Not pointless, that's the best use of Starlink with phones. Base station backhaul gets the benefits of not having to run fiber + space for a bigger antenna w/ better signal to noise ratio
SNR is not a function of antenna size. The size is dictated by the wavelength, not how desperate you are to receive a signal.
Directionality does make an antenna larger as it usually involves reflectors and directors, the size and placement of which is also a fraction of the wavelength, but if they are actually able to do direct to phone with decent reception and arbitrary coverage, then that beats having to set up base stations to cover a small circle even if you get 10-15 dB better SNR.
This might give you LTE in, say, all of the Australian outback, all of Alaska, along the Andes mountain range, etc.
The deployment cost is even lower when you don’t need to put a tower on the ground, which is the point of this. They can cover the entire U.S. to eliminate coverage gaps using the starlink satellites.
For remote areas that might still be tens to hundreds of kilometers of poles and fiber just to add coverage to one remote area. Then you move on to the next.
No one wants to do that across all of Alaska or the Australian outback.
In the sense "you can buy fiber cheaply by the ton", not. But in the sense "laying down fiber in the mountains of Papua-New Guinea, or in the Canadian Arctic, or a simmering warzone full of militias", that is indeed a major bottleneck.
It's absolutely the bottleneck in some remote areas, and satellite backhaul for terrestrial mobile networks has been a thing before Starlink, as far as I know.
+1 for reading projects. There's rarely one, perfect way to solve a problem, and there's certainly no silver bullet pattern in software. The more patterns and types of solutions you've seen, the bigger the set of tools you'll have in your mental toolbox when faced with a new problem.
These answers seem to be quite out of date, as the aerospace industry (most notably SpaceX) has been using Linux as part of their rocket control systems for quite a while now.
US Government: You have to careful about potentially leaking export controlled material, or your employees will be held personally responsible and go to jail.
US Government: You have to careful about potentially leaking export controlled material, or your employees will be held personally responsible and go to jail. Also, you have to comply with non-discrimination law while doing that.
SpaceX: Okay, so we’ll ignore non-discrimination law and excuse it as “being careful about potentially leaking export controlled material”.
It's almost like the US government is trying to ensure DoD dollars don't go very far.
More importantly, from a national security perspective, it doesn't make sense to exempt every refugee and asylee from ITAR restrictions. The benefit is negligible to the typical refugee and the risk is immense.
> More importantly, from a national security perspective, it doesn’t make sense to exempt every refugee and asylee from ITAR restrictions.
Justifying workplace discrimination on a generally prohibited bases on the basis of “well, if the government regulations that we are relying on to justify our discrimination were revised in a way that we feel makes better policy sense, they would require the discrimination we are doing, even though they explicitly do not as currently written” is…probably not an argument that will succeed in any US court.
Your comment is completely tangential to the point I was making.
My primary concern isn't "succeeding in any US court". I'm not involved with SpaceX or the job applicants who were passed over. My concern is much more around the use of tax revenues, the overall security of the country and the stability of the world order. There are a multitude of cases the DOJ could be taking on right now. That this is what they choose to litigate is a clear warning sign.
This is a really dishonest interpretation of events. US law states that asylees have been vetted thoroughly and can take these positions the same as any US citizen or green card holder (if you had read the article).
You can't vet anyone thoroughly though! You can reply yes I love the united states a million times, read the constitution a million times and still be part of some sect.
