See this is the problem with always using 'anonymous coward'. We need to mix it up and add anonymous idiot, unidentified twit, mysterious prat and others to more accurately describe the poster.
My impression was that the post you are replying to has an implied/s tag.
That title is very misleading. From what I can read there, none of that 3.5 billion is kickbacks to doctors for actually prescribing medicine. That money was given to doctors who did the trials, it paid for travel expenses, it paid for doctors to come to conferences so they could come learn about this new drug and yes, a doctor that knows about your drug is more likely to prescribe it but nowhere is there any obligation or even incentive to prescribe it to a patient. The pharma companies do have plenty of tricks. They give "free samples" to doctors to give to their patients which of course the patients love and they do plenty of other things like free seminars that help influence (aka brainwash) which drug a doctor gives to patients but there is no financial incentive for a doctor to give you prescription drugs aside from the fact that you have to come back every few months and pay a copay for a refill so there is a sligh incentive for you to be on at least one prescription drug but no incentive to the doctor for which prescription drug that is.
If you know your place of employment, commuting is up to you - you can live close by if you prefer.
Although I agree that this makes sense and it's probably one of the many reasons that the labor laws are this way, there are plenty of situations where this is just not possible. If you're a housekeeper, work at a fast food joint, etc... in an expensive area then chances are there is not going to be affordable accommodations nearby. I've heard stories of people having 4 hour commutes via public transportation to work a 4 hour shift at minimum wage. Making employers start pay when you leave your home also doesn't help this situation either because even if you did this then employers would discriminate against you for living further away.
It's even worse than a taser. We're talking about firing a lethal bullet at a subject and hoping that the shield in front protects the criminal. I know I wouldn't want to be the test subject for this technology. With a rubber bullet you know how much powder and how much power is going to be there. With this device you start out with a lethal bullet and if the shield is defective, slips off, etc... then you just shot them when you really only wanted to knock them down.
I agree with the judge on one point: if they were independent contractors, they would be free to pickup passengers not using Uber.
If Uber allowed that, they'd be allowing street hails, which would in effect make them a taxi company. Regulators have been operating stings lately where somebody will wheedle their way into an Uber car without using the app, and then regulators fine the hell out of everyone for violating the law.
How does this affect Uber? If someone gets in a "uber" car without using the uber app then how does this have anything to do with uber and what makes it a "uber" car? Yes, the individual could be fined for picking up someone but without it being with the uber app, I don't see it any difference than a random person who's never used uber picking up someone. They are basically "moonlighting" as an independent person with no association with uber at that point.
Leave a note on the bulletin board at your local library offering inexpensive computers.
Yeah, this would be great if they were ready to go. If they were ready to go, I could sell them on craigslist. The problem is that most of them are in various levels of disrepair. Most of them are missing their harddrives and the ones that aren't missing their harddrives would still need their harddrives wiped before giving them away. A "computer club" could probably get them all up and running in a matter of a few days but I don't have the time to do it myself.
Microwave and light wave are on the same spectrum so if you could see in microwave then it would just illuminate objects just like regular light or ultraviolet light but with the awesome effect that it would actually penetrate some objects. A camera that shifted microwave down to visible light would be really cool similar to how a ultraviolet camera lets you see ultraviolet light.
What on earth am I going to do? The end of western civilization. If I cannot get my daily fix of the Washinton Post, I'm just going to end it all...
umm actually no, I just won't visit their site. Just like I haven'y visited their site for years.
This is the best way to vote but it does have its limits. I use google news and I notice more and more sites are paywalled (or limit you to 5 articles a month or something). I block them from the feed and move on but this only works for so long. If enough people do this, then they will either change their business model, go out of business, or someone with a profitable business model will replace them. If enough people put up with ads and/or pay then eventually the people insisting on no-cost ad-free content will be very limited on what they can see.
I hope that puts the final nail into the coffin of online advertising.
I highly doubt it. It's more likely to put the final nail in the "ad blocking" industry. As soon as ad blocking goes mainstream then ad supported sites will start to actually care and start actively circumventing ad blocking via either embedded content or requiring you to download an app, etc... The vast majority of people have voted and they have voted that they don't want to pay for apps and websites and would rather see ads instead.
You want a working computer for less than a $170 Chrome book? Well sure, who doesn't. But, no such thing exists. Seriously WTF kind of Ask Slashdot is this?
a monitor alone will set you back $100
Go on Amazon.com and type computer. there is your answer.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but this is an excellent ask slashdot. And if you have to pay $100 for a monitor then you are not thinking very hard. 17 inch CRT monitors can be gotten for LESS than free. Most places now charge a disposal fee for them. And that's even assuming you need a monitor as even most poor students have access to a TV and as the OP stated, he wasn't opposed to a solution that allowed a keyboard to connect to the smartphone the kids likely already have.
That said, I think there's a real limitation as to what can be achieved at such low pricepoints. At about the $170 range you can have a decent screen, processor, storage, and RAM. As you go below that price point things have to be sacrificed.
