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Google's Project Loon Can Now Launch Up To 20 Balloons Per Day, Fly 10x Longer
An anonymous reader writes Google [Thursday] shared an update from Project Loon, the company's initiative to bring high-speed Internet access to remote areas of the world via hot air balloons. Google says it now has the ability to launch up to 20 of these balloons per day. This is in part possible because the company has improved its autofill equipment to a point where it can fill a balloon in under five minutes. This is a major achievement, given that Google says filling a Project Loon balloon with enough air so that it is ready for flight is the equivalent of inflating 7,000 party balloons.
frist loony sist eleventyone.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What happened to actual units like cubic-meters? Too difficult for slashdot? Or is the number to small and just shows that "Google engineering" is not nearly as impressive as some people want it to look?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
These are not hot air balloons.
The inflatable part of the balloon is called a balloon envelope. A well-made balloon envelope is critical for allowing a balloon to last around 100 days in the stratosphere. Loonâ(TM)s balloon envelopes are made from sheets of polyethylene plastic, and they measure fifteen meters wide by twelve meters tall when fully inflated. When a balloon is ready to be taken out of service, gas is released from the envelope to bring the balloon down to Earth in a controlled descent. In the unlikely event that a balloon drops too quickly, a parachute attached to the top of the envelope is deployed.
http://www.google.com/loon/how...
Do you guys know that the Helium gas is in shortage?
This is due to the fact that inside each and every MRI machine there are some superconductors which needed to be cooled and Helium is the gas that they use
Amazing to see what Google is upto these days :D
You can fill it with as much air as you want, and it wont fly.
And that is not what the google statement says
How many olympic swimming pools are in a cubic meter?
What happened to actual units like cubic-meters? Too difficult for slashdot? Or is the number to small and just shows that "Google engineering" is not nearly as impressive as some people want it to look?
It's machines like you that insist my muti-terabyte backup job log files report in bytes, which drives humans like me crazy.
I hate having to convert shit to units that are completely uncommon.
And no, this has jack shit to do with that whole metric argument. Much like my byte example, certain unit breakdowns are fucking pointless and worthless no matter what system you use.
Not slashdot's fault; party balloon's the only unit given in "TFA".
How many olympic swimming pools are in a cubic meter?
ummmm zero. if you mean how many m3 in an Olympic sized pool then its about 2,500.
If I see one of those balloons, I will try to destroy it with my experimental weaponized drone. Seriously.
Zero only to 0 decimal points. The correct answer is 0.0004.
Is this project real, or just a sly attempt by Google to corner the market for helium?
How many people actually know what an olympic sized swimming pool looks like though for reference? You don't get the full impression of scale watching it on TV, and your local swimming pool doesn't compare.
Sounds like a wonderful idea... yet another source of littering on a planetary scale. And just what we need is yet another way of dissipating the supply of helium...
It's almost as though Slashdot is trying to lure me out to the front page, or something, by not showing responses to the JE messages.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Helium is a totally nonrenewal resource, extremely valuable for thousands of important applications like MRI machines and other superconductors, and yet the US govt is selling off its reserve at cutrate prices that encourages party balloons and other wasteful uses. Helium will likely become a scarce resource that impacts national security and we're being stupid about managing its future supply.
That's why the SI system has prefixes, like tera.
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So this is what passes for a major achievement on /. now? Higher pressure air filling a balloon faster tgan lower pressure air?
...why cat food cans generally have pop-tops, but tuna fish cans generally don't?
Project Loon strikes me this way: they are missing something obvious.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I did a little googling (har) and didn't find much in the way of environmental impact studies. How will all this affect air traffic? Bird migrations? The atmosphere, when releasing helium (or whatever) during a descent? Who is going to clean up the mess when, not if, the balloons get caught up in a storm and go down in the middle of the Pacific, or get strewn across the Himalayas?
I like to measure everything in terms of party balloons you insensitive clod!
Surely we should only be using helium in a reusable way.
I'm pretty sure this is all just full of hot air.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
It's approximation half a football field.
I wonder how long until the balloons also carry stingrays
Is that an American, Canadian, or Aussie Rules football field?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
We cannot get anything faster than 28.8 in the parts of america that is 15 miles from a town. What gives? These people have a copper phone line, power and in some cases natural gas. But no high speed internet. They do not do windows updates or update the browser or plugins until night when the computer can download all night. And they do not have a router so we have a windows machine right on the Internet ready for the latest Windows attacks.
I think Microsoft should pay a LOT to get broadband to those people so they can get patched. Microsoft has more money than the US Federal government, or it appears that way....
Your Average Joe
And a football field is about half the size of a stadium.
Zero to 0,1,2,3 dp...
Wouldn't it be possible to get some helium from Jupiter ? I'm not saying it would be easy, but would it be technically feasible ? Is it even possible to get close enough to mqybe fill a big balloon with helium and get it back to USA ? I know it sound crazy, but I'd like to know if this is science fiction or not..
Use k/G/T/E/... for SI and ki/Gi/Ti/Ei... for IEC. Peopls not following standards have no business expecting that anybody understands what they are talking about. Really, do not blame your cluelessness on me, blame it on yourself.
You are of course right about the useless units, like miles, gallons, stones, etc.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They are also a fail on a different level: Rubber balloons hold air under far higher pressure than hot-air balloons, so these are not even comparable if the volume aof a party balloon was somehow a defined quantity.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Which Aussie Rules football field? They're all different sizes.
I hereby disqualify grim-one on strong suspicion of being Aussie. ;)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.