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Injured Man Is First Person Saved By a Police Drone In Canada
AchilleTalon writes "As the US continues to grapple with the idea of letting drones fly through the country's airspace, our neighbors to the north have reported a new milestone for unmanned aerial technology: the first life saved using a drone. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the province of Saskatchewan announced yesterday that they successfully used the small Draganflyer X4-ES helicopter drone to locate and treat an injured man whose car had flipped over in a remote, wooded area in near-freezing temperatures. Zenon Dragan, president and founder of the Draganfly company that makes the drone, said in a statement: 'to our knowledge, this is the first time that a life may have been saved with the use of a sUAS (small Unmanned Aerial System) helicopter.'"
They are a powerful technology, for good, or evil.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
When they are used for search and rescue. The problem is that our police force has been lobbying to get them for law enforcement, to be used to further spy on and exert control over the populace. If law enforcement wants to have drones for the sole and limited purpose of search and rescue thats fine by me. Id prefer if I didnt need to worry about some agency watching my every physical move.
Of course we Canadians would use drones for polite and considerate tasks. We have a reputation to keep up!
You forgot getting rid of the jews! (I joke I joke, he didn't get rid of the jews)
Interesting point, but I have to disagree. The V1 was a missile, not a drone. The V1 itself constituted the attacking weapon. I think the distinction with a drone attack would be that the drone itself isn't the attacking weapon, but rather it carries weapons to attack. Example: The Predator drone which carries Hellfire missiles.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
As with most government tools we will only hear about the good things until after they become common place. When tazers were originally deployed they were a "replacement only for lethal force", now they are used at the drop of the hat against loudmouthed teens, nonviolent protestors, and pregnant women with little to no repercussions. Right now it is all about saving people lost in the woods and catching murders, but 5 years after they are more ubiquitous you can be guaranteed that the stories will begin to flow of women catching one hovering outside their bathroom window, protestors finding unflattering images of themselves on police forums & former boyfriends/girlfriends of officers being stalked by drones (much like the cases of police misusing official databases to track/harass).
The man's life was saved by a policeman using an infrared camera which happened to be mounted on a drone.
It's important to get the gist of the story right here, because the decision to use drones domestically is a matter of trade offs. So it makes a difference whether you draw the spurious lesson "drones save lives", or the correct lesson, "infrared cameras save lives, drones save money in deploying such cameras in comparison to conventional helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft." One might reasonably choose to risk civil liberties because of certain life-or-death situation, but not choose to do so if its a matter of another ten or twenty bucks a year on your state or provincial taxes.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
He is, after all, the guy who killed Hitler...
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
The V1 had a rudimentary guidance system consisting of an anemometer in the nose that track distance and tipped the missile into a dive at the proper range.
So yes it was the first guided drone.
If you're mixing them, I prefer my metaphors shaken, not stirred.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
If you throw a crack pipe at the head of a bank robber and distract the robber long enough to subdue the robber, you could say that a crack pipe saved the life of the bank manager.
The effect of a tool depends on how it is used.
Then again, a person carrying a crack pipe at a bank would probably have used the tool for its usual purpose, and would be unable to successfully aim the pipe at the robber's head, so the odds of a crack pipe routinely saving lives are about as slim as the odds of a drone routinely saving lives.
There are commercial satellites with the resolution to read your license plate
Satellites are not comparable to drones. To achieve good resolution, satellites need to be in near earth orbit, which means they are moving overhead at thousands of km/hr. They can take a snapshot, but they cannot loiter and observe continuously, and they cannot zoom in real time. They are an expensive and limited asset, which means they are not available to the local cop who has a grudge against you because you are dating his ex-girlfriend.
By that logic, the "drone" in the article wasn't even a "drone", since it doesn't do any of it's own onboard guidance. It's really just a fancy RC helicopter.
I don't respond to AC's.
I'd say it's worse, yes. I doubt satellites would be very useful for spying purposes.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
but when the police department does it, it's evil?
The government has the power to ruin people's lives, so the implications are far different. Furthermore, the information would be available to the entire government, not just a single person.
And unmanned drones are different from helicopters (and I don't think helicopters should be spying on anyone, either) in that they can be used en masse far more easily.
but realistically you're not that important or interesting to begin with.
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. As long as the government doesn't abuse me, all is well!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Read a licence plate, if so then barely and only because there are only so many alphanumeric characters and you know how each one fogs out. That besides the point, sattelite imaging is often overestimated, the fact that you can take a look at any place in the world does not mean you can see the whole world with one look. Think of it like that, make a pinhole in a piece of paper and put the paper over a map, now try to read "dragons be here" through the pinhole. Same problem with finding interesting things with satellites, if you dont know where to point the sattelite in the first place you cant find anything.
There are commercial satellites with the resolution to read your license plate
High school physics FAIL!
Ezekiel 23:20
I think the issue many people have, besides the imagery, is drones drastically lower the barrier to abuse by police departments. Putting a fixed wing plan or a helicopter in the air is a fairly big deal, there is paperwork and people involved, there will be fuel and maintenance to deal with, and generally only large departments actually have easy access to them.
Drones on the other hand are much much cheaper to acquire and operate, and will probably be done with much less oversight. And unfortunately the police have a reputation for abusing powers when they are easy to access.
So I think people feel that the main reason current aircraft have not been heavily abused is their relative inaccessibility, and that the problem with drones is not that they add fundamentally new capabilities, but because they make those capabilities cheap and accessible.
Perhaps another distinguishing characteristic of a drone (vs a V1) might be that a drone returns to a "base" and lands (or is otherwise recovered) to complete its mission.
For hire.
I happen to be a search & rescue volunteer here in the southwestern US. (As a matter of interest, we are all 100% volunteers. We don't get paid for anything except fuel when we're on a search. We buy all of our own equipment and devote a lot of our own time to train regularly.) Recently, we were approached by some university students who built an inexpensive UAV ($3000) specifically for SAR uses. I personally though their platform had a lot of merit. It's a low-cost foam airplane that uses a customized version of Ardupilot to take photos regularly while flying a pattern over a designated region. They can photograph a square mile in about 30 minutes. You then have a couple of people do a photo analysis of the results. The photos are all geotagged so you can pull a coordinate off the photo for some object of interest. Sadly, the political climate is such that the tin-foil hat types have scared the county board of supervisors and the local Sheriff's office away from even trying the platform out on some training exercises. What's worse is that even though our SAR organization is an independent 501(c)3 and not part of any law-enforcement agency, the managers still won't try out the concept. I wonder how people would feel if some child died of exposure because we didn't have this tool in the toolbox.
This platform is also an order of magnitude cheaper than a DraganFlyer and can cover a hell of a lot more ground without changing out the battery. 15 minutes of air time isn't nearly enough.
its commonly called
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superresolution
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.