171–180 of 299 posts
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It does not have it now, because they want to focus on the basics. Once that is done, adding a camera is not a big deal.
But I feel like that would make the media -- followed by average people -- go crazy. Consider the current NSA news combined with "Google puts hundreds of cameras in the sky".
Yes, that will be a two uncomfortable days of online nerd rage.
Imaging getting real time video from the stratosphere to everywhere all the time. The weather data alone would be awesome. The traffic data would be great. The IR imagery catching forest fires or amazon jungle burning would be great. An almost real time collection for finding illegal logging or toxic waste dumping.
When there are clouds of these ballons going overhead, who will notice an extra one or two that happen to have militarized payloads.
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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But I feel like that would make the media -- followed by average people -- go crazy. Consider the current NSA news combined with "Google puts hundreds of cameras in the sky".
And what happens when "Google puts thousands of cameras on our faces" ?
Trying to do an "Energy Budget" with my low-power research background. Please help with the balloon angle. .1 - 1W Balloon height adjustments .1 - .5W Flight tracking, control and management .5 - 2W RF power and conversions (balloon-to-ground) .5 - 2W RF power and conversions (balloon-to-baloon) 1 - 2W Packet routing, processing and baseband processing Essential missing insight: how to they lower/rise the balloons an…
"I love those who yearn for the impossible." -Goethe I wish other large companies showed such ambition. Telecoms like AT&T can't even be bothered to roll out the network upgrades they promised in the early 2000's.
Google deserves a lot fo credit but let's give something to Jerry Knoblach and his team: "His plan: Beam it down from balloons hovering at the edge of space. This isn't just hot air. His company, Space Data Corp., already launches 10 balloons a day across the Southern U.S., providing specialized telecom services to truckers and oil companies. His balloons soar 20 miles into the stratosphere, each carrying a shoebox-s…
There's a lot that I don't like about Google, but I do like that they're fucking insane.
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Building computer networks and artificial intelligence are pretty much Google's core competencies. Most if not all other companies would struggle to fund and develop this project. First of all, the system is in total very expensive: You don't get any coverage with just a few baloons, you probably need hundreds to make any of them stay connected to the rest of the internet most of the time. Second, this system is extr…
> This is a very exciting problem once you think about it... That's a good summary of why Google has been so successful. They have a way of making engineers and regular people really excited about their projects. It's a feedback loop - have exciting stuff, recruit smarter people, work on more exciting stuff.