I’ve been getting flack on twitter for pointing out (see below) that this is probably another bait and switch. Lots of people are raving about this rather than seeing it as almost certainly poisonous in the long term.
One guy said my ‘arguments were terrible’ and that it was ‘absolutely unthinkable that Microsoft would do this’.
I asked him to explain why he thought this (checked again just now, so no response). Another guy said, “we’ll have to disagree and… mute”.
It was all perfectly civil, nothing inflammatory, just stating the view that this was not a good thing because Microsoft will offer goodies to get people on board, and later when it is hard to leave, extract value from the community that rightfully belongs to the community.
People love their belief that corporations are benevolent - and to my surprise (check the replies to the github announcement on twitter) a lot of people in the Open Source community on github share that belief! Even one of the Solid developers RT’d the announcement enthusiastically.
My tweet has another reply this morning which says ‘just go away’
For a long while I was subscribed to ‘SpotTheStation’, NASA’s service to notify when the ISS is visible in your area. This is always after sunset or before sunrise. It’s quite a bright object in the sky.
ISS being one of the largest (if not the largest) spacecraft in orbit, I wonder how these Starlink satellites compare. I can only find information about the sizes: ISS is 419,455 kg and Starlinks 227 kg. As far as I know the brightness is about how much sunlight those reflect. I’m not sure the picture that shows the Starlink string is representative of how bright they’ll be when in their right positions.
Also, how would the amount of Starlink satellites compare to what is already out there? I’ve used the astronomy software Stellarium to regularly spot satellites flying overhead. Or is the amount really so massive that this really impacts our view of the sky?
Well they already record everything as evidenced by one court case where they filed for Amazon to supply the recording in a murder trial. And the court received the recording thus showing more is recorded than just everything after the “wake” word.
Google in their product warning, warns the user to inform guests to the house that their conversations may be recorded.
AstroKatie’s concerns are valid, not that she needs my acknowledgment considering she’s talking about her job.
Regular people will be able to enjoy the night sky all the same, maybe even more, watching the dance of these satellites (just for the record: I would prefer my view of the sky without them but that’s just me).
Astronomers, not so much. These satellites are very bright compared to faint deep sky objects and, when thousands of them are on orbit, it will be near impossible to take long-exposure images without one or two of these messing them up.
To give a picture of just how dense they would sit, (comment from Twitter):
There are 41,253 square degrees in the sky. With 12,000 satellites, there will be approximately 1 moving satellite in every 3.4 square degrees, (roughly 7 times the size of the Moon) every minute of every hour of every day.
I’m all for machine learning, but its usefulness is closely dependent on an awful lot of things, including how much the people who made it understood the curse of dimensionality and overfitting.
