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Seatlle Police Drones Overhead Now
Seattle police are deploying the Draganflyer X6 Helicopter for domestic surveillance.
(Seattle drone surveillance video)
The kite-sized micro chopper weighs three pounds and can stay aloft for about 20 minutes. As a Seattle PD officer explains in the video, it’s not allowed to fly above 400 feet and has to be operated from a SPD vehicle
Science fiction writers have been working on this idea for generations. In his 1966 novel This Moment of the Storm, Roger Zelazny writes about surveillance eyes:
I sent my eyes on their rounds and tended my gallery of one hundred-thirty changing pictures, on the big wall of the Trouble Center, there atop the Watch Tower of Town Hall... My eyes, coasting weightless along magnetic lines, began to blink.I knew then that we were in for something.
I sent an eye scurrying off toward Saint Stephen's at full speed, which meant a wait of about twenty minutes until it topped the range. Another, I sent straight up, skywards, which meant perhaps ten minutes for a long shot of the same scene. Then I put the auto-scan in full charge of operations and went downstairs for a cup of coffee.
(Read more about Zelazny's Eye surveillance devices)
Other writers to deal with this area include Philip K. Dick and Jack Vance; read excerpts highlighting the robot tracking device IDick) and the servo-optical stick-tight (Vance).
Via Defense Tech; thanks to Winchell Chung (aka @nyrath) of Project Rho for submitting this story and reference.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/9/2012)
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