The Walkman and other tape players were so much superior to CD players for portability and convenience. Batteries lasted a lot longer for portable tape players than for CD players. Tapes could be remixed easily so you could bring a specific playlist (or 2 or 3) with you. Tapes were much more resilient than CDs. The superior audio quality of CDs didn’t matter as much when you were using 1980’s era headphones. Or, even if you were using a boombox, the spinning of a disc was still susceptible to bumps or movement causing skips, and the higher speed motor and more complex audio processing drained batteries much faster. And back then, rechargeable batteries weren’t really a thing, so people were just burning through regular single use alkaline batteries.

It wasn’t until the 90’s that decent skip protection, a few generations of miniaturization and improved battery life, and improved headphones made portable CDs competitive with portable tapes.

At the same time, cars started to get CD players, but a typical person doesn’t buy a new car every year, so it took a few years for the overall number of cars to start having a decent number of CD players.

A 56.6 kbps modem just needs an analog audio channel to work, right? A stereo jack has two channels for full duplex communication at that point.

NASA funded SpaceX based on hitting milestones on their COTS program. Those were just as available to Boeing and Blue Origin, but they had less success meeting those milestones and making a profit under fixed price contracts (as opposed to the traditional cost plus contracts). It’s still NASA-defined standards, only with an offloading of the risk and uncertainty onto the private contractors, which was great for SpaceX and terrible for Boeing.

But ultimately it’s still just contracting.

NASA has always been dependent on commercial for profit entities as contractors. The Space Shuttle was developed by Rockwell International (which was later acquired by Boeing). The Apollo Program relied heavily on Boeing, Douglas Aircraft (which later merged into McDonnell Douglas, and then merged with Boeing), and North American Aviation (which later became Rockwell and was acquired by Boeing), and IBM. Lots of cutting edge stuff in that era happened from government contracts throwing money at private corporations.

That’s the whole military industrial complex Eisenhower was talking about.

The only difference with today is that space companies have other customers to choose from, not just NASA (or the Air Force/Space Force).

The only problem with that plan is that it takes a lot of energy to raise an orbit that much, I’m not sure how to make that feasible.

Lowering the orbit takes energy, too, unless you’re relying solely on atmospheric drag.

Your original comment said 2050, which is a long way off. SpaceX’s first launch attempt was in 2006, their first successful launch was in 2008, their first successful recovery of a rocket in reusable condition was in 2015, and first reused a rocket in 2017. If they can make progress on that kind of timeline, why wouldn’t someone else be able to?

Physics don’t change fundamentally between 6 meters and 120 meters

Yes it does. Mass to strength ratio of structural components changes with scale. So does the thrust to mass ratio of a rocket and its fuel. So does heat dissipation (affected by ratio of surface area to mass).

And I don’t know shit about fluid dynamics, but I’m skeptical that things scale cleanly, either.

Scaling upward will encounter challenges not apparent at small sizes. That goes for everything from engineering bridges to buildings to cars to boats to aircraft to spacecraft.

The satellite constellation is the natural consequence of cheaper rockets. It’s a true paradigm shift, but the pioneer in this case has only the moat of being able to spend less money per launch. If someone else can deliver payloads to low earth orbit for less than $2,000/kg, then they’ll easily be able to launch a Starlink competitor.

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The actual key management and encryption protocols are published. Each new device generates a new key and reports their public key to an Apple-maintained directory. When a client wants to send a message, it checks the directory to know which unique devices it should send the message to, and the public key for each device.

Any newly added device doesn’t have the ability to retrieve old messages. But history can be transferred from old devices if they’re still working and online.

Basically, if you’ve configured things for maximum security, you will lose your message history if you lose or break your only logged-in device.

There’s no real way to audit whether Apple’s implementation follows the protocols they’ve published, but we’ve seen no indicators that they aren’t doing what they say.

Google has been quietly doing that for more than 10 years, only we didn’t start really calling this stuff AI until 2022. Google had offline speech to text (and an always on local hotword detection for “hey Google”) since the Moto X 2013, and added hardware support for image processing in the camera app, as images were captured.

The tasks they offloaded onto the Tensor chip starting in 2021 started opening up more image editing features (various algorithms for tuning and editing images), keyboard corrections and spelling/grammar recommendations that got better (and then worse), audio processing (better noise cancellation on calls, an always-on Shazam-like song recognition function that worked entirely offline), etc.

Apple went harder at trying to use those AI features into language processing locally and making it obvious, but personally I think that the tech industry as a whole has grossly overcorrected for trying to do flashy AI, pushed beyond the limits of what the tech can competently do, instead of the quiet background stuff that just worked, while using the specialized hardware functions that efficiently process tensor math.

It’s a chain of trust, you have to trust the whole chain.

Including the entire other side of the conversation. E2EE in a group chat still exposes the group chat if one participant shares their own key (or the chats themselves) with something insecure. Obviously any participant can copy and paste things, archive/log/screenshot things. It can all be automated, too.

Take, for example, iMessage. We have pretty good confidence that Apple can’t read your chats when you have configured it correctly: E2EE, no iCloud archiving of the chats, no backups of the keys. But do you trust that the other side of the conversation has done the exact same thing correctly?

Or take for example the stupid case of senior American military officials accidentally adding a prominent journalist to their war plans signal chat. It’s not a technical failure of signal’s encryption, but a mistake by one of the participants inviting the wrong person, who then published the chat to the world.

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus