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Drone Guides Fuel Shipment to Alaskan Town
pigrabbitbear writes with an excerpt from an article at Motherboard.tv about a non-evil use for unmanned aircraft: "Ask anyone in Nome, Alaska right now how they feel about surveillance drones and you'll likely get unequivocally high praise. Had a remotely-piloted surveillance aircraft not been monitoring Bering Sea ice flows over the past week an emergency shipment of 1.3 million gallons of oil may not have reached the iced-in, snow-drifted town as soon as it did. ... The drone, which was launched from Nome's shores by University of Alaska – Fairbanks Geophysical Institute researchers, isn't the sort of eye-in-the-sky most often associated with the U.S.'s various hulking, 40-foot wing-spanning reconnaissance planes ... The Aeryon Scout micro unmanned aerial vehicle resembles a 'smoke detector with wings and legs,' according to the Anchorage Daily News, and is part and parcel of a rapidly expanding fleet of mid- to micro-sized sky robots being flown domestically for all manner of tedious or risky intelligence gathering gigs."
It's not the drones that people have a problem with; It's how they're used. No amount of positive publicity on their 'good' uses can erase the fact that many, if not most, law enforcement agencies envision an armada of cheap surveillance drones monitoring everyone and everyplace they decide they don't like. Protesting wall street? Drones. Add in the crowd-control microwave emitter for only an additional $2,999. How about some drones patrolling over the freeways during rush hour, equipped with a radar gun? Now an officer can write tickets for anyone speeding over a several mile stretch of road, rather than just a particular point. Only $1,599 after mail in rebate. The list goes on.
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I guess Iceroad Truckers had the month off. :(
I thought they would drive through anything including snow drifts. I am so disillusioned.
I just wonder why someone would be willing to live in a place that is by all measures a risky place to establish a life. Why? When I think of the polar bear, the weather, the isolation and so on, I fail to see the reason why I would want to live there. Man is surely intriguing.
Some people like to be closer to nature than others. It's a risky thing to do, but the Earth is a beautiful place, and that's fulfillment enough for those people.
I just wonder why someone would be willing to live in a place that is by all measures a risky place to establish a life. Why? When I think of the polar bear, the weather, the isolation and so on, I fail to see the reason why I would want to live there. Man is surely intriguing.
Yes we are intriguing. Other people might say the same about living in a city.
Noise level, crowding, crime, expense, risk of getting hit by a motor vehicle, etc, etc.
To each his own.
Or, that's where your family is from. Nome started out as a Inupiat settlement, then morphed into a Gold Rush town. Much of the population is Alaska Native and the rest are just basically crazy.
It's an odd life, but makes more sense than living in Cleveland.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Exactly. if you want to be close to nature come to a state like AK where it's blanket white wherever you see and land is cheap so you can own your own bog and have as much nature as you desire. my GF's family own their own bog up near Fairbanks and i just love going up there to spend a week because i can sit on the front porch and enjoy my lunch while watching a herd of caribou graze not 60 feet from my seat. Of course you gotta watch the Polar Bears on the back patio, the grandkids have been fed to them so so long they park their little fat asses on the back patio not 10 feet from you and if you don't throw them a snack they start growling at you "Hey asshole, I'm right here and if you don't feed me some dog food, then you're next. WTF? What's a endangered species gotta do to get some of those calories man?". If its something they really love like a can of Alpo or a steak, they might take it out of your hand and leave the hand alone. Then again, they might not.
Its really beautiful country with miles and miles of unspoiled wilderness you can enjoy, fishing, hunting, snowmobiling, or just being hypothermic with a survival suit and sleeping bag on a cold afternoon, its just nice, if your survive that is. It also only stops snowing a couple of days a year and almost never melts except under the houses so its a hell of a lot colder than a New York City hooker. How them folks live in those big cities is just beyond me, hell you have people dressing like it was Halloween pretty much every day of the year.s Right now, there's hardly a soul in site, just the sun barely above the horizon and 60 mph winds. I'll take that over traffic jams any day of the week.
There, I made it a bit more topical.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!