
|
| 1: https://i.imgur.com/9eE1zKe.png
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
| SEJeff wrote:
| They've done similar things with hundreds of cell phone
| cameras and digital techniques to piece it all together.
|
| The prototype was called Gorgon Stare[1] and could surveil
| an entire city at once.
|
| [1] https://www.sncorp.com/capabilities/wide-area-motion-
| imagery...
| Perceval wrote:
| There are already commercial constellations on orbit doing EO
| and SAR: Planet Labs, Capella, IceEYE, Umbra, Maxar, and more.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| It's a 450km orbit. Cameras are good, but you'd need quite a
| bit of mass per satellite to identify anything of interest that
| isn't already covered by other satellites. At a certain point
| photography becomes more a matter of optics (using lens to
| collect light) than anything else.
| wmf wrote:
| Apparently you can't hide from Starshield so I'm guessing it's
| pretty good. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/11/nro-chief-
| you-cant-h...
| greatgib wrote:
| The space around us will become such a junkyard with all these
| big corps competing to put thousands of sats at the same orbit
| all around us
| eastbound wrote:
| It's not big corps. Interns. Student projects. I make software
| typically used in the space industry and our customers are
| surprisingly small, just s dozen people each time. Startups,
| half of them funded by the EU startup funds.
|
| The kilogram in orbit is supposed to go down to $1000, and
| everyone's joking that it becomes affordable to send a turd to
| space "for the lulz". It's literally the case.
|
| Ariane 5G is already down to 10k$/kg, Falcon 9 is at 6500k$,
| pricing on https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ and you can
| literally click "Buy" and enter your credit card number.
| daymanstep wrote:
| I see a minimum price of $325k
|
| I don't think a student is going to be able to afford that
| any time soon
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| I think it's cheaper for student groups. If you google
| "student club sends satellite" you get a bunch of examples,
|
| https://globalnews.ca/news/9818771/university-of-
| saskatchewa...
|
| https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/09/16/satellite-
| developme...
|
| https://www.utoronto.ca/news/launch-its-first-satellite-
| stud...
|
| etc
| syedkarim wrote:
| SpaceX isn't providing a discount to student groups. The
| program, Cubesat Launch Initiative, is funded by NASA and
| covers the cost of launch and integration into the
| deployer.
| eastbound wrote:
| 325k$ is for 50kg. Yes it's the minimum for this program.
| The students I had were programming the 10cm^3 satellites,
| I don't have more details than this cursory explanation but
| it's definitely possible.
| wmf wrote:
| A cubesat isn't 50kg. Maybe people are subletting a
| single slot.
| fidotron wrote:
| And every country as well.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| I doubt we'll end up with 200+ of these consolations in 100
| years. Probably not even 20.
|
| It's just a physics problem. Rocket launches are expensive
| from an energy standpoint. These satellites will have a
| decaying orbit that requires replacement. It won't look
| appealing to most net-importers of energy (which is most
| countries, but the whole EU might bear the cost for one
| network for strategic reasons).
|
| Not to mention most countries just don't operate enough
| military assets outside of their borders to justify their own
| network. Non-military applications will be just fine with E2E
| encryption over public channels. More localized military
| operations can have communication needs served other ways.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| These have to de orbit at end of life. Junkyard might be the
| wrong analogy. More like busy workyard. Or highway.
| az09mugen wrote:
| I just cross the fingers to not witness a Kessler syndrome :
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
| voidfunc wrote:
| You'll be long dead before it matters.
| menturi wrote:
| It's comments like these that sadden me. It's this
| mindset that make me pessimistic about the long-term
| viability of humanity as I think it is shared among many
| people. When we (individuals/groups/society) don't plan
| far ahead (even for the loosest sense/meaning of the word
| "plan"), that will tend to lead to short-term benefits
| with long-term detriments. That even applies even for
| things that can occur past our lifespan. In my opinion,
| we should strive to benefit/help our decedents. Climate
| change is the most obvious case of this, but it applies
| to other cases like solar flares on the scale of the
| Carrington event or greater or like Kessler syndrome here
| (both perhaps on the order of hundreds of years). If
| Kessler syndrome is a legitimate concern to be a problem
| in the not crazy distant future, we shouldn't dismiss it
| outright just because the issue is unlikely to be a
| problem within our lifetime.
