Basically Intel has been greedy / hasn't had the competition. The result of Moore's law is still quite possible it seems. Even with a slowdown in chip density; computing prices can fall on similar historical curves now that AMD is competing.
As a someone in my late 20s I could sort of see it BUT not with a family and child. Seems insane. If you were broke and unmarried I could see it being enticing. Also, he potentially thought he would make more? If it was a 1.25M he could have thought he would have received more or that it was actually a smaller haul than imagined/
I don't think you could really disappear depending on your pursuer/ threat model. However, if you were to make more money than you needed to survive you could presumably invest in something like Bitcoin or alt-currency and with the legalisation of crowd-funding you could potentially also make tangible investments in companies through similar mechanisms to the blockchain.
Again, I don't think you could knock the ball out of the park or allude a motivated state agency if you were a terrorist or something; but if you were in a similar position to the subject of the article you could probably avoid capture and maintain a semblance of normalcy.
he's only run YC for 3 years. Not knowing him personally; everything I've seen from him publicly points to him believing that he can do more as head of YC than in a public office like governor. I also suspect he believes that to do either job effectively it would be mutually exclusive. I think he is committed to YC short term; but maybe you are correct if you look pretty far downfield.
No spacecraft can hope match terrestiral latency, the speed of light is not your friend. There was an identical push for space ISPs in the 90's. Iridium was the only sucessful leo space "ISP". Elon has been sucessful with what he says he will do but all these space bases "ISPs" are vaporware until they deliver. Look at the joke of oneweb with their botched softbank merger with intelsat, consilidating billions of dollars of existing debt to fund another few billion to develop a new constillation does not bode well.
Echostar is doing a good job with their proven GEO ISP constillation. With several billion in the bank they are the most promising to be sucessful, keep an eye on their HTS development over the next couple years. The problem with GEO ISPs is they have 1-2s latency :(
Latency is not a problem for low orbit. You're adding a few hundred miles to the trip, which adds single-digit milliseconds of latency. Cost is a huge problem (that's why Iridium went bankrupt) but SpaceX will be able to launch their constellation far more cheaply than it cost Iridium in the 90s.
I agree that they're vaporware until they deliver, but latency isn't going to be the killer.
SpaceX was the launch provider for a 10-sat Iridium cluster 3 weeks ago so they must have restructured favorably as that launch succeeded on May 2, 2017.
The original Iridium was viable when it came to operating costs, they just had no hope of success when they also had to pay back the ~$6 billion in capital costs it took to build and launch the satellites.
The current incarnation of Iridium bought the constellation for only $35 million, effectively discharging the massive debt and allowing them to profitably operate the satellites without having to pay back what it cost to put them up in the first place.
Come forward to today and satellites are cheaper and more capable, demand for communications is higher, and launch services are much cheaper, so Iridium thinks they'll be able to put up a next generation constellation without repeating their history. It looks like they're planning on spending about $2.1 billion to build the satellites and $800 million to launch them, which puts the new constellation at about one third the cost of the original taking inflation into account, while being vastly more capable. (The current Iridium system gets you a connection which provides either a single voice line or 2.4kbps (!) data service. The next generation will go up to 1.5Mbps.)
Iridium is a fascinating story of hubris, spectacular failure, and eventual success.
Unrelated fun fact, an Iridium satellite was involved in the first accidental collision of two satellites. Iridium 33 collided with the defunct Kosmos-2251 in 2009. The relative speed was over 26,000MPH and sprayed a bunch of debris around the two orbits. Iridium has spares in orbit, so they were able to patch up the constellation without much trouble.
SpaceX carried an Iridium cluster 3 weeks ago. OneWeb, as you noted; also exists. Google has designs in the space and you can see a company like Planet (or even Planet) eyeing the economics of this. My point was that there are companies putting pressure on terrestrial ISPs.
As to latency; their tech woul;d be ~750[1] miles from the ground. They are targeting 1Gbps capabilities[2] vs a global avg of terrestrial companies around 20gbps. I don't know how viable that number is; but if it is physically possible then hitting 1/100th of that would still put immense pressure on ISPS as the floor for your weakest offering is 10gbps to be competitive. 2019 is scheduled date; so presumably 2020.
Uber tech isn't exactly google[1] in difficulty to implement, but it isx pretty ridiculous to suggest they go out and build an uber clone for 300k-600k. Not only would they need PMs but they would need to develop and build iOS and Android versions of this technology and then all the backend algorithims.
Then they could build in all the business logic to store driver and rider information securely as well as securely charge and pay them.
Then operate the business by marketing it and attracting drivers to the platform.
Subsidize Uber vs. All of That? On a 600K MAX budget for a town too small to seriously consider >2 buses, using an existing Lyft or Uber-esque service is a no brainer.
[1] I mean what google does is a lot more comkplicated than what Uber does. That said, google is alleging that large swathes of the Uber AI program are literally"exactly the same" as Waymo...
I think GPS has progressed to the point that it would be difficult to stray far enough to get lost, or marooned for that matter, on a 3 hour cruise. That said, the likelihood you would not be able to communicate the boats location or be found by the massive influx in boat traffic would be low.
Impact is important as "monopoly" is subjective. For example, in Googles financial filings they can't break down numbers because *the search industry is highly competitive and we face challenges from the many other players in the industry".
So a company might have close to 75% market share in an industry that matters and they would be a lot easier to prosecute vs the company w/ 100% market (a fleshlight, or other trivial niche thing)
Maybe you personally know parent poster but I saw nothing indicating "his president" was Donald Trump. This false dichotomy is another poison. Obama was a man, he did good and bad things, and also had no say in others.
To pretend a person is above criticism, or that these issues are 2 sided is absurd. This is an instance of what that poster (imo) is talking about.
Edit: what user jmyles is talking about. People are close to the median and also outliers. Saying you hate obama (or implying you disagree with a single policy during his administration as that post did) isn't a tacit endorsement or ballot punch for someone running in an unrelated election after he left office. That logic is very flawed
