The reason current ISP are able to get monopolies is because of them "convincing" local government officials to give them said monopolies. Satellite internet is regulated by the FCC, and thus has a lot more coverage of the issue. The FCC has already approved of a few other LEO satellite networks, like Oneweb, Telesat, and Space Norway, for US operations.
LEO satellites are much closer to the Earth than the existing internet satellites, which are way up in a geostationary orbit; that and the much larger number of satellites fixes most of the issues you mentioned. Being closer means the latency should be in the 25-50ms range, comparable to existing cable, and the larger number of satellites should mean much higher bandwidth and data caps for each customer. It will also help with the weather issue.
Another thing to consider is that Starlink will also end up making the rural cellphone service your parents switched to better - Starlink will be highly suitable for the backhaul on rural cell towers.
Nothing stopping other companies from setting up their own satellite networks, well unless SpaceX starts refusing to launch satellites for other networks, and other launch providers can't match the SpaceX price. Anyways though, there will still be competition from other land based internet services; for that matter, Starlink could actually end up improving those ground based networks - many cell phone providers will be very interested in using Starlink to provide the backhaul on their 5G cell phone towers, for example.
To add some math about the amount of available space - the Earth has a surface area of 510 million square kilometers. Give each satellite a comfortable 25x25km block (625km^2) area in its orbit, and each plane can hold over 800,000 satellites. Add in that in the LEO orbits these satellites are in will bring any debris or broken satellites down in 10 years or so, and things will be fine.
If the BFR/Starship is anywhere near as cheap as Ol'Musky is projecting, setting up a bunch of satellite telescopes in higher orbits will be possible. That should easily more than make up for any data lost from existing telescopes getting more contaminated data.
Flipout smartphones are being made - look up the Samsung W2019 for a recent one. For some reason they only sell them in China & a couple other parts of eastern Asian; you would have to custom import one if you lived elsewhere.
There are also SpaceX's plans that seem to be moving forward at a stellar pace. That test vehicle, Starhopper, they are building down in Texas is almost done, and will be doing low-altitude engine tests in a few weeks. The first prototype "Starship" proper should be done later this year, and doing sub-orbital tests either by the end of the year or early 2020. If SpaceX gets its Starship flying at anywhere near the estimated cost, all sorts of interesting space projects become viable. The whole project has gotten speed-up when they decided to switch from carbon fiber covered in heatshield material, to stainless steel with an active cooling system. Turns out that steel is a lot easier to work with than carbon fiber.
Hopefully the BFR works; if Ol'Musky gets it flying for anywhere near the projected cost, it would have little issue with recovering Hubble and bringing it down. And for that matter, the BFR would also be capable of hauling up much larger replacement telescopes.
Almost all the plastic trash going into the sea is coming from a handful of rivers in Asia & Africa. So why not put this plastic trap at the river mouths of those high trash rivers, like the Ganges or Yangtze? Seems to me like it would be easier to catch the plastic in such concentrated locations, before UV rays & ocean waves have broken it down into little bits.
Look at it this way - right now there are more than 52,000 merchant ships sailing the seas. Have we run out of space in the ocean? And then add in the fact that space is 3d, so adding in vertical stacks, the number of satellites that can be safely fit in LEO is huge.
Or for harder numbers, the earth has a surface area of 510 million km^2. Figure 1 km^2 area per satellite, and 1 km between orbital levels, and LEO orbits from say 600 km to 1000 km, and you get 204 billion satellites.
Drug companies spend hundreds of millions to develop a single new drug, and get it approved for sale. Yet they only get 20 years to sell it before any schmuck with a FDA certified production facility can take the patent info an make their own version that gets sold for $4 a month at Walmart. Why should your book get more protection than life-saving medications? The same is true for all sorts of inventions that have heavy R&D cost. Books, on the other hand can written on even the cheapest computers available for sale, and are something that usually only takes one person to write.
