Sorry for the political ad, but I'm frustrated by news articles that say "voters don't want Biden or Trump", but fail to mention RFK's campaign.
(stepping off the soapbox)
Oh, and did you hear that neither New Hampshire's nor Iowa's delegates to the Democratic national convention will be counted? Or rather, they'll automatically go to Biden. I kid you not.
(I'll just show myself out)
if you would like candidates like that to have a chance, petition your state to allow non party members to vote in primary elections
partisans of any party are a now minority in this country but the growing number of independents dont know it yet and have no representation, while their participation in the primaries would smooth out the candidate selection
in the mean time, fawning over non consensus candidates are a waste of time
it is accurate for there to be frustration over the two predictable candidates because rabid partisans are going to pretend that the rest of the population have a choice (as long as its the "choice" they like)
If they haven't finalized the design, I'd say they've got a ways to go.
I had a very difficult time trying to figure out if that subsea cable was online or not.
Except in Canada and elsewhere where the mobile and wireline providers are the same and deliberately keep mobile pricing high enough to disincentivize cord cutting.
And we're re-allocating more spectrum for 2-way data regularly.
Even in this hand-wavy announcement clutching their pearls at Starlink, they were careful to build in an extra few months for people to finish importing and hiding their Starlink terminals before they might start sending sternly-worded letters...
[0] https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Sh... (PDF)
So much of our governance, if not all, is based on geographic sovereignty, and satellites can supersede that.
I hope we finally get more global governance to deal with more and more global issues.
If you think about it it makes sense; otherwise governments could just ban the sale of Starlink equipment for violating the law.
You can still access your home country’s Netflix/streaming content. Log into websites that might geo-block (Homedepot.com blocks Europe…), log into work without security admins losing their mind about a “suspicious foreign access”.
Downside is that ads won’t localize into a language you don’t understand. I love it when that happens when travelling.
Because ultimately, that means more ways to bypass that firewall. Chinese people in the US could but a US SIM to avoid the firewall. They could even take it home.
But routing Chinese SIMs through the firewall is only acceptable if the reverse is also true: letting non-Chinese SIMs in China bypass it. Otherwise it's just more censorship.
[0] https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2023/news/lease-signed-with-o...
[1] https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2020/news/satellite-ground-st...
Base stations on remote islands are a routine thing to construct. The British Empire built the first global telegraph network using their island colonies, and some of these routes are still used for Internet cables. Ascension Island for example.
https://www.starlink.com/maritime
https://support.starlink.com/?topic=9eb841b3-2e43-a6fb-ecc7-...
We saw one version of this with Uber and Airbnb, essentially blowing up taxi and rental regulations, respectively. This is happening with AI, where regulation is hopelessly lost in its current state. We have seen this (unsuccessfully so far) with finance and the blockchain. And arguably this is a legacy which traces its way through industrial revolution (which saw the breakup of monarchy's monopoly on labor and land) or even the stirrup or the sword.
Breaking existing rules and being unregulatable is probably an intentional point of Starlink.
You can watch the original at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqReTJkjjg. (I picked the longer version at 3 minutes that includes the leadup to why the debate happened.)
Looking at Starlink's coverage map (for stationary service at least), they seem to very much be playing by the rules (i.e. international laws and regulations regarding satellite communication services): https://www.starlink.com/map
A "break rules and become unregulateable" approach would not have service boundaries corresponding to political borders.
The initial constellation also lacked polar orbits, which limits the maximum latitude at which satellites are available.
But both are being addressed now, and then it’s really only a question of regulatory approval.
This is the problem with deregulating businesses (as opposed to deregulating people).
But enforcing that monopoly against private users, i.e. not resellers/ISPs, seems somewhat extreme.
If you make it out of the right materials, it shouldn’t be too hard to conceal a starlink antenna without destroying the gain.
https://us.latinhoneyshop.com/blogs/news/the-mystery-of-red-...
> In the summer of 2016, the United Nations declared access to internet is a human right. While we are just beginning to realize the internet’s potential for our island and with the prospects of a high speed cable arriving on our shores, perhaps now is the time to re-evaluate the importance of information technology for EVERYONE. Can we truly reach our fullest potential if access to the World Wide Web is available only to those who can afford it?
> Inhabitants of the tiny tropical island of St Helena pay through the nose for an internet service that mainlanders would have considered painfully slow even during the pre-Netflix era.
> St Helena’s isolation and reliance on satellite technology, means that internet services are limited and expensive compared to many countries, and are a major barrier to development. The top residential package offered in St Helena provides 13.3 megabytes of data at a speed of 1.5 megabits per second, and costs £180.50 per month.
Starlink seems to be illegal to protect the government’s investment in a monopoly on the main satellite.