131–140 of 299 posts
Eric Brewer, who joined Google a year or so back, has been working on Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions. He had similar ideas. I wonder if he has been involved with this project. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/ http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/drupal/
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I feel bad for people like you. I fee bad that you can't believe that some people or company with money just wants to make the world a better place. You said it yourself. Google probably won't make money. Maybe, just maybe, they just want to do something good.
without addressing the remainder of your comment.. > I feel bad that you can't believe [..] the same could be said for naiveté.
They don't need to do this. Yet they do. That's good enough for me.
Though opening up their index and creating a search marketplace might seal the deal.
Wasn't Page about to focus? Shutting down small, useful and used tools because Google should only do a few thngs, but all of them well? So will this litter the countryside, and even worse, the oceans with electronic equipment incl. highly toxic batteries? will they maintain and retrieve every single one of those balloons? who pays for that?
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and C
How long does a 100k+ employee company get credit for something a small handful of their employees did almost half a century ago? Not that C wasn't an achievement but . . .
This sounded like a great idea to me at first. But, Each balloon provides coverage to a 40km diameter area. That's a lot of balloons to cover rural Africa. It would help a great deal if the balloons could be made to stay in precise locations, like geostationary satellites. I thought maybe they had solved that problem (which would be amazing). But, I guess not. They said in the video that the balloons would follow the…
4 million balloons and routers would cover earth. That's actually not a lot compared to how many cars and cellphones are manufactured every year. If each one is $100 dollars, the total cost is only 400 million - less than google fiber installed in kansas city ($1 billion).
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I find it odd that you assume they're going to take these highly advanced routers and litter with them.
I share the same concerns - what about the batteries and other products that aren't as expensive as the routers?
Q: WHAT STEPS IS PROJECT LOON TAKING TO BE ENVIRONMENTALLY RESPONSIBLE?
A: We are taking several steps to ensure Project Loon does not negatively impact the environment:
- We’re working to guide all balloons to collection points upon descent, so we can reuse, recycle, or dispose of the parts responsibly
- When balloons do not make it to one of these collection points, we will be offering a reward for reporting the location of the balloon so we can collect it
- We can track where the balloons land and we have a team of people who focus on recovering the balloons
- We'll have a boat for recovering balloons that go into the sea close to New Zealand
- We've started looking into using biodegradable films for our balloon envelopes
- Our balloons’ electronics are entirely solar powered.
Wasn't Page about to focus? Shutting down small, useful and used tools because Google should only do a few thngs, but all of them well? So will this litter the countryside, and even worse, the oceans with electronic equipment incl. highly toxic batteries? will they maintain and retrieve every single one of those balloons? who pays for that?
Any news about other "moonshot" projects that Google[x] is working on besides self-driving cars and Loon?
I think Google Glass started out as a Google[x] project as well. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in their division.