That’s a pretty bad story of itself to make up.

Elon says his son punched him after he told him to punch him.

The FCC revoked that award before the money was handed over because starlink wasn’t meeting the speeds they needed to meet for the deadline 3 years in the future and they didn’t think they would make it. The speeds that money was supposed to help them achieve launching the satellites required to meet it.

No one else had that made up requirement put on them in advance.

The goal that was 3 years in the future, which would have been around now or early 2026, required them to meet their speed (100d + 20u) and latency (<100ms) goals for 40% of the 650k rural users.

They had 1.5 million US customers at the start of 2025, not sure how many are part of this rural 650k but id imagine the majority are, and only 260k of the rural ones have to meet the requirements.

Ookla did a post about starlink in Maine where it shows many of the users are meeting those requirements

https://www.ookla.com/articles/above-maine-starlink-twinkles

Median DL: 116.77 (over the required 100)

Media UL: 18.17 (just shy of the required 20)

90th Percentile DL: 250.96

90th Percentile UL 27.17

If Maine is a representative example, then they are probably meeting their 40% target of 260k rural users despite not getting the money which would have accelerated things and made launches more focused on meeting the goals.

Edit: extra details.

Edit: I was just looking up more info on the program, and the deadline to report would have been in January 2025, so it would have been with the 1.5 million users they had at the start of the year, not around now, or 2026 as I’d said. That Ookla report was December 2024. We should get a report from the FCC (this summer?) that outlines how many others met their respective 40% target.

I wish there was more municipal fiber. It’s absolutely insane that the big ISPs fight it and often win.

It depends on the distance, but yes. Those laser interlinks are fast.

The problem with fiber is it isn’t direct, and the satellites do use lasers (light!) to travel longer distances. The longer the distance the bigger edge satellite internet gets.

They deorbit every 5 years and burn up in the atmosphere they don’t make it to land (although i think i remember a a part of a very early version did and changes were made because it did, but that might have been something else)

There have been a couple launches where some solar radiation caused damage or a problem with the stage 2 and they all came down and burned up before they made their planned orbit. On occasion, there may be a faulty satellite that doesn’t reach its proper orbit after launch and instead comes down instead.

Short of an error during launches, it’s all planned.

They weren’t just paid, they were paid repeatedly and they repeatedly didn’t do it.

Starlink can be more direct as well. The further fiber goes the less direct it is. By the time we’re talking between continents that builds up a lot.

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Someone told me they are public some months ago? Like if someone wanted to look up your lemmy DMs they could.

I read the headline expecting to need some ELI5 on how they had some crazy optimizations… but guess it’s nothing like that hahaha.

You barely saw it in the news compared to VW as well. Even if an article would bring it up, it’d usually be headlines with VW in some way or another.

It’s a shame so many of our choices for cars out there are run by bad people at the top 😞

That wouldn’t even need to be malicious, but it definitely could be.

I could see a selling point being, oh ya you can monitor the system and then adjust things for more power, but it’ll be dirtier.

And then at that point it’s up to the OEM to keep it within regulations, but they could offer different power modes within limits.

Then everyone’s like oh this would make cheating so easy!

It wasn’t just VW. It was like a dozen of the major brands all doing it in some way or another.

E.g BMW was involved as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

I wouldn’t really called it a solved problem when waymo with lidar is crashing into physical objects

https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/waymo-recalls-1200-robotaxis-after-cars-crash-into-chains-gates-and-utility-poles/ar-AA1EMVTF

NHTSA stated that the crashes “involved collisions with clearly visible objects that a competent driver would be expected to avoid.” The agency is continuing its investigation.

It’d probably be better to say that Lidar is the path to solving these problems, or a tool that can help solve it. But not solved.

Just because you see a car working perfectly, doesn’t mean it always is working perfectly.

I get stressed enough waiting minutes for a remote server to come back up.

Shit… it taking longer than usual, it’s never this long… f5 f5 f5, oh fuck what did I do… oh there it is!

In Canada, we just give them the money, they twiddle their thumbs for a few years then say they’re abandoning the project and keep the money. Then we wait a few years, and decide to give them more money for the same thing again.