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

I’m pretty sure their concern is their own birth rate dropping, actually. Have you seen the demographics graph for Russia? They’re facing a complete collapse of their working-age population in a decade or two

No, it would have been detected by various systems pretty much immediately. Those systems are military though, and probably wouldn’t tell the general public about the movement of military satellites

It’s also conceivable that it was detected in that orbit but not recognised, so it was treated as a mystery object

The biggest problem is that the magnets will “quench”, which is what happens when a superconducting electromagnet suddenly stops being superconducting.

There’s a lot of energy stored in that magnet, and when it quenches the energy all turns to heat in a very short time. Any remaining helium will flash boil, turning into an explosive expansion of gas, and the thermal shock will seriously damage the machine

It is guaranteed, actually. US law imposes requirements on telecoms providers to support wire taps

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