I’ve watched a company load up 2PB of data into a tape library, have them stack it full of bubblewrap, then roll it onto the back of a truck with the tires deflated for a softer ride, then driven across town to a new datacentre at 3am on a Sunday.
Effective data rate: 1PB per hour.
My old PMG3 (beige, the first one) came with a Zip drive. I still have that machine, and the Zip drive in it still works.
Not a physicist, merely a science enthusiast with a high school science education.
My understanding is that we’re having a hard enough time smashing hydrogen together into helium (and actually getting back more energy than we put into the process) that making specific isotopes of heavier elements with the current state of technology is between ‘extraordinarily unlikely’ and ‘impossible’. We would have to manage to get past Helium and then on to Lithium, Beryllium, and Boron to get to Carbon – I imagine the amount of energy required to produce even just a few C12 atoms would be off the charts.
A lack of competition. The snag is that Canada has low population density - which means that yes, you can afford to cover most big cities in cell towers, but not outside the city limits – because you might only serve users who are in a car or on a train as they pass through that cell – and it’s prohibitively expensive to put up a multi-million dollar cell tower to serve users who are passing through for a few minutes at a time.
This is why all of the cell infrastructure is owned by two companies – because when mobile phone service came to Canada, the fees were high enough, and the costs low enough, that they could afford to build out sites because they were insanely profitable – in addition to getting funding from the federal government to build out this infrastructure. That’s why they’re the incumbents – they have a critical mass of cell sites, and upgrading hardware every decade or two is cheap compared to purchasing/leasing the land and building a tower from scratch (including bringing in power and fibre).
lobbying, I guess
No, it’s absolutely lobbying and regulatory capture. When I worked in the telco space, back when long distance competition came to Canada, the CRTC was a constant revolving door of lawyers and company VPs from the telcos. The running gag in our office was that if a decision didn’t go our way, that the C-Suite would have to fire someone for the failure, so they could go work at the CRTC and influence the next decision in our favour.
But it wasn’t a gag. Three of my co-workers from that time ended up taking their turns at the CRTC as analysts and commissioners.
And when making hundreds of billions of dollars off of the ‘woke’ crowd that subscribes to the ‘building a better tomorrow’ ideal, turning into an ignorant and unrepentant fascist piece of shit is a good way to erode market share for free, if you exclude the $46 Billion USD social media site purchase, which is now worth essentially nothing.