spaceheretostay

I don't understand this logic. SpaceX's bread-and-butter is building technology and setting up processes to lower launch costs to hilariously low levels.

> Those thousands of sats will also need to be replaced as quickly as 10-15% per year, unless they are going to get their own propulsion systems, seriously multiplying their cost of launch/operation.

Multiplying by.....10%? I think they would laugh off those costs and easily pay for that with the huge margin they are likely to be eyeing.

> Take a look at the difficulties in setting up downlink stations at a global scale. To facilitate the dreamed bandwidth the number of hops between satellites will have to be as low as possible. Hundreds of large base stations will be needed. New land must be purchased, new laws passed, and old laws abolished.

Can you cite this? What new laws must be passed and what old laws abolished? Also,

> Unless spaceX intends to have Musk elected to the presidencies of many nations, the regulatory hurdles alone will take decades.

This is hyperbole and clearly not true. Countries make deals with businesses all the time, especially when the business is likely to bring opportunity and money into the country. I have a hard time imagining a world where leaders and countries are anti-SpaceX to the point of stalling negotiations until Elon is 75 years old and already lives on Mars.

Lastly, citing unknown video game nerds and believing their interpretations over the CEO of a public company (yes I'll count Tesla here, it speak to his dedication of running global-scale changing companies) and the specifications of a private company with ~10,000 employees? It just seems less likely to be true that video game nerds know best here.

It will not take SpaceX 'decades' to enable widespread commercial and personal use of the network. It is SpaceX's intent to use it as a revenue driver for the early work on the Martian colony, which is planned to get started in 5-6 years. Therefore Starlink must be operational long before then or the whole plan fails.

Also, I think Starlink's launches are planned to ramp up significantly in the next 1-2 years, immediately enabling multiple use cases popular in multiple very large consumer industries (gaming, streaming, etc).

I'm not sure how that could happen. No matter how much money you have, this stuff takes time. There should be multiple independent companies providing satellite internet at low-cost with thousands of satellites each within 2-3 years (SpaceX Starlink, OneWeb, BlueOrigin's, etc).

I'm not sure how China could physically accomplish such a task - to prevent those companies from finding a market, despite being so far behind themselves?

> Have you never committed a bug before?

Engineers who make mistakes that harm people are still responsible for the mistakes they made. You cannot just claim "it was a bug" and get off scot free if your code harms someone or otherwise breaks the law. Also there's no need for this sarcastic tone, "have you never..?"

> I doubt it was an engineer who deliberately removed the text but kept the contact import functionality.

Why would you doubt that? I personally think that situation sounds quite likely. But either way we're just speculating.

Also, don't ignore the part of the parent comment that discusses the manager's (and implied other decision markers) that result in the decision being made to make an illegal change to the code.

Engineer, or manager, or QA assistant - someone or some group of people will have made the change. And "oops that was a bug" doesn't count. Corporations and their employees must be held to the same laws and standards to which the rest of us are held. "Ooops I didn't mean to do that" doesn't fly as an excuse to break the law.

None of what Facebook has done here sounds plausibly legal to me. I'm not a lawyer, but this stuff is plain-as-day immoral and illegal from my eyes.

> Should a developer be responsible because the cookie banner they implemented wasn't compliant with the laws of 100 countries even though the legal team already told them it was ok?

Yes. 100%. "I was just following orders" is not a valid excuse, ever - Nuremberg is the obvious extreme example, but it's true everywhere.

We don't all need to be lawyers to understand the basics of our laws. Knowledge of the existence of the law is assumed for all citizens. Ignorance of the law has never been a valid excuse when the law is broken.

(Yes, the US does have some new problems with private laws being passed, where the public is not allowed to know the law itself - and this opens up huge scary things. But that is not what is being discussed here and I don't believe is relevant.)

Facebook have broken a huge list of laws. But recently from my reading I think the current issue is a breach of contract. They signed a legal contract with the FTC and then broke it, hence the fine.

There doesn't seem to be any debate that Facebook broke the law - just debate about what the punishments should be.

I have noticed this as well.