A surveillance drone that never needs to land | Hacker News Reader

A surveillance drone that never needs to land

technologyreview.com

25 pointsOatseller7 comments

Whats new in this? there are quite a few tethered surveillance platforms out there, even rotor based[0].

Heck we had a run away blip just a like a week ago that one is also a tethered platform in most cases and that actually doesn't need to land because motor powered tethered platforms usually need to land every X amount of hours / days just to let the engines cool down (some might have paired engines that can be spun up and down in order to maintain altitude while one of the paired engines is idling).

These platforms allow you to usually have much more powerful engines that can maintain the altitude of a much heavier payload but ofc are much less maneuverable, they are often used as very tactical surveillance platforms for various events sport games and other such venues, political rallies, news coverage and venue broadcasting (Elistair's[1] solution for example mainly sold for commercial broadcasting proposed and not homeland/border security) and critical infrastructure protection.

These aren't the type of drones one would use however for wide area persistent surveillance for those purposes Google's and Facebook's internet providing drones would probably be a better platform and ofc military extreme long endurance platforms like Global Hawk[2](which can be now also autonomously perform air refueling) were kinda designed for it

[0]http://www.uasvision.com/2015/05/14/iai-and-sky-sapience-par...

[1]http://elistair.com/

[2]http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/10/05.aspx

I hope that technologists are also students of history. You do understand where all this is going don't you? What are you doing now to safeguard the future?

"Not my problem, won't happen in my lifetime" - yes it will.

>I hope that technologists are also students of history.

Not in the good ol' USA they aren't. This is precisely why I cringe every time I hear the usual anti-intellectual rant about how STEM fields are the only thing worth funding.

If you're serious about creating benevolent technology, you must necessarily be in favor of funding the humanities.

Very good point, I think it's very telling that they seem to have minimal appreciation for those fields. These techies hate the Wall Street types but are quickly becoming them, like the nerds who became jocks.

A historical perspective should tell you that communities want to detect people who violate norms and inflict pain(ful death) on them. We have for most of human history. The urbanization incident to the industrial revolution made the detection part harder for a little while, since communities were too large to meaningfully police themselves ad-hoc anymore. Professional police band-aided the gap for a while. Now we're returning to a total surveillance society, except with computer systems instead of your neighbors doing the watching.

You talk like if anybody had the power to change the course of history.

What do you think will happen if "technologists" decide to stop working on those projects? That the projects won't get done? Not a chance.

And "what are you doing to safeguard the future"?! What is any other group doing? Because almost everybody that is doing something will self identify as "technologist" nowadays.

I do believe we can change the course. It starts with questions and from that discussion. Question what is happening.

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