| voidfunc wrote:
| There's no incentive to do this, it's politically
| untenable to plan that far ahead. The beauty of humanity
| is we're always changing and evolving because we only do
| things within the scope of our lifetime.
|
| The curse of humanity is having a brain that lets us
| think too hard about what we want to be rather than
| acknowledging what we are which is a bunch of mortal
| animals with finite time spans that like to fuck, make
| babies, raise families and occasionally we come together
| and do shit together in the form of work so we can
| further those three other priorities.
| thrance wrote:
| What do you make of the million buildings, devices, ideas
| and techniques left to us by those that came before?
| titzer wrote:
| We better make double-sure than any leftover value past
| your life is purely meted out through hereditary lines
| and couldn't possibly benefit any but a tiny minority of
| people. Like, if you had three houses and two kids at
| death, there ain't no way some poor fool is getting that
| leftover house for free!
| squigz wrote:
| > The beauty of humanity is we're always changing and
| evolving because we only do things within the scope of
| our lifetime.
|
| This is just simply not true. For thousands of years,
| humans have done things that are meant to endure beyond
| our lifetimes - from building monuments like the the
| pyramids to conducting scientific research to creating
| art. Our ability to look beyond the here and now is
| actually one of the defining characteristics of humanity.
| timewizard wrote:
| Move fast and break things.
|
| Try to be dead before you have to pay for it.
|
| The "hacker ethic" has been redefined.
| thrance wrote:
| That's what they thought in the 70s when they discovered
| climate change. Look where we are now. Is basic concern
| for others a sin in our current world?
| titzer wrote:
| We're living out the consequences of a system where the
| Nash equilibrium is everyone maximizing their individual
| benefit at the expense of all else. And that extends to
| being an unapologetic jerk--as long as that face looks
| like a stepping stone, climb on. And screw future people
| and animals.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Kessler cascades as depicted in _Gravity_ aren't really
| possible [1]. Instead, a Kessler cascade would proceed
| linearly, within a tight orbit, and over the course of
| decades if not centuries. In LEO, the timeline for a
| Kessler cascade is on the order of natural decay times.
|
| [1]
| https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/understanding-
| the...
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| burning the ozone layer in every reentry. ah the marvel of
| offset costs.
| perihelions wrote:
| Satellite constellations account for a negligible 0.01% of
| human ozone depletion. It's viral misinformation that
| there's a rallying-cry issue here.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| We may need all the ozone possible to offset global
| warming.
| perihelions wrote:
| I'm unsure what you mean by that; and ozone itself is a
| greenhouse gas[0,1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing#/medi
| a/File:...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone#Ozone_as_a_greenh
| ouse_ga...
| perihelions wrote:
| Late update: if you look at the fancy full version of the
| IPCC graphs[0], there's a funny (ehh...) observation: the
| human destruction of stratospheric ozone was one of the
| largest climate radiative forcing factors--and it was on
| the "cooling" side!
|
| [0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/technical-
| summary/figts-0...
|
| It's the negative-side, green (O3) bar in the third row,
| "halocarbons". There's multiple human contributions to
| ozone I don't fully understand, but, *that* one's the
| stratospheric ozone destruction due to CFC's. (That's
| _not_ to to say CFC 's were good for the climate: as that
| same row illustrates, CFC's themselves are also
| ultrapotent greenhouse gases. If you trust the fancy
| graph, the CFC's direct heating effect slightly
| outweighed their cooling effect via destroying ozone).
| QuiEgo wrote:
| It's hard to internalize just how big space is. Low Earth Orbit
| has nearly twice the surface area of Earth. These LEO
| constellations (Kuiper and Starlink) are trying to put one
| object the size of a car per each area the size of Rhode
| Island. We're a long way away from junkyards.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| The article doesn't even mention AWS, which I think is the
| obvious implication being overlooked here. AWS has Government and
| defense contracts, with DoD notably. This enables secure private
| communication outside of the internet across data centers (of
| which there are a lot) and of course, to any point on the Earth.
