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Jeff Bezos is not able to understand the obvious problems with drones. He thinks Amazon can make deliveries using drones. He didn't think of these problems:

I think you're right about the feasibility of Amazon drones. I don't think that they are a viable option for delivery services. There are too many variables, not enough space and landing zones, and a host of other issues. I think that cost, payload capacity and package thieves will be the biggest problems. But I thought I'd answer your questions as a rebuttal because they are clearly framed from an uninformed position that is intended to malign drones.

1) Dog runs from bushes and attacks drone, does damage. Who pays?

The dog does. The blades are going to slice the dog to bits. If he survives the owner will pay for his vet bill. No, Amazon will not be liable for it, just like car owners aren't held liable for running over a dog that runs into the road. (Theorically, Amazon could bill the customer's credit card for the drone, but they'll never do that because of the PR repercussions.)

It's also conceivable that the drone's collision avoidance system could be programmed to "see" and evade the dog. Think behavior like Luke's lightsaber practice drone. This level of avoidance is not yet a production option, but is technically feasible and may not be far off.

2) Child runs to drone, is hurt. Whose fault?

Child's fault. Really unfortunate, like when a child runs into the road and is struck. When it's the child's fault, the driver is not charged.

3) Drone fails in flight, crashes, kills people, destroys property. Amazon pays more than all profits from drone delivery.

You should google insurance. It's kind of a thing for all commercial vehicles. Insurance protects people and corporations from from that sort of thing.

4) Teenager is in a field trying a BB gun, shoots at drone. Drone crashes. What then?

Drone and package is lost. If they are able to identify/prove the teenager did it, he'll likely face charges for shooting at an aircraft, destruction of property, and possibly theft. But, most likely it'll just be a write off for Amazon.

5) Someone is testing a Tesla coil in his garage. The huge sparks emit electromagnetic interference, making communication with the drone impossible. Drone cannot be controlled, destroys property. Who pays?

Amazon's plan would use fully autonomous drones. But, even if the drones were under control from an external controller, the loss of signal would trigger its fail-safe return to home feature, where it completely autonomously returns to base and lands safely. If this tesla coil was so large as to create an EMP effect that affect GPS signal or impedes the onboard computer, then the drone crashes. Amazon is liable for property damage and their insurance pays out.

6) Drone noise and danger reduces the value of houses in a neighborhood. An adjoining county has restrictions against drones; the value of the property there goes up.

This argument just won;t fly.(See what I did there?) Drones are far quieter than trucks. But, just like trucks are not allowed in certain areas, municipalities could similarly ban drones. In that unlikely case, Amazon can simply fly around the no-drone zone and delivery will not be available to those addresses.

7) RFI, Radio Frequency Interference: Someone is outside on the street welding something using an electric welder. Electric welding generates interference on ALL frequencies. The drone might receive nothing except noise.

Electric welders don;t produce that much interference, unless the receiver is within a few inches/feet of teh we

Propaganda and patsies....

At least 7 of the 19 so-called 9/11 suicide pilots have been confirmed to be alive and well. They had their passports stolen. There has been zero evidence that Muslims carried out 9/11. That was a lie that was propagated by war criminal and terrorist supporter George "Dubya" Bush (and company).

Falsely accused hijacker Abdul Rahman Said al-Omari was even given a formal apology:

RIYADH, Sept 17 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - U.S. officials in Riyadh offered Abdul Rahman Said al-Omari an official apology in the presence of Saudi interior ministry officials for including his name among the list of suspects in the U.S. terrorist attacks, news agencies reported Monday. Original story here (Arabic)

In fact, Osama Bin Laden was never listed on the FBI's most wanted list for 9/11 because the FBI had no hard evidence linking Bin Laden to 9/11.

It is because of 9/11 that this whole bogus "war on (of?) terrorism" and Muslim hatred began. Who benefits from it? USA and Israel. Partners in crime.

Most of these other terrorist attacks are also false flag operations perpetrated by the same people and blamed on Muslims.

The 7/7 bombings in London, incredibly, were planned as crisis management exercises the night before they occured. They just happened to pick the same subway stations and the same times as the terrorists! What a freakin' coincidence! Simply, WOW!

The war on terror is a global sham designed to shift the blame from the real terrorists to the Muslim people and usher in a fascist New World Order, as announced by "Poppy" Bush on 9/11, 1990.

Please turn off FOX news and take your xenophobic, racist b.s. and stick it where the sun don't shine.

Propaganda and patsies....