I think that copyright length should be rolled back to the same length as patents, 20 years. It just seems strange to me that cheesy romance novels & generic action movies get longer amounts of protection than life saving drugs, new battery chemistries, or improved engines. 20 years should be plenty for any book, movie, or game to recoup its development cost, but would allow adults to take the media of their youth and put their owns spins on it, coming up with all sorts of interesting things. Imagine if genuine Star Wars fan could have come up with their own set of prequels & sequels to the original series. I am pretty sure at least one group would have given us a better version that what Lucas and later Disney came up with.
Another thing that should be looked to is coming with some sort of copyright registry; with most valuable property like real estate, automobiles, boats, and even IP like patents & trademarks, there is a pretty easy way to find out who owns what. Copyright doesn't have that, which leads to works being unable to be used since no one knows who owns it. Plus, if IP holders want the government to protect their property, well, they should maybe be taxed on it, with say an assessed tax on the estimated value of the copyright, similar to how property is taxed today. Now, obviously, given the volume of works created, maybe have the tax kick in at values of more than say, $1 million, since trying to tax every little song or short story would be a bookkeeping nightmare.
Patent laws are actually pretty reasonable, at least length-wise: 20 years, which is long enough to payoff off various high R&D cost inventions, like new pharmaceuticals, while still allowing people to see the patent go public domain within a fraction of the typical human lifespan. I think that setting copyright at the same 20 years would be a good idea.
Maybe we should only take immigrants from countries that are organized enough to have credit scores? This proposal seems reasonable enough to me; importing people who will never pay more in taxes than the receive in benefits is just dumb.
Personally, I think we should limit immigrants to countries that have nicer social welfare systems than the US. With any large group of people, you will both productive, hard working people, and lazy people who leech off of others. When you bring in people from countries with worse social programs than the US, it ends up being a crapshoot on what kind of people you get. But when it comes to countries with more extensive welfare benefits, well the lazy ones will stay home, while the only ones that would move here would be coming for higher salaries and pay plenty in taxes.
There is a free market solution to this - LEO satellite internet. Several vendors like Oneweb and Starlink have already gotten FCC approval for their satellite constellations, and Starlink has test satellites in orbit already. Once these networks are built out, the rural broadband issue is solved.
If you are going to pass out subsidies to anyone, why not the various LEO satellite internet projects going on? Starlink's network is estimated to cost $10 billion to build out fully, and would be able to cover every rural area.
It seems like there is a solution to this problem that is already in the works - Low Earth Orbit based satellite internet. Several companies are working on this already - Starlink already has a couple test satellites in orbit. The best solution to this issue would be to just keep the government out of the way of these networks going up.
Hopefully the various companies planning (like Oneweb & Starlink) to launch satellites for LEO internet are successful. Starlink already has a couple test satellites in orbit. This should basically fix this issue; a large enough LEO constellation of satellites should be able to provide access to all rural Americans (and rural people anywhere else that local government lets Starlink or Oneweb sell service to) at a price that is much cheaper than installing cable/fiber everywhere. By being in low Earth orbit, that fixes the latency issues that plague existing internet satellites in higher orbits, and the larger number of satellites will allow for faster service/more customers - Starlink plans on launching over 4,000 satellites in the next six years, and another 7,000 after that.
What if the Federal government says no to that? I mean, the feds could pass a bill requiring that people purchase a certain percentage of their electricity from coal or natural gas if they wanted too. We now have legal precedent that the feds can force you to engage in commerce against your will.
This system seems nice and all, but what is LA County going to do to fix its voter registration rolls. Currently LA county has a 112% voter registration rate, which is obviously means some shenanigans are going on. Judicial Watch is currently suing California over this. https://www.judicialwatch.org/...
No matter what kind of security Google places on this, it will always be possible for the recipient to save a copy for their own records. The brute force approach of simply taking a picture of the email with another phone/camera will always work. And that is before the hackers do their stuff. So don't trust this system to keep your messages truly confidential.
So Ol'Musky wants to cut down on LA's traffic, with a project that won't need anything from the local government except approval & right of ways. So why not let him give it a try. Absolute worst case is that it doesn't pan out, and the city just ends up using the tunnel as storage space or fills it back up with dirt.
