I agree with that, but it's great for a greenfield project/area. Say, Mars or very high and low latitudes, or ships/airplanes.
However, once you are in an area of "civilization," there is not only an opportunity for fiber, but also maybe the locals don't want a foreign power controlling your citizens' data access. India + China = 35% of the global population, and Starlink is not legal in either place.
Meanwhile, the free speech absolutist is focused on breaking up the ~5.4% of the globe, (EU) where Starlink is legal.
Yes, but those are different reasons. Eventually we'll have many different providers offering LEO internet. Competition is the best way to solve this. The benefits of LEO internet is obvious.
No, I disagree, maybe. The terrestrial Internet was literally designed to route around a nuclear war. That was its initial purpose, was it not?
Starlink needs ground stations, which are visible from orbit, and can be Shaheded... unless every Starlink terminal can also become a down-link.. which would be cool. However, then it all still relies on terrestrial fiber, right? Or, then that would be a Starlink-only WAN?
I don't want to call out a specific HN'er, but he is an HN hero. Years ago, in person, he told me he was bored. I tried to convince him to work for Starlink in Redmond, as what could be cooler than working on an entire new satellite laser-based Internet 2 backbone?! This was back when GMaps labeled that office "A Place of Worship."
I failed at that, because he probably saw that the entire concept was questionable. My point here is that this is all very complicated, and while Starlink is the coolest tech in my lifetime, it still relies on terrestrial fiber in the end.
Please, help me work through this. I am likely very confused.
Starlink can now jump the connections satellite to satellite, and curve them around the planet. You need to knock out not just the nearest ground station but also the stations the traffic can be rerouted to for the constellation to be meaningfully degraded. Stations that are spread across multiple countries and continents.
In which case, yes, SpaceX can also spin up new makeshift ground stations using off the shelf user terminals.
The current ground stations use specialized transceivers, but that's an efficiency improvement, not a fundamental limitation.
> I failed at that, because he probably saw that the entire concept was questionable.
There's a lesson there: if you think you understand a bleeding edge emerging technology better than Musk does, think again. Think for a long time - maximum reasoning effort.
It's not impossible that you truly are, but it is unlikely.
> There's a lesson there: if you think you understand a bleeding edge emerging technology better than Musk does, think again. Think for a long time - maximum reasoning effort.
Starlink is undeniably some of the coolest tech I have ever seen. However, I was once one of Musk's biggest fans and defenders, and I am no longer that.
He really was the best of us, going all-in on physics-based ideas, not giving any f's about money... until the Tesla payout. That appears to have broken his brain. He went from a real truth-seeker, to a financial engineer. I get it, how could that much money not change one? I bet it would change 99.9999% of us.
As far as musktradumus, he once stood in front of a very warbley Starship prototype and answered "yes, this specific article is going into orbit." It took many more years, and many more articles to even start to get close.
FSD is still incoming, maybe. Tesla created a special call center in Las Vegas to deal with the fact that Tesla greatly over-promised the range on all their vehicles.
Internet routing around nuclear war not because it's cable but it's because it's an inter connected network (ie "internet"). Meaning there's multiple routes to the same destination.
Eventually someone somewhere will decide these LEO satellites are used for the military against their own sovereign countries and will have to start destroying them. We will end up with a graveyard in space where fragments will make it difficult to continue any space activities.
> someone somewhere will decide these LEO satellites are used for the military against their own sovereign countries and will have to start destroying them
Military potential is true for all materiel. Including DoD satellites.
> We will end up with a graveyard in space where fragments will make it difficult to continue any space activities
No, we won’t. Specific orbits will get trashed. And even then, only for a few years—LEO deörbits in months to years, the latter only for small things in high LEO.
If you're determined enough you can cause damage that does not decay or go higher than LEO. This risk already exists for accidents. If your goal is to cause it, it wouldn't be too difficult
No one should be able to do anything. You learn to do it or you don't. There are women who are already capable of opening jars without help. There's no conspiracy here. If you think it's an untapped market go out and start selling easy open jars.
American navy has blockaded countries all over the world, so it's more true that they closed international waters. Waters were open before America existed. If Americans would actually learn their history they would see that the USA blockade was the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, as the Japanese needed the water to open and thought taking out Pearl Harbour would prevent the US Navy controlling the Pacific. Japan attacked the American base, USA attacked Japanese civilians with nukes.
The framing in general of “Japan only took military action and the US sank to attacking civilians” is wrong too. Take a look at what Japan did to the Chinese during that time period if you think they were only attacking military targets.
No, Japan had not surrendered before the bombs. There is no evidence of that in Japanese or western history. Where are you getting that from?
> Are you saying USA cared about the Chinese?
I’m saying it was not beneath Japan to commit horrific atrocities on civilians. You can’t pretend they were some high moral actor that was only performing a military action to defend themselves.
Did I say the Japanese were good guys?
Everything the Japanese did, UK, USA and other European countries have done worse. They're still doing it. Going back to the original reply, US Navy only benefited the US by screwing over the rest of the world
It was the US that made all these countries stop committing atrocities, so they are the good guys.
World war 2 was the war of 3 different evil ideologies, you had the fascists vs the communists vs the imperialist England and France. The war ended with both the Imperialists and the Fascists defeated so European imperialism ended there, England and France had to give up their colonies.
If not for USA likely Europe would still have colonies and just be as imperialist as they used to be, same with Japan. USA might not be as good as these defeated imperialists, but it was still USA that ended the age of European imperialism that was so much worse than anything USA has done since ww2.
Are you saying there are no pirates now? US navy has solved all the world's problems? The blockades have killed millions of people, even in the last 30 years. When US sanctioned Iraq after the first war, they killed 500k people every year, and then US invaded Iraq on lies. The world would be safer without the US Navy.
Why would you post such nonsense given how easy it is these days to determine bullshit? By the time of Pearl Harbor, Japan was formally aligned with Nazi Germany. Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact in Sept 1940 creating the Axis alliance. Pearl Harbor happened in Dec 1941, so Japan had been formally tied to Germany for more than a year.
“The American navy closed international waters.”
Not in the Pearl Harbor context. Before Pearl Harbor the U.S. was not conducting a naval blockade of Japan that closed international waters. The U.S. cut off Japan from US oil in July 1941. That is not the same thing as the U.S. Navy closing the Pacific.
“The USA blockade was the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.”
False. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because it wanted to neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet while Japan seized the "Southern Resource Area”, especially oil-rich East Indies, Malaya and other regions in the pacific. The U.S. oil embargo might have played a small factor, but that wasn't a US-only thing; various countries were increasingly unwilling to sell oil and other resources to Nazi-aligned Japan while they were attempting to conquer China and most of the Southeast Pacific.
Japan didn't have any problems with USA because USA was not part of allied forces. In fact USA sold weapons to both UK and Germans. USA only joined after Pearl Harbour. Japan attacked because US Navy prevented oil being shipped to Japan, Japan had no other source.
The U.S. Navy did not blockade Japan or “prevent oil being shipped” by closing the seas. The U.S. imposed an oil embargo and froze Japanese assets after Japan expanded its war in China and moved to invade other pacific countries. Surely you can understand why that was a good thing.
Oh shit, you got me! In all seriousness, you are not doing yourself any favors if this is how you typically debate a topic. I expect more from a HN netizen.
I think a teletext-like central information service for terminals would see use, because sometimes you just want to check the weather and news without being spammed with a billion ads and JavaScript