At least 7 of the 19 so-called 9/11 suicide pilots have been confirmed to be alive and well. They had their passports stolen. There has been zero evidence that Muslims carried out 9/11. That was a lie that was propagated by war criminal and terrorist supporter George "Dubya" Bush (and company).

Falsely accused hijacker Abdul Rahman Said al-Omari was even given a formal apology:

RIYADH, Sept 17 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - U.S. officials in Riyadh offered Abdul Rahman Said al-Omari an official apology in the presence of Saudi interior ministry officials for including his name among the list of suspects in the U.S. terrorist attacks, news agencies reported Monday. Original story here (Arabic)

In fact, Osama Bin Laden was never listed on the FBI's most wanted list for 9/11 because the FBI had no hard evidence linking Bin Laden to 9/11.

It is because of 9/11 that this whole bogus "war on (of?) terrorism" and Muslim hatred began. Who benefits from it? USA and Israel. Partners in crime.

Most of these other terrorist attacks are also false flag operations perpetrated by the same people and blamed on Muslims.

The 7/7 bombings in London, incredibly, were planned as crisis management exercises the night before they occured. They just happened to pick the same subway stations and the same times as the terrorists! What a freakin' coincidence! Simply, WOW!

The war on terror is a global sham designed to shift the blame from the real terrorists to the Muslim people and usher in a fascist New World Order, as announced by "Poppy" Bush on 9/11, 1990.

Please turn off FOX news and take your xenophobic, racist b.s. and stick it where the sun don't shine.

Do you also get auto-reverted when you discuss the correction on the article's talk page?

Can't speak to the original commenter's experience. But I did take the time to go to the talk pages sometimes, and my experience was that if the change (or especially deletion of a page for "non notability") was made by an Editor, the response was approximately "This was changed due to 'WP:Antediluvian Reactionary Recalibration' and you should have voted on that topic six years ago, so too bad, it stands." If I made the exertion to actually dig up that policy and make a counter-argument, the result was essentially "I am an EDITOR. Run, coward! [read all in the voice of Sinistar]. All will kneel before me."

I used to make dozens of minor edits (usually typographical corrections) to Wikipedia articles a year, as well a contributing generously. Since a few experiences where major changes were made or whole articles were deleted with nothing representing a fair discourse that didn't amount to a policy citation or editorial bullying, I have done neither. Wikipedia will of course go on just fine without me. But someday the Awesome Powers That Be will find that the "crowdsourcing" that once made Wikipedia great has been reduced to an oligarchy.

I have only followed the cultural goings-on there at a distance, but it seems like the reaction of US Army generals in Vietnam - any criticism of an individual's performance is a criticism of The System, and The System must be protected at all costs, so the Establishment must stand behind every member of the Establishment's reactions to preserve their collective credibility. And as that war demonstrated, any system which does not have a systemic ability to internally evaluate and critique its own strategic errors and fallibility is doomed to failure.

Like I said, Wikipedia loses very little from my withdrawal and non-participation. But how many of "me" are there out there, and when does it reach some form of tipping point?

At least this guy does.

Difference is Stewart knows what's getting laughs from pandering to the audience and what you need to do to get laughs from parodying.

He goes up against his own preconceptions when constructing a joke.
Oliver follows his own preconceptions.

Find me anyone who hasn't broken any laws in a given day, week, or month! As many respectable sources point out, you break the law every day without even knowing it: e.g. http://www.washingtonsblog.com... If you don't feel like reading, watch here from 5:18 to 6:18, or even further until to 7:18 for some fun examples. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

IF I were to agree with you that everyone breaks the law everyday, it still wouldn't change the fact that the statement was you would get credit for the days as long as you weren't FOUND to have broke the law.

I don't need a lecture on ethics from the frog who rigged the lottery!

Watching non-consensual porn? You get to pay a big fine too.

Rickroll jail time. What a wonderful idea.

The moral of this story is that intelligence isn't just a game of what you know about your enemy, it's also about what they know you know about them.

That type of logic always reminds me of this great TNG quote.

"Many prisoners released early may not wind up being re-incarcerated, according to Brown. The law requires the state to give day-for-day credit in most cases to a prisoner who has been released early and hasnâ(TM)t been found to break any laws since, he said."

Find me anyone who hasn't broken any laws in a given day, week, or month! As many respectable sources point out, you break the law every day without even knowing it: e.g. http://www.washingtonsblog.com... If you don't feel like reading, watch here from 5:18 to 6:18, or even further until to 7:18 for some fun examples. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Radicalization starts when you treat people badly and word gets around. That family probably loved America. Not any more. The bad press incidents like this generate only fuel negative perceptions. Border guards: If you want the world to hate America, mission accomplished.