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The reason current ISP are able to get monopolies is because of them "convincing" local government officials to give them said monopolies. Satellite internet is regulated by the FCC, and thus has a lot more coverage of the issue. The FCC has already approved of a few other LEO satellite networks, like Oneweb, Telesat, and Space Norway, for US operations.
LEO satellites are much closer to the Earth than the existing internet satellites, which are way up in a geostationary orbit; that and the much larger number of satellites fixes most of the issues you mentioned. Being closer means the latency should be in the 25-50ms range, comparable to existing cable, and the larger number of satellites should mean much higher bandwidth and data caps for each customer. It will also help with the weather issue. Another thing to consider is that Starlink will also end up making the rural cellphone service your parents switched to better - Starlink will be highly suitable for the backhaul on rural cell towers.
Nothing stopping other companies from setting up their own satellite networks, well unless SpaceX starts refusing to launch satellites for other networks, and other launch providers can't match the SpaceX price. Anyways though, there will still be competition from other land based internet services; for that matter, Starlink could actually end up improving those ground based networks - many cell phone providers will be very interested in using Starlink to provide the backhaul on their 5G cell phone towers, for example.
To add some math about the amount of available space - the Earth has a surface area of 510 million square kilometers. Give each satellite a comfortable 25x25km block (625km^2) area in its orbit, and each plane can hold over 800,000 satellites. Add in that in the LEO orbits these satellites are in will bring any debris or broken satellites down in 10 years or so, and things will be fine.
If the BFR/Starship is anywhere near as cheap as Ol'Musky is projecting, setting up a bunch of satellite telescopes in higher orbits will be possible. That should easily more than make up for any data lost from existing telescopes getting more contaminated data.
Flipout smartphones are being made - look up the Samsung W2019 for a recent one. For some reason they only sell them in China & a couple other parts of eastern Asian; you would have to custom import one if you lived elsewhere.
There are also SpaceX's plans that seem to be moving forward at a stellar pace. That test vehicle, Starhopper, they are building down in Texas is almost done, and will be doing low-altitude engine tests in a few weeks. The first prototype "Starship" proper should be done later this year, and doing sub-orbital tests either by the end of the year or early 2020. If SpaceX gets its Starship flying at anywhere near the estimated cost, all sorts of interesting space projects become viable. The whole project has gotten speed-up when they decided to switch from carbon fiber covered in heatshield material, to stainless steel with an active cooling system. Turns out that steel is a lot easier to work with than carbon fiber.
Hopefully the BFR works; if Ol'Musky gets it flying for anywhere near the projected cost, it would have little issue with recovering Hubble and bringing it down. And for that matter, the BFR would also be capable of hauling up much larger replacement telescopes.
Almost all the plastic trash going into the sea is coming from a handful of rivers in Asia & Africa. So why not put this plastic trap at the river mouths of those high trash rivers, like the Ganges or Yangtze? Seems to me like it would be easier to catch the plastic in such concentrated locations, before UV rays & ocean waves have broken it down into little bits.
I would wager on Space X being up and running first with their Starlink service.
Look at it this way - right now there are more than 52,000 merchant ships sailing the seas. Have we run out of space in the ocean? And then add in the fact that space is 3d, so adding in vertical stacks, the number of satellites that can be safely fit in LEO is huge. Or for harder numbers, the earth has a surface area of 510 million km^2. Figure 1 km^2 area per satellite, and 1 km between orbital levels, and LEO orbits from say 600 km to 1000 km, and you get 204 billion satellites.
Drug companies spend hundreds of millions to develop a single new drug, and get it approved for sale. Yet they only get 20 years to sell it before any schmuck with a FDA certified production facility can take the patent info an make their own version that gets sold for $4 a month at Walmart. Why should your book get more protection than life-saving medications? The same is true for all sorts of inventions that have heavy R&D cost. Books, on the other hand can written on even the cheapest computers available for sale, and are something that usually only takes one person to write.
I think that copyright length should be rolled back to the same length as patents, 20 years. It just seems strange to me that cheesy romance novels & generic action movies get longer amounts of protection than life saving drugs, new battery chemistries, or improved engines. 20 years should be plenty for any book, movie, or game to recoup its development cost, but would allow adults to take the media of their youth and put their owns spins on it, coming up with all sorts of interesting things. Imagine if genuine Star Wars fan could have come up with their own set of prequels & sequels to the original series. I am pretty sure at least one group would have given us a better version that what Lucas and later Disney came up with.
