The precedent seems to be that anyone can broadcast anything without caring what territories can receive your broadcast (see Voice of America broadcasts during the Cold War or GPS jamming in the Baltic nowadays). This seems to be extendable to broadcasting from space.
The nominal group in power may ban/jam _receiving_ equipment on their territory though.
US law prohibits Starlink from transmitting into countries that don't permit it, with exceptions as directed by the US Government. If this was not the case, Starlink would have made its product available globally instead of having to seek permission from every country they want to service (called "landing rights")
>it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible
It is not the same, supply from gas turbines is more flexible/predictable, this might be worth an extra premium.
Motorola did some A/B testing in 2011 with Droid RAZR and Droid RAZR MAXX. They had identical hardware, but first one was the thin one with a camera bump, second one was uniformly thick (thus no bump) and put an extra battery there (which doubled the capacity).
Given that 3 years later they have stopped producing phones with bumps, I guess people really prefer battery to bumps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hackers could have redistributed their coins to the existing wallets in the same ratio their balances were at the time of attack, keeping some coins (say, 1/21) to themselves as a reward. The outcome would've been: the hackers become owners of 1/21 of all bitcoins ever; Satoshi either keeps his 1/21 or is left with 1/184000 (depends on the implementation); everyone else sees their balance increase 20k times overnight. bitcoin/fiat exchange rate drops the same 20k times, so noone has lost any fiat value. Block rewards immediately become essentially worthless; mining becomes 100% fee powered.
I know this wasn't meant literally, but it does make for an interesting thought experiment - under what circumstances might it be valid to dial 911 to ask for the time?
My first thought was something like a nuclear operator - "we need to shut down the core at exactly 19:00, but our clocks are down!" so they call and wait for the operator to advise when the time is reached. Obviously contrived and not realistic, but interesting to think about.
> under what circumstances might it be valid to dial 911 to ask for the time?
Maybe, if all of your clocks don't work and you went to somewhere else and their clock isn't working either, and it is raining and you cannot use a sundial, and you tried to call everyone else already and they also cannot give you the time for whatever reason, then you might try to call 911 and ask them, because you tried everything else and it didn't work. (I once heard a (fictional) story where this happened. This is an unlikely scenario, but some of the things mentioned here (and other things) might happen, e.g. bad weather so you cannot go out, the television and computers are not working (and maybe the power is out but the telephone uses a separate power), and there are some problems with the telephone too (I have had problems before where some telephone numbers worked and some didn't), etc.)
Well given that virtually everyone's "telephones" are cell phones which would be incapable of making calls unless they connected to the network, and the network would be incapable of handling their calls without also telling the phone what time it is, this situation becomes far less tenable in 2025 vs the 20th century when land lines were king. :)
At least in many European countries, the landline phone companies offered a short number for obtaining the time from an answering robot.
Many, many years ago, I have designed a piece of equipment that was integrated in a phone exchange and it provided vocal messages to be sent to a caller, for errors like non-existent phone number, but also for replying to the dedicated number for the time service. The messages were something like "The time at the next beep will be ... hours ... minutes ... seconds".
I have not heard about a similar service for mobile phones, because here the phone gets the time automatically and it displays it.
It's not a good idea to call 911 with non-emergencies.
But until a few decades ago, the primary way most of us to set our clocks was to call a number the phone company provided, which in our case was TI4-1212. "At the tone, the time will be ..."
If a response packet contains a good timestamp, you could initiate a 911 call, get a reply packet, and cancel the call before it reaches any actual operators.
if someone gets Indiana on the suspiciously detailed request the author provided and it appears they wanted something else, they can clarify that to the chat bot, e.g. by copying this your comment.
I have a strong suspicion that many human artists would behave in a way the chat bot did (unless they start asking clarifying questions. Which chatbots should learn to do as well)
At least one the Navy Nuke side, they need to survive what colleges count as 50 to 92 credits in a year and a half. So considerable levels of training.
Anything govt. Nuclear is also going to have "interesting" relationships with procedures. Essentially planning them out, proving them as functional, and being pretrained think about current conditions compared what the procedure thinks is correct. Also trained to analyze when to step into a casualty or recovery procedure properly.
Those still seem to be projects years away from completion (and they also have projects for fusion powered data centers - which are 30 years away, I guess?), yet I've interpreted the chain of comments as "Nuclear workers which were laid off _now_ can easily be absorbed by data centers almost immediately".