The more fans America has around the world, the better. Border guards need to learn how to do their jobs without needlessly pissing people off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

How long until mexcian drug cartells manage to capture a drone and repurpose it for their own drug delivery. Like in the movie Intersteallar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Who used delivery drones first? Amazon? UPS? No, it's the drug dealers :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's far worse than most people think. In 60 minutes, this guy got 50 petition signatures on Yale's campus to repeal the First Amendment.

These kids are so clueless and brainwashed by the ultra-liberals, that they don't even understand that the First Amendment is what gives them the right to protest and shout their liberal agenda.

Yeah, he writes okay pieces, but it kind of annoys me when he throws up blanket advice and then practically trips over himself extolling the opposite.

ZFS: You should use mirror vdevs, not RAIDZ

Guess what? The entire rsync.net service is built on top of RAID-Z3, if I read their promotional portal correctly.

One use case I can see for this is using ZFS to back up Postgres databases. I'm not the only person to think this might be a good idea. A while back, I listened to this talk, which I really enjoyed:

Keith Paskett: PostgreSQL on ZFS

On hard experience, he's particularly wary about the "drop table" oops disaster scenario.

Keith Paskett bio

* infrared radiometric calibration chambers Space Dynamics Laboratory
* helped develop Utah State University's Climate data server
* National Climate Data Center validated climate data
* all stored in PostgreSQL of course

(Read like "Marsha".)

Is this the NASA channel or something? Can we please stop posting stories made by known liars? At least add some content from TheNASAChannel: https://www.youtube.com/user/T...

Maybe I saw it wrong. I'm on mobile net and Youtube just refuses to load the video, but I'd swear I saw it somewhere around 8-9th minute of https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Self-driving trains are here today where unions and passengers tolerate them. You are right, this is much simpler and, therefore, has long been solved.

Well, didn't the Death Star's contractors have it coming?

The best solution would be that any time a terrorist video is found, the soundtrack is automatically replaced with Yakety Sax.

The economy is the RESULT of people doing 'stuff'. "It" is not a servant of anyone. If that 'stuff' is wealth destroying feel good nonsense - wealth is destroyed - thus mathless degrees have no ROI. If instead that 'stuff' is production - wealth is created ( why we are seeing the general transfer of capital to Asia.) Under the cartel/socialist system we have now, the creation of wealth in the USA is declining because the rewards are steered to the corrupt rather than the productive. It is simply political theater that there the 'big-business' and 'big-government' people are not one and the same. A good measure of corruption is the size of the middle class - which is disappearing. I hope Sanders gets elected so it finishes collapsing sooner rather than later. The longer they prop it up - the farther it will fall. Here is a hint - while it is quite possible to print money - it is not possible to print wealth. The idea that printing money works was thoroughly tested by the Mugabe school of economics. Now that women get married to the government instead of men - men have lost agency of purpose - and not a lot of reason to go to school or find productive work. Socialism is a form of reverse eugenics where the fit are forced to support the unfit (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] ). The quest for utopia has a really bad track record...

Wow, You got ignorance, paranoia and misogyny all in one post. All you needed was a little racism, and you would have achieved the whole gamut.

Yeah, but the New Shepherd was launched essentially straight up and came straight back down [...]

"The Rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher Von Braun....

Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

For enthusiasts, the most relevant part of the live feed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

If you'd been paying attention... There was a live video feed of the attempt. Here's a recording:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If you want to go all conspiratorial about it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Source?
(btw, I don't believe any military uprising would be necessary to oust Chavez. If he loses the presidential election, he will leave.)

Well, yes, ever since he died from cancer, he doesn't care so much about staying in office...

Oh I just realized that you were talking about Maduro, not Chavez.

It is an understandable mistake, since they often speak through birds.

Can't wait to "play" Marsbase Alpha!

Rob

The economy is the RESULT of people doing 'stuff'. "It" is not a servant of anyone. If that 'stuff' is wealth destroying feel good nonsense - wealth is destroyed - thus mathless degrees have no ROI. If instead that 'stuff' is production - wealth is created ( why we are seeing the general transfer of capital to Asia.)

Under the cartel/socialist system we have now, the creation of wealth in the USA is declining because the rewards are steered to the corrupt rather than the productive. It is simply political theater that there the 'big-business' and 'big-government' people are not one and the same.

A good measure of corruption is the size of the middle class - which is disappearing.

I hope Sanders gets elected so it finishes collapsing sooner rather than later. The longer they prop it up - the farther it will fall.

