Since they tried to charge everyone extra card payment fees I have assumed their leadership were idiots....
I get why they are doing some of this, not sure how useful it will be. Couldn't you already have free content? Not sure that's actually new.
And wow, that has got to be the most unrecognisable logo ever. They are going to have fun trademarking that....
The article says it ran out of fuel
I think you are getting confused between geostationary orbit and legrange points.
Geostationary orbit is just the narrow band where you can have a stable orbit at the same speed as the earth's rotation (so it stays in the same place in the sky) no other gravitational bodies involved.
The vendor technical lock in side is difficult - there is lock in because they have developed a service to differentiate themselves from the competition....
You can reduce the lock in by reducing their feature set to a reduced level - most multi clout implementations basically use containers to do everything I think?
Should the fine not be the cost of a mission to move the satellite? It's within our technology now.
I thought the charge series was meant to be their basic 'not really smart' watches?
The quality of things being self promoted will on average be lower than that of content being posted by other people. (If your posting other people's content, it's because you think it's good, if you are posting yours it's just because you made it)
This isn't necessarily a problem, in a small community it adds content and helps the poster grow their skills. But in a larger community it can result in a lot of low quality content.
The problem is that due to the scale of the rocket/explosions the regulators are being more picky - their test rate is much reduced. If their not allowed to launch again for months after the last failure then it could easily take that long.
They really didn't do a good job of making that clear until the very end of the article.
Yes, but that probably doesn't help in the next few years. (Expecting a few more fireballs)
They may need to seriously up the Falcon9 launch cadence or switch back to gen 1 sats. (Unless the better capabilities of the gen 2 sats mean they need less up there - I thought that the number was more due to low coverage due to altitude though)
It's only junk if they are useless, which the functional satellites are definitely not.
I think the dead ones come down pretty quick, can't remember what the exact timing is from their full orbit though. (It's weeks from their launch orbit)
You normally get the first one hassle free, then get checked a few times after that. Once they know your reliably you get checked a few times a year only (or if you have a strange shop)