| The idea that this is for "underserved communities" is probably a
| sly nod to battlefield logistics.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| They will undoubtedly sell some aspect of Kuiper through AWS.
| They already have IP addresses and DNS in the AWS product list,
| and they have all kinds of data transport services.
|
| I don't know if the government implication is as big as you
| think, as the US government has been doing secure satellite
| communications for decades and has already given SpaceX the
| contract for Starshield. So undoubtedly Kuiper would love a
| piece of the action but there is already competition and Kuiper
| is a bit late to the game.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _already given SpaceX the contract for Starshield_
|
| Many key things the government buys need to have more than
| one independent source. This way Kuiper may be just in time.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| The federal acquisition regulations have fairly strict
| rules against acquiring duplicate systems. It totally
| permits buying systems from multiple vendors, but there are
| interoperability requirements, and these would have to be
| interpreted and negotiated. If Kuiper wants to provide
| services to the government, I'd expect that they would have
| to be compatible with the Starshield user equipment at a
| minimum. The military doesn't want to be lugging around
| multiple satellite terminals to connect to both the SpaceX
| and Kuiper versions of Starshield. I doubt the government
| would go so far as to require SpaceX and Kuiper make their
| constellations interoperable in space, but even just
| requiring compatibility with the ground terminals is a
| pretty big hurdle.
|
| SpaceX has proprietary info in practically all of their
| comm layers, so interoperability is not easy. The
| government probably did not buy full rights to the
| protocols. So the first step to Kuiper getting a piece of
| the pie is convincing the government that it is worth
| paying to license SpaceX's comm standards so Kuiper can use
| them. That is not an easy task.
|
| There are a dozen hypothetical ways that Kuiper might get a
| portion of government programs, but the fact is that SpaceX
| has been embedding themselves into the US government's
| space infrastructure for years without competition, and has
| used that lack of competition to build up a bunch of
| technical hurdles to purchasing services from other
| contractors. For the past several years there has been no
| reason for the government to spend money and effort to
| prevent these hurdles because there was no other contractor
| that might be able to offer a similar service. So SpaceX
| has got a pretty sweet position right now, and Kuiper is
| going to have to invest heavily before the government
| changes course.
| Perceval wrote:
| Space is an AWS region, just like AWS has terrestrial
| regions. The AWS space region is named Pigeon.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Currently "space" as an AWS region is only ground stations
| communicating with satellites the customer owns, so nothing
| from AWS is actually in space. But with the way AWS allows
| customers to configure their network configurations, I
| expect there will be an option to communicate between AWS
| data centers using Kuiper for people who have a use case
| and care enough to pay for it. I expect it to be pretty
| niche, as most customers are fine with public fiber and
| Amazon's own fiber, but I'll bet they sell it to someone,
| like a remote AWS Outpost with Kuiper terminal on it for
| people that work in the field.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| I didn't know about Starshield. I thought Starlink was
| supposed to be neutral.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Starshield is like a private totally separate Starlink for
| the US government (and controlled/operated by the US
| government). I am not sure what sort of neutrality you were
| expecting as US government is SpaceX's biggest customer and
| is obviously a critical infra company.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| I expect it not to be involved with the military, which
| was something they stated
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Why would you assume any space company anywhere can be
| neutral to their nations military. These companies depend
| on government for far too many things (projects, permits)
| and are much more tied to government than other
| industries.
| echoangle wrote:
| When did SpaceX claim they weren't involved with
| military? They are launching military payloads all the
| time.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Starlink is as neutral as government regulations allow
| (both the US regulations and those of the customer's
| country). They just want to make a profit.
|
| Starshield is a separate constellation for the US
| government and select allies only, and is built and
| launched by SpaceX.
| SEJeff wrote:
| Starlink is neutral. Starshield is not. Starshield runs on
| different satellites with potential for custom additional
| payloads as well.
| dboreham wrote:
| Quick note that post-Snowden: no it doesn't. There's no such
| thing as "secure private communication" from magic wires.