Here is a hint - while it is quite possible to print money - it is not possible to print wealth. The idea that printing money works was thoroughly tested by the Mugabe school of economics.

Now that women get married to the government instead of men - men have lost agency of purpose - and not a lot of reason to go to school or find productive work. Socialism is a form of reverse eugenics where the fit are forced to support the unfit (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ). The quest for utopia has a really bad track record...

"Kronor"? Sounds Borgish.

Unlike fixed wing remote controlled aircraft, drones can take off anywhere including street corners.

It's not like fixed wing RC planes need a lot of runway.

Or any at all, in fact.

Not sure why OP was modded up. The 1977 Star Wars movie saw Kenner sell $100 million in tie-in toys by 1978. Fox wasn't sold on the idea of a western set in space, so Lucas agreed to receive $500,000 less pay in exchange for keeping the merchandising rights for himself. You bet your ass he exploited the tie-in toys to try to make back that money. I was 8 when the movie came out, and nearly all my friends had the toys (I didn't like the movie so I never bugged my parents for toys). There were fast food tie-ins. And ESB and RotJ were advertised up the wazoo (which really annoyed me since I didn't like the first film) with huge opening-night lines. There was even an ill-fated Star Wars Holiday Special on TV.

I don't really see why merchandising is considered "unpure" either. If the kid wants a Star Wars toy, then it's better to get him one than for there not to be one for him to get. It only becomes a problem if the kid wants one only because his friends have one (which is a jealousy/parenting problem), or if you're an obsessed collector who has to buy every toy that's out there (which is a mental health problem).

May The Schwartz Be With You

dropping many balls through a triangle of pins and watching them fall into a bell-curve pattern. Called a "galton machine" apparently https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Backdoors are not secrets! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I honestly thought your post was satirical for a moment. Then again, I honestly thought Google's introduction video when they launched Material Design was satirical too.

Google are among the worst offenders with the flat design idea. Google Mail has a terrible case of iconitis, for example. But just look at the basic design elements in Material Design generally, and you can see many of the common criticisms of flat design perfectly illustrated. For example, MD can lack differentiation between component of a site/app, and thus may not clearly show how the user can interact with them and what any current status is, all a direct result of the limited palette of expressive options available to those designing UIs.

It's not a novel and it's not exactly "computer generated" but I do love the chicken paper and it's later presentation at a meeting

now the poor cat has to go back to her day job.

I gotta admit, when I first saw the phrase, I thought it was a variation of Hello Nurse!

Not yet practical, but maybe this is the technology that one day will give us real working light sabres.

Unlikely. The problem with using lasers for this is that they focus the beam to get the intensity needed to ionize the air and so much of the beam will carry on only slightly attenuated by the plasma. Assuming you had the power requirements to run this intensity continuously (or at least at a far higher repetition rate than todays femto-second lasers) then you could certainly imagine using this to create a tube of plasma like a light sabre but in reality what you have created is a massively powerful laser beam which you have focussed to ionize the nearby air.

This would undoubtedly cut through things but the cutting power would not be limited to the length of the blade and, if you did not bother to focus it, it would extend a great deal further and be harder to detect...but at the cost of looking nowhere near as cool. However I expect that, unlike Hollywood, when it comes to real world weapons effectiveness will outrank the "looking cool" factor by quite a lot. If you really want a lightsabre I think it is far more likely to come from other ways of generating and containing plasma (such as this) rather than using laser-created plasma because in the latter case you might as well just use the laser beam without the plasma.

You were this guy, then?

Yup, get on the list.

Architecture is not a bad analogy, because it went through a similar period of mindless "innovation" and oversimplification to the detriment of functionality. James Kunstler wrote about "the damage of Modernism" in his book The Geography of Nowhere.

Check out his TED talk How bad architecture wrecked cities. I particularly like his comparison at 8:20 of the Civic Center comparing its design to a DVD player. <g>

In case the difference between London (City) and the "City of London" is not clear to some, here's a great video on the topic.

It's a city within a city, within a country that's within a country.
It's also semi independent of the UK and its laws; an artefact of existing longer than the UK does.

You must have missed the youtube video of cleetus out in Kentucky building a car battery the size of a can of Spam out of six D-cell ultracapacitors for under $100.
 
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3x_kYq3mHM

"Nobody seems to commit mass murders at police stations......."
Well some have tried - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm betting if this was an everyday occurrence, the cops would quickly demand that every civilian who sought access would be sequestered and strip-searched, disarming the innocent civilians.

The site is down. You can view it on a live YouTube stream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It seems that Telethon.archive.org died.... they are also on YouTube Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...