111–120 of 299 posts
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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Almost everything they're done is centered around ads and getting more data on their users to sell more ads. Even this project, in the end it's about getting more people online to look at their ads. (not sure how much ad revenue you can get from poor places, but whatever) EDIT: To those saying they're playing the long game; Playing the long game doesn't make sense. The long game is being fully wired. By the time poor…
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.
> I feel bad that you can't believe [..]
the same could be said for naiveté.
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>I wonder if Google did this, partially to piss China off. Clearly, not. China has enough air power (including drones) to shut down any amount of the balloons.
I don't think conventional drones can fly that high.
Actually, kite fights are an old Asian tradition: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101010110043AA...
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I'd say it still hasn't branched out. It is very much an "internet" company. So anything related to the internet (and data nowadays) is somehow going to benefit their bottom-line.
That said, no internet company has products as diverse as Google's? Smartphone OS, wearable computing, gigabit internet etc.
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Almost everything they're done is centered around ads and getting more data on their users to sell more ads. Even this project, in the end it's about getting more people online to look at their ads. (not sure how much ad revenue you can get from poor places, but whatever) EDIT: To those saying they're playing the long game; Playing the long game doesn't make sense. The long game is being fully wired. By the time poor…
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.
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…
The balloons are not going to move in one direction though. The video also mentioned you can steer the balloons, which means, there is way to keep them above the ground and not the ocean.
It doesn't help the way the landmasses are oriented in the southern hemisphere. I think it's a given that the majority of balloons will always be over water. They mentioned a demo in, I think, New Zealand with a handful of balloons. It would be interesting to know how long they'll have for the demo before the balloons are pushed out to sea, and whether the coverage area will be constantly drifting.
The video seemed to show the balloons in a thin band encircling the Earth. Aiming to cover a thin band would seem far likelier to be achievable than spreading them over a broad swath. They also mention using the steering ability to form them in clusters, which is probably what you'd need to solidly cover an area.
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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The long game is being fully wired. No, the long game is wireless communications (and renewable energy). One of the reasons for fast growth in some developing countries is the fact that they don't have to make the same investments in infrastructure that developed countries made in the past.
Wireless is a hack, it will never replace wired. Sure, in Africa they get online with mobile phones, but that's only because it's not profitable _yet_ to run landlines. Even 56K would be better than mobile, but since it's Africa they don't even have that. Give it a few more decades and they'll be wired just like everyone else.
And data rates of > 1 Gigabit for wireless connections are readily achievable these days. [1]