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Facebook Successfully Tests Laser Internet Drones
rtoz writes: At its F8 conference in San Francisco, Facebook announced the first hardware it plans to use to beam the Internet down to billions of people around the world. Codenamed "Aquila," the solar-powered drone has a wingspan comparable to a Boeing 737, but weighs less than a small car. It will be powered by solar panels on its wings, and it will be able to stay at altitudes of more than 60,000 feet for months at a time. Facebook says it'll begin test flights this summer, with a broader rollout over the next several years. The drones were tested over the UK recently, and everything worked as expected.
Yay! A more direct way to feed Facebook's data mining operation. Sign me up!
- A. Retard
"internet". yeah right. You're not fooling anybody Zuckerberg.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So I assume we can expect this airspace to become cluttered like LEO satellite space? The only exception is when these crash, they come down when I high risk of killing people.
I gotta say, a private corporation like Facebook, flying solar powered communications drones using lasers ... that's more than a little creepy.
Welcome to the dystopian future, kiddies.
Shit's all down hill from here.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Please boost my stock, we are out of useful ideas.......
Do you think anyone that needs the internet beamed to them in this crap will be a useful paying customer? The cost of a laden swallow, gripping it by the husk, vs energy costs, repair, maintenance, and insurance will certainly make this in the end, what it appears to be now.
Mod me down into oblivion if you must, but not everyone lives in Seoul, Tokyo, Stockholm, or NYC with insanely fast fiber optics.
This is going to be great for people in rural areas, developing countries, and others who otherwise would remain hostages to the poor reliability and high latency of radio and satellite internet.
April Fools is still five days away.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
frickin laser drones.
Gross malinvestment by management for a stock whose price is held up by sentiment. You hold Facebook stock at your peril. How many of these guys will build a decent website and then think their true calling is aerospace?
So we build a light aircraft that is as big as a jet liner but weighs less then a car. We plan to broadcast internet through a laser system which nobody points out how that works? Plus we expect these aircraft to stay in the air for up to 3 months on solar power alone? Enduring all kinds of weather, other air craft and probably countless drones flying around too. Of course nobody has even bothered to figure in the liability and risk factors of such a large craft interfering with other air traffic, crashing into populated areas or the added costs of other infrastructure to support such a project and support system. This sounds like a system far too complicated for its own good. I guess engineers prefer to seek out the hardest solution these days because its more exciting. Its like the old saying how many engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Hundreds! because you have to design a robot, software and create a robotics program to reverse screw a bulb while holding it with precise pressure so as to not break the bulb. Then screw in a new bulb with the same focus on torque, pressure and tension on bulb.
Yea, its scary how over engineered life is today.
How do they plan to get through clouds?
to beam the Internet down
*The internet in accordance with local and national regulations pertaining to censorship and surveillance.
to billions of people around the world.
Some restrictions apply, billions of people will be considered based on race, gender, social position and annual income as potential revenue factors when subscribing or continuing to use the product. underfunded schools and desolate post-capitalist urban areas wracked by systemic unemployment and without adequate starbucks will be avoided. Remember: you are the product, the drone is merely another way to deliver that product to consumer affiliate corporations.
Good people go to bed earlier.
What if I don't want an unmanned fixed wing aircraft loitering over my head for months, just waiting to have a catastrophic mechanical failure and kill me randomly?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/03/27/1225228/broadband-isp-betrayal-forces-homeowner-to-sell-new-house
These drones will be the only way this guy will get broadband at his new house.
Will the lobbying ensure that faraday cages are built around one ISP cities?
"Laser Internet Drones" Am I the only one that read this as a really good way to prevent trolls on Facebook?
I don't understand why such a creepy person like Zuckerberg is given this much money by investors. Why is this system so much better then the ancien regime when who had the money was decided by who your parents were? It is because smart people who through hard and smart work build a profitable business that makes the society better. But in the case of Facebook, what is the thing that makes Facebook profitable? What is the positive impact on the society? Why do they get all this money? It's not only Facebook, there are many, many businesses like this who are over-valuated. We already had the tech bubble some 15 years ago. It can't be that investor forgot about this bubble?
