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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • No, it couldn’t. That’s pure misinformation.

    Kessler syndrome is only a possibility in orbits high enough that atmospheric drag is negligible. Starlink, by design, is at an altitude where the atmosphere is still thick enough to bring any debris or old satellites down to earth in a timely fashion rather than building up like Kessler syndrome requires. (To be clear, the air is still so thin that you’d need sensitive instruments to detect it at all. It’s just enough to produce a tiny amount of drag, which adds up over weeks or months to lower the debris’ orbit so that it meets thicker air)

    There are plenty of perfectly legitimate objections you can raise to starlink without resorting to Kessler syndrome







  • The reason, I suspect, is fundamentally because there’s no relationship between the uppercase and lowercase characters unless someone goes out of their way to create it. That requires that the filesystem contain knowledge of the alphabet, which might work if all you wanted was to handle ASCII in American English, but isn’t good for a system which needs to support the whole world.

    In fact, the UNIX filesystem isn’t ASCII. It’s also not unicode. UNIX uses arbitrary byte strings, with special significance given to a very small number of bytes (just ‘/’ and ‘\0’, I think). That means people are free to label files in whatever way they like, and their terminals or other applications are free to render them in whatever way seems appropriate, without the filesystem having to understand unicode.

    Adding case insensitivity would therefore actually be significant and unnecessary complexity to add to the filesystem drivers, and we’d probably take a big step backwards in support for other languages