pgalvin

I believe the second half of your comment is exactly what I was getting at.

I’m more familiar with how Starlink compares to existing publicly-available satellite internet options. Here are some brief points:

- data throughput orders of magnitude higher,

- the ability to use smaller and more portable antennas (e.g. ~100 Mbps with something the size of a textbook, currently ~2 Mbps and soon ~10s Mbps with your normal mobile phone),

- order of magnitude lower latency compared to GSO satellites.

Other constellations like Iridium dedicate large portions to use by government(s?), too, but simply do not have the throughput or total bandwidth that Starlink does. Your speeds there, on the expensive business plans that offer it, are measured in the low Kbps.

However, the Earth’s own radius dwarfs the height of LEO, so they’re actually roughly the same.

There are other reasons we don’t currently experience major problems with collisions in space, and why airplanes sometimes do, but it is not this.

The article indicates they were unable to handle the increased electricity load, which caused blackouts.

Additionally, sometimes unnaturally high temperatures break AC systems put in place with poor planning. This is very common in UK supermarkets every summer.

He is far more than just a narrator. His 77-year career created and defined the wildlife/nature documentary as a genre, beginning at a time when television was so new that it really was just him and a few individuals making all the decisions. In his youth, he was given some cash and sent to travel the world in a 2-3 man team, off-grid for months, in the “Zoo Quest” series - the first time anyone had really seen animals, in the wild, on television.

Switching to a desk job, he went on to use his position in the BBC to green-light then-pioneering documentaries like “Civilisation” and “The Ascent of Man” (and still travelled occasionally for anthropological and nature documentaries, that he also green-lit) that remain a huge influence on all documentaries today.

Then in 1979, “Life on Earth” created an entirely new format of nature documentary that has only seen iterative change in the almost-50-years since. The rest, as they say, is history. He’s been heavily involved in the production of so many documentaries in the decades since, only reducing his role as he got older. Even in his 90s most of the series he narrates have short on-location sequences with him.

It’s safe to say that he, perhaps more than anyone else, created the “nature documentary” - both in experimenting with the format, and in green-lighting shows - and therefore shares a huge amount of responsibility for the many positive second order effects. Certainly in the UK, I would argue that a significant amount of public awareness of climate change comes from BBC documentaries. As attested to by others in this thread, generations of scientists and conservationists pursued their professions in part because they were inspired by him (and I can throw my own hat in the ring for this). It was also spoken about, at his 100th birthday concert, what an outsized influence his documentaries had on increased worldwide awareness of plastics pollution and the recent UN treaty beginning to address it.

His voice, really, is secondary to all that.

(I would highly recommend reading his “Adventures of a Young Naturalist” and “Journeys to the Other Side of the World” books for anyone with an interest in this sort of thing. They’re combined volumes of books he wrote back in the 1950s and 60s about his Zoo Quest expeditions - both a wondrous first-person view of the travels and interactions with wildlife, but also a fascinating teleportation back in time into a world where air travel and television were brand new, and all of these remote communities were near-untouched compared to today).

I disagree with the claim that a greater proportion of people go hungry, and more are homeless, today than at any point in recent western history. These have broadly been on a downwards trend over the last century.

Of course many do struggle, and that should not be dismissed by pointing to the past. But it nonetheless strikes me as naive to believe that people today are hungrier than at any point in recent history - the obesity crisis, and its lack of discrimination between social classes, should at least in part demonstrate this.

In my opinion, such exaggerations mostly serve to discredit and distract from legitimate complaints about the cost of living today.

I believe that is the same event as in my comment.

> However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.

Could you expand on this please?

This depends entirely on how you hold your phone in your hand. For some positions, someone would need a 5” thumb to reach the corner. You can’t make such sweeping statements for something with such variation.

This information is now many years out of date - they no longer have this policy.

You are wrong, this same story was not reported more than ten years ago. The article is not a report of a man being arrested, tried, and sentenced (doubtless the extent of reporting in local news when it happened). This article is about the wider background of one story, of many, from a behind-the-scenes documentary that has been filmed over the last five years and just released.

Did Britain's public broadcaster decide, half a decade ago, to begin making this documentary so that they could secretly and nefariously support a US government agency long before it was embroiled in its current controversies?

Are you suggesting that the BBC, the world service arm of a British public broadcaster (that is editorially independent from the state and even the wider BBC), began spending five years filming a documentary across the US, Portugal, Brazil, and Russia, just so that they could secretly support a US government agency half a decade before it became embroiled in controversy?