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If by 'drone' you mean 'unmanned multirotor', it's actually quite an accurate topic. What's more, it provides more insight into why this is actually a big deal
by hug 12y ago
If by 'drone' you mean 'unmanned multirotor', it's actually quite an accurate topic. What's more, it provides more insight into why this is actually a big deal in modern society.
A 'drone' is a cheap and effective way to have a camera with a huge field of view operating in areas that humans and helicopters cannot, or just doing things that it would be prohibitively expensive to do otherwise.
You can fly a 'drone' over a river, where a human would be hard pressed to follow, and you can fly a drone amongst trees where helicopters could not fly. You can do both of these things cheaply, and in a far more scalable fashion. 'Drones' don't need roads or other such infrastructure, and can carry decent sized payloads practically anywhere.
The application of 'drones' has huge impact on a large number of areas of applications, and it would be silly not to recognise that.
Somewhat sensationalist it may be, but in my opinion the advent of these things is worth it.
- flexd 12y agoI completely agree that mass surveillance is and will be a problem, and drones like that might very well be a part of the problem in the future. But the 'drone' in this case did not do anything. It is a remote controlled vehicle, and it did not do any thinking, the operator did. The title implies the drone was the key element in finding him, and not the person controlling the drone. I agree that drones will make surveillance easier, but until they fly autonomously without human control then it is a much smaller problem. Using drones to find missing people is a good usage case though, and I like that.
- privong 12y ago> The title implies the drone was the key element in finding him, and not the person controlling the drone. In a sense, that is accurate. The person alone would likely have taken far longer to find the person, so the drone was a key (if not the key) element in finding the missing person so fast.
- raverbashing 12y agoExactly Flying a drone is much easier and cheaper than flying a helicopter. Sure, you can go ride a chopper to look for the person, it's about $500 an hour Not to mention risk and hard to reach places.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 12y agoSo in this case, that's $167.
- raverbashing 12y agoAdd coming and going from its base to the search area, planning the search (flight plan), etc It's not "hop in and fly" usually
- avn2109 12y agoYeah, the startup costs of helicopters are large. A Marine quartermaster once told me that it costs $N,000 just to turn a military helicopter on, because after you turn it off you have to do a bunch of maintenance tasks no matter what. And chopper technicians aren't cheap.