Another thing that should be looked to is coming with some sort of copyright registry; with most valuable property like real estate, automobiles, boats, and even IP like patents & trademarks, there is a pretty easy way to find out who owns what. Copyright doesn't have that, which leads to works being unable to be used since no one knows who owns it. Plus, if IP holders want the government to protect their property, well, they should maybe be taxed on it, with say an assessed tax on the estimated value of the copyright, similar to how property is taxed today. Now, obviously, given the volume of works created, maybe have the tax kick in at values of more than say, $1 million, since trying to tax every little song or short story would be a bookkeeping nightmare.
Patent laws are actually pretty reasonable, at least length-wise: 20 years, which is long enough to payoff off various high R&D cost inventions, like new pharmaceuticals, while still allowing people to see the patent go public domain within a fraction of the typical human lifespan. I think that setting copyright at the same 20 years would be a good idea.
I just want to give a shout out for Terry Davis, and hope he is working on his TempleOS in the sky. Also, f*ck glow in the dark CIA n1ggers.
Sounds you should hope Starlink gets up and running correctly.
Maybe we should only take immigrants from countries that are organized enough to have credit scores? This proposal seems reasonable enough to me; importing people who will never pay more in taxes than the receive in benefits is just dumb. Personally, I think we should limit immigrants to countries that have nicer social welfare systems than the US. With any large group of people, you will both productive, hard working people, and lazy people who leech off of others. When you bring in people from countries with worse social programs than the US, it ends up being a crapshoot on what kind of people you get. But when it comes to countries with more extensive welfare benefits, well the lazy ones will stay home, while the only ones that would move here would be coming for higher salaries and pay plenty in taxes.
There is a free market solution to this - LEO satellite internet. Several vendors like Oneweb and Starlink have already gotten FCC approval for their satellite constellations, and Starlink has test satellites in orbit already. Once these networks are built out, the rural broadband issue is solved.
If you are going to pass out subsidies to anyone, why not the various LEO satellite internet projects going on? Starlink's network is estimated to cost $10 billion to build out fully, and would be able to cover every rural area.
It seems like there is a solution to this problem that is already in the works - Low Earth Orbit based satellite internet. Several companies are working on this already - Starlink already has a couple test satellites in orbit. The best solution to this issue would be to just keep the government out of the way of these networks going up.
Hopefully the various companies planning (like Oneweb & Starlink) to launch satellites for LEO internet are successful. Starlink already has a couple test satellites in orbit. This should basically fix this issue; a large enough LEO constellation of satellites should be able to provide access to all rural Americans (and rural people anywhere else that local government lets Starlink or Oneweb sell service to) at a price that is much cheaper than installing cable/fiber everywhere. By being in low Earth orbit, that fixes the latency issues that plague existing internet satellites in higher orbits, and the larger number of satellites will allow for faster service/more customers - Starlink plans on launching over 4,000 satellites in the next six years, and another 7,000 after that.
What if the Federal government says no to that? I mean, the feds could pass a bill requiring that people purchase a certain percentage of their electricity from coal or natural gas if they wanted too. We now have legal precedent that the feds can force you to engage in commerce against your will.
This system seems nice and all, but what is LA County going to do to fix its voter registration rolls. Currently LA county has a 112% voter registration rate, which is obviously means some shenanigans are going on. Judicial Watch is currently suing California over this. https://www.judicialwatch.org/...
No matter what kind of security Google places on this, it will always be possible for the recipient to save a copy for their own records. The brute force approach of simply taking a picture of the email with another phone/camera will always work. And that is before the hackers do their stuff. So don't trust this system to keep your messages truly confidential.
So Ol'Musky wants to cut down on LA's traffic, with a project that won't need anything from the local government except approval & right of ways. So why not let him give it a try. Absolute worst case is that it doesn't pan out, and the city just ends up using the tunnel as storage space or fills it back up with dirt.