No. The space junk at a given orbit makes it unviable to put more satellites in that orbit, but launching beyond that orbit is still viable.

This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?

Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're essentially a loss-generating product, that exist because they cancel out distribution costs that Google and Microsoft would otherwise have to pay other browsers.

But the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers: > As detailed in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from providing third parties something of value (including financial payments) in order to make Google the default general search engine or otherwise discouraging those third parties from offering competing search products

With that revenue gone, the only real options to fund a browser are:

* Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

* Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.

* Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?

Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google. In that case, perhaps Bing or OpenAI takes over all the distribution agreements and becomes the top search engine. Whether that's better for consumers seems fairly questionable.

> And this is where the goals of the platforms and their users are at odds with each other.

They can be, but they usually mostly aren't. Showing people what they like is the best way to get them to come back.

I think you need to accept that what you want is different from what most people want.

> I want the platform to be a dumb pipe between me and the people I follow.

I guess your only hope would be to make it illegal, worldwide, to provide algorithmic feeds.

Hacker News uses an algorithmic feed, and that's why we're here talking. https://news.ycombinator.com/newest exists but it's not very good. You can also browse Reddit chronologically https://www.reddit.com/new/ but, seriously, don't bother.

So, as long as someone can do algorithmic feeds, someone will, and people will use it, even you, because algorithmic feeds are just better than chronological feeds.

> I don't want "influencers" to be possible.

This one is truly hopeless. We've had influencers at least as long as we've had the written word.

I recommend you list them instead of telling random strangers about the helpfulness of their responses.

Thoroughly unhelpful response. There’s a number of analogies available.

Elon buys it to "preserve free speech everywhere" then turns it into the same swamp twitter is. So you know, could be worse.

> I do worry modern Oauth2/MFA is going to kill the free OS.

As long as you can run a modern browser, how so? FIDO2 is pretty well supported everywhere these days, though of course you don't get a platform authenticator like macOS keychain or Windows Hello.

> I feel … I have been tricked

Everything “free” coming from a company means they’ve found a way to monetise you in some way. The big long ToS we all casually accept without reading says so too.

Other random examples which appear free but aren’t: using a search engine, using the browser that comes with your phone, instagram, YouTube… etc.

It’s not always about data collection, sometimes it’s platform lock-in, or something else but there is always a side of it that makes sense for their profit margin.

This feels like it's supposed to sound like a bad thing. I think it's awesome the cities you went to were designed for the people who actually live in those cities, not the people driving through.

Technically he can't run again so he doesn't need any money for his own campaign. However, he might reward donations to his friends in the MAGA Cinematic Universe.

I wonder if a big enough ad spend at X would be enough.

I’m sure the constitution will be changed to allow Trump to remain President, one way or the other way.

Depends on where in LEO. Explorer I had a perigree of about 350km and lasted for 12 years, though the orbit was highly elliptical. 900km and above is stable for thousands of years and well within the (circular orbit) LEO ceiling of 2000km.

My understanding was always that LEO is much less of a Kessler risk due to atmospheric friction - ie: in the absence of active control and regular correction, LEO objects will gradually de-orbit themselves. It's the the higher geostationary orbits that pose the problem.

I'm in the same position with Linux. I'm back on Windows as a daily driver for the first time in about 12 years. WSL2 makes this more pleasant than I expected.

There are a few reasons for this. The first is hardware support; I bought a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD, which is almost a perfect Linux machine save for a whole bunch of bugs in the amdgpu driver that I'm not willing to live with. This is always a risk when you buy recent hardware.

The second is that no mainstream Linux distribution does secure boot or disk encryption very well, and that's not something I can do without on a portable machine in this day and age. Fedora is moving in the right direction quickly with UKI[1] and SED[2] support, but it's not there yet.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Unified_Kernel_Suppor...

[2] https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f41-change-proposal-s...