| XorNot wrote:
| End to end encryption has not been broken.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yes, which makes the point of dedicated connectivity moot
| from a data security point of view.
|
| Metadata security and availability are different concerns.
| fulafel wrote:
| Traffic analysis tells your adversaries who you
| communicate with, and what apps you're using, inferring
| what communication was caused by what preceding
| communication, etc which lets your adversary guess what
| the communication was about. Esp when compared against
| what other people is communicating about just then.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yes, which makes it a particularly bad idea to run
| unencrypted metadata over satellite connections if it can
| be avoided - and that's the case for communication
| between data centers, arguably.
|
| That might change once lasers or extremely tight radio
| beams can be used for ground stations, but for the latter
| you'd still need to make sure that nobody can get
| reasonably close to your ground stations, which might be
| possible for remote military bases, but probably not for
| AWS data centers.
| gruez wrote:
| >Metadata security
|
| If you have a dedicated circuit, you can send dummy data
| 24/7 to mitigate any traffic analysis. Even if you don't,
| you configure each link to send dummy data, so
| eavesdroppers can't do any traffic analysis without
| compromising the node itself.
| lxgr wrote:
| > This enables secure private communication outside of the
| internet across data centers
|
| How so? I'd imagine the datacenter terminal side downlink to be
| much more easily tappable than fiberoptics.
|
| There are advantages in latency and potentially availability,
| but even there I would imagine fiber to win in an adversarial
| active jamming scenario.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _easily tappable_
|
| I suppose in any realistic scenario we should assume that the
| enemy may be listening to all our communication at all times.
| This is the assumption behind such daily things as WPA3, SSH,
| TLS.
|
| Jamming is a much more serious concern.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yes, so all in all for satellite vs. fiber in backbone
| applications, I'd say that it's a wash (or slight win for
| fiber) when it comes to security, and a definitive win for
| fiber when it comes to jamming resistance.
|
| In the field it's a completely different story, of course -
| you can't always pull fiber (although it does appear in
| unexpected scenarios, such as fiber-operated UAVs or
| torpedoes).
| saltcured wrote:
| Not sure. Jamming a wireless signal is an active process
| that stops interfering when you stop transmitting.
|
| Destroying fiber with a backhoe or an axe doesn't stop
| interfering when you stop digging or chopping though.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Wire-guided drones and missiles seem to be increasingly
| common, probably due to the cost of instantaneous radio
| jamming being so low. However, it's very easy to cut a
| fiber in a way that is hard to repair. Fishing trawlers
| do this all the time. In that sense, fiber can be
| "jammed" (sabotaged) much more easily than
| radio/satellite.
| SEJeff wrote:
| FHSS[1] has made jamming difficult in US military
| communications for decades. It doesn't make it impossible but
| jamming the entire spectrum is nearly impossible at scale for
| almost everyone. At best it would affect small areas until
| the US sent rf seeking missiles (HARM are designed for this)
| at the jammer source. Also note that modern satcom like
| Starlink uses AESA digital phased array antennas much like a
| F35's radar. It's so much more complex than legacy analog
| stuff.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-
| hopping_spread_spe...
| nkrisc wrote:
| > Say a couple perpetually quarrels about who's going to do the
| dishes. To prevent further squabbles they decide to split the
| chores on weekly, alternating basis. > > Everything works well,
| until one of the spouses falls ill. The dishes pile up in the
| kitchen sink, but the other spouse does not feel responsible for
| the mess. It's not their turn. And yes, there's nobody to blame.
|
| And this is where accountability sinks distinguish two different
| kinds of people: some will (rightfully) realize that it is not
| their responsibility and no one is to blame, so they will do
| nothing. Others will see also see that it is not their
| responsibility and no one is to blame, but they will also see
| that it will become their problem regardless of responsibility or
| blame, and so they do something about it.
|
| Unfortunately the latter is often not rewarded or even actively
| discouraged or punished in corporate settings.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| I think you're posting in the wrong comments section
| Gud wrote:
| You are in the wrong comment section, but thanks for the
| thoughtful comment!
| nkrisc wrote:
| I definitely am.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-03 23:01 UTC)