There would absolutely have to be safety measures on this to avoid that exact scenario from occurring. I cannot remember the author of the book right offhand, but there's a book called PowerSat that goes through something very similar to this. As long as the beam is diffuse and not incredibly focused, it should be fine if something flies through it like a bird or if the beam gets knocked off course, it wouldn't damage infrastructure. There would also need to be good auto cut off functionality built into the thing so that if it realized it was off target, maybe by like a focusing laser or something, it would automatically shut itself down.
shortwavesurfer
Has anybody ever seen the movie The Core? This kind of reminds me of that.
They've just been deprecated to doing it the same way that every other custom operating system has been doing it for a long time. It makes it slower, but it doesn't make it impossible.
If these were seats on a plane, they got bumped from first class down to coach at the very back. They'll still get there. They just won't have the nice leg room and the extra peanuts.
I would rather have Linux phones, but while those exist, they are not mainstream and ready quite yet.
So, custom Android, such as Lineage or Graphene, is about the closest we can get for now.
Honestly, the downfall of Apple would be good news in my book.
I know Google is not the greatest about it, but at least on Android, you can install third party app stores and custom operating systems.
F, f, fifty billion dollars chuckles
Will ya take a check?