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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.
"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)
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.
More like 'Enjoy high speed Internet access for free! Just sign in using your Facebook account!'.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
"Laser Internet Drones" Am I the only one that read this as a really good way to prevent trolls on Facebook?
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results - often referred to as "natural," "organic," or "earned" results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.
Started out quite sensibly, then went totally bananas beginning from the China thingy... I mean, how many Chinese care (or even know) how wealthy their nation is? The only ones, outside the rich minority and ruling class (the "communist" party, the rich and western corporations), who care about keeping the Chinese socio-economical system as it is are greedy multinational corporations and extreme-capitalistic countries like USA.
The average Chinese, if they were given free access to information couldn't care less - for them the system needs to change. Oh, but that would make things more expensive for us wealthy westerners. Too fscking bad.
...and then we blame internet for terrorism....
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
tl;dr