Amazon is planning a satellite internet constellation that could rival SpaceX Starlink, touted by CEO Elon Musk as a means of getting more people online.
Brazilian Communications Minister Fabio Faria met with the billionaire tech mogul in Austin, Texas. SpaceX would send its satellite internet service, Starlink, to rural schools and health institutions.
His team, he adds, has spent years refining the technology’s atmospheric sensing, mirror controls, and motion detection capabilities; Taara’s terminals can now automatically adjust to changes in the environment to maintain precise connections.
Project Taara aims to bridge a connectivity gap between the Republic of the Congo’s Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kinshasa. The cities lie just 4.8 kilometers (2.9 miles) apart, but between them is the Congo River —it’s the deepest river in the world (220 meters/720 feet in parts! Pretty terrifying, if you ask me), the second-fastest, and the only one that crosses the equator twice. That makes for some complicated logistics, and as such, internet connectivity in Kinshasa (which is on the river’s south bank) very expensive.
Local internet providers are putting down 400 kilometers of fiber connection around the river, but in a textbook example of leapfrogging technology, Project Taara used WOC to beam high-speed connectivity over the river instead.
A new European satellite will use machine learning to provide rapid, low-cost information on soil conditions to enable smarter agriculture. The project is a model for what novel sensors and artificial intelligence technology can do in a vehicle no bigger than a shoebox.
Edge computing is a fashionable buzz-phrase for the technique of shifting the processing power away from the server farms of the internet and out to where the data is being collected. According to some, edge computing is the next great tech revolution, and in the case of satellites, where communications bandwidth is severely limited, it could be transformational.
The Intuition-1 satellite program will provide soil data to drive European precision agriculture projects, which involve applying fertilizer only when and where needed rather than treating an entire field. Precision agriculture is both more economical and easier on the environment — the catch is that it requires detailed information about soil conditions on a small scale. At present, establishing levels of soil nutrients in sufficient detail involves taking samples from multiple locations and sending them to a laboratory for analysis. This typically takes about three weeks.
SpaceX launches Crew-3, Tesla crashes, Elon Musk considers selling… again?
SpaceX launches Crew-3 and Starlink, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving potentially causes a crash, angered by Bernie Sanders, Elon Musk considers selling stock… again?
Dr. Ben Goertzel with Philip K. Dick at the Web Summit in Lisbon 2019.
Ben showcases the use of OpenCog within the SingularityNET enviroment which is powering the AI of the Philip K. Dick Robot.
Reports from various parts of the U.S. indicate that Tesla has started deployment of SpaceX Starlink dishes at Supercharging stations to offer Wi-Fi access (not all sites have W-Fi).
The move was actually announced by Tesla’s COE Elon Musk in October and now at least thea first few sites were equipped with SpaceX Starlink dishes.
Tesla has started to deploy Starlink antennas at Supercharger stations in an apparent effort to offer satellite-based internet to owners while charging.
The Supercharger network currently undeniably offers the best charging experience for electric cars. Other charging networks are closing the gap, but Tesla’s early investment in offering a great complimentary charging experience has paid off.
With charging, the goal is always to make the charging sessions shorter, but it is still not unusual for Tesla owners to spend over 30 minutes at the stations.
SpaceX shot 53 Starlink internet satellites into orbit on top of a Falcon 9 rocket Saturday from foggy Cape Canaveral, commencing a new phase of deploying the global broadband network with the first launch into a new “shell” some 335 miles above Earth.
The mission was the 31st Falcon 9 launch in two-and-a-half years dedicated to carrying satellites for the Starlink internet network, bringing the total number of Starlink spacecraft launched to 1,844.
Continue reading “SpaceX launch starts deployment of new Starlink orbital shell” »
AI is a classic double-edged sword in much the same way as other major technologies have been since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Burning carbon drives the industrial world but leads to global warming. Nuclear fission provides cheap and abundant electricity though could be used to destroy us. The Internet boosts commerce and provides ready access to nearly infinite amounts of useful information, yet also offers an easy path for misinformation that undermines trust and threatens democracy. AI finds patterns in enormous and complex datasets to solve problems that people cannot, though it often reinforces inherent biases and is being used to build weapons where life and death decisions could be automated. The danger associated with this dichotomy is best described by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson at a Harvard debate, where he said “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and God-like technology.”
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Continue reading “With the Metaverse on the way, an AI Bill of Rights is urgent” »