But why is Facebook not a bubble? Why do investors trust this company as an investor in long term projects like this 'bring internet to the poor' plan?
In my 'alu hat on'-mode I would say that American political elite and their accomplices, the elite of the financial sector, saw that social media was something that would not go away, and a source of valuable private information and a system for mind control. If social media was really that promising like foreseen, it had to be in American hands, and why not this website of this moldable college drop out? Just use your connection to advertise the site world wide through the Reuters News agency. Do you remember how FaceBook peacefully 'spread democracy' in the Arabic world a few years ago? There wasn't one news journal that didn't have special bulletin about FaceBook at that time. It was the death knell for all competing social media around the world.
When I had a popular website that had a lot of personal information, I would not even think about sharing it with third parties, especially not big insurance or financial companies, and not the government. But when I'm offered many billions????
About the bubble, there are also opportunities when a bubble bursts. Just profit as long as it is inflated, but just gamble on it's burst with the profits you make from it. The really big investors know how to handle this kind of bubble, they also have the power the gently guide the market to let the bubble burst... meanwhile the bubble keeps on getting inflated by these kind of 'too good to be true' inventions.
Internet and social media has brought terrorism and instability over the Arabic world, a civilized society with smart people, a huge potential of technological progress with all the universities around the Arabic world - the oldest in the world - , but a problem with fanatical religious leaders and rebels who use the social media and internet to preach their views on religions (called hate preaches by terrorist in the West, but are just expressions of freedom of religion and free speech imo).
What would you think that this free flow of information will bring to the developing world that don't even have a civilized religious system?
This is even a threat to the stability of China one of the oldest continuous high level societies of the world, hence why they require the Great Firewall. Not for every region or culture free flow of information is the 'good' thing. Many times free flow of information will destabilize the existing socio-economic situation, and that's not always the good thing to do.
Even in the West we need to hide a lot of information. But here it is done through corporate firewalls or using the propaganda machine to make some information unethical and career breaking when discussed in public. I have seen examples of professors who got silenced because they found inconsistencies in the history how it is know and thought today. Inconsistencies that potentially have a high impact on the religions of the West and Middle East and the cultural identity of the people. Just imagine if everyone was free to say what they want, if all the secret deals between corporations and or governments were out there available for public eyes? Even our freedom loving, free speech loving society doesn't want to go there.
A western controlled free internet in impoverished third world countries don't have the tools to hide the information to keep the internal peace, so it will most certainly lead to years of instability in these countries.
I have not clue how this relates to their business model, but more power to them anyway. I hope society learns a lot from experiments like this -- will its solar panels really supply enough power? At 60k feet they can cover a humungous land area, which potentially means millions of customers. I can't imagine the power consumption of laser communication between this unit and all of the potential customers. Can this really cover an area that big or is it just flying that high to stay out of flight levels of commercial aircraft?
So many questions that this experiment might be able to answer.
Do not look at Internet with remaining good eye.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
What do you think a phase-conjugate tracking system is for?
Have gnu, will travel.
Look ma! The Internet is really in the cloud!
With Fricking LASERS?
Zuckbook will never give us great unwashed unfettered Internet access, but only a one way trip into the bidding paddock for advertisers to assess us - the product - a monetary value.
And to think FB will not be vending everyone out to all the state security organs of the world for 30 Ag is utter cluelessness.
I'm sure it'll all be extra-logged, extra-data-mined. It's bad enough FB puts their stupid icons on third-party sites everywhere.. if they are actually -providing- internet access, they'll be able to scrape everything. Eeeeeccch.
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Just for the sake of argument.
Either way, both companies are in cahoots with Major League Baseball. They're watching us.
-Legal.Troll