Amazon: Its True Classiness Shines Bright
July 16, 2021
Richard Branson, the UK winner from the land of those who cannot kick straight, flew to the edge of space. If Mr. Branson could get into real space, I assume he could have swapped the Hubble telescope’s computer and made the darned thing work. He did not get into “real” space, and ever classy Amazon apparently suggested that Mr. Branson’s well-publicized ride “didn’t go high enough to make it to what most people consider space.” Hey, this is not my quote. I pulled it from the Metro UK online information service, a super high quality source of “real” news. For the original diss, click here.
The classy Amazon-linked observation points out:
[Amazon] claims that its own spacecraft, New Shepard, makes it above a well-defined boundary between Earth and outer space known as the Kármán Line.
I prefer the Hubble fix idea myself.
As helpful as this space flight observation is the information in “Amazon Gets Waiver from FCC to Monitor Sleep with a Radar Sensor.” First, I like the idea of a waiver because it makes clear that rules are made to be Elastic, just like Amazon’s cloud in India. (Bummer that it went down for a couple of hours on or about US July 12, 2021.) Second, the new sleep tracking device may allow some sysadmins to monitor Mr. Bezos’ sleep (maybe snapping some pix, capturing vids, and recording some spoken words) in the post-Branson era. Third, this is a classy idea: More home surveillance but for a really good reason. On the other hand, maybe Amazon just wants to fatten up the data gathered by its different surveillance devices helpfully connected to Sidewalk. Who doesn’t love Sidewalks?
My take away from these two news items is that rich people and big companies are like medieval kings. Different rules apply. But the outcome is the same. True classiness and the ability to do pretty much what the billionaires want. As I said, classy.
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2021
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