I think screenless is the best way to get to the sub $100 dollar or even sub $50 range. Most people have access to a TV or monitor. I like the zotac ci320 zbox but it's over $100 and overkill for what this person is looking for. The better solution would be some sort of hdmi dongle. A quick amazon search turned up this: http://www.amazon.com/Androset... as well as several mentions of "finless bob roms". Not sure if they are any good but I would think that would be a good starting point.
On a side note, I have an entire basement full of computers that are faster than most current tablets but are basically worthless. I could probably sell them for $50-$75 each but it would likely cost me more in labor to get them up and running to a usable state and unless it's someone local, shipping heavy computers at $20+ a pop makes it even less worth while. If anyone has recommendations of how to do something productive with several dozen decade old computers running windows XP, let me know.
From the summary: "only a small percentage of cloned offspring survive to term" and they didn't ban it for research. Noone is going to clone for production until they can get a large percentage of clones to survive and there is some cost advantage. They didn't ban researching it so basically this sounds like a feel good piece of legislation that does very little except complicate things.
The extensions will catch up -- this is how the game is played.
The game is only played because youtube allows it to be played. It would be relatively simple for youtube to design something where you can't tell the difference between an ad and the content. I'm actually surprised that you currently are able to. My guess is the reason it's currently separate is because if it was part of the video stream then it would be easier to fast forward thru the ads but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of ways for youtube to design a player that makes ad blocking virtually impossible. Same with other websites, ad blocking is a game that if the content providers got serious then the ad blockers would have an impossible game of catch up. It's different than spam blocking. Spam blocking you have to analyze the message and there will always be an arms race unless you do some sort of server whitelisting. With ad blocking, the content provider could easily make the ad indistinguishable from the content or even interwoven. If youtube for instance made the ad rendered into the video then in order to block it, your "ad blocker" would have to actually re-render the video on the fly. Yes, this is possible, some football games insert ads in predefined spots on the fly, but it's not something that a free ad blocker is going to implement anytime soon.
Funny thing is, IMHO that is where the real connection with mathematics comes in. Not doing calculations (that's what computers and assistants are there for, not mathematicians). It's how much the > combine several thousand of those if statements to do something is similar to "combine loads of theorems and other bits of information to make a proof". And like in programming, there are horribly convoluted though working ways to do it, and there are good ways to do it. Though there is more peer review and good/beautiful ways tend to be more appreciated in mathematics. Funnily, "maintenance" is more intuitively understood as valuable there than in programming - though maybe it's mostly the lack of economic pressures and less pressing practical uses.
Yes, there are similarities between proofs and programming but I'm living proof that you don't need to be good at proofs to be a programmer. I always had problem with proofs as I would always skip steps or do them in my head and teachers would count off for them. You can't skip steps in programming, it's more rigid and straight forward and I enjoy and find programming A TON easier than trying to write a proof which I hate and I fail miserably at.
Because of this: how she taught herself how to code
She didn't teach herself to code. She taught herself how to cobble together a website. Yes, you can cobble together a website with minimal coding skills by using already created widgets but what if you want a widget that doesn't exist yet? If you want to cobble together a website, there are plenty of programs like wordpress that require no coding skills at all. True programming doesn't require math as much as it requires you to be able to understand how to take small pieces like if statements and arrays and create something with it. I can explain if statements and a flow chart to someone in 10 minutes but the hard part of programming is being about to see how you can combine several thousand of those if statements to do something like generate an image. Being able to imagine the end product and plot a course to get there through several thousand steps using rudimentary blocks is what makes programming hard. Building a webpage is not programming.
Why are you comparing a single fibre to a 12 inch wide transmitter?
Why don't you compare a 12 inch transmitter (which requires slightly more than 12 inches wide direct line of sight pathway between end points) to a 12 inch wide bundle of fibres. No prizes for which has higher bandwidth and less sensitivity.
Better than your horrible example. (Doubly so, since most fibre runs of any length typically run 16+ cores because the glass isn't the expensive part, it's the labor)
You asked the question: "Why are you comparing a single fibre to a 12 inch wide transmitter?" and then answered it with "because the glass isn't the expensive part, it's the labor". A 12 inch wide line of sight would be considerably cheaper to install than installing a 12 inch wide bundle of fibers. Granted with today's technology, the 12 inch wide bundle of fibers would win hands down but that doesn't mean it will remain that way forever. It's very possible to envision a technology that can create tiny beams of light narrower than today's fiber optic lines but even if the beams of light are wider, if you are not having to purchase and install cable then having a 12 inch wide beam is not as big of deal as having a 12 inch wide cable.
Do those same techniques work on frequencies through all different mediums, or do they only work in the air? (this is a rhetorical question by the way).
Whatever you can get in the air, you can get more in a cable or fibre. Sorry, that is just how it is going to be. Find the fastest wireless technology on the market, and then compare it to what you can get over a copper or fibre. Do it at any given point in history, and you see that it is always behind.
There's a reason for that, and I gave the reason.
I disagree. That's the way it is now but it might not always remain that way. Copper and fiber are both single channel mediums. You might be able to put more than one frequency on them but they are still a single tiny channel. There is nothing that says you can't have 10000 parallel channels running thru the air. A simple (though impractical with today's technology) example would be a 100x100 array of lasers pointing to a 100x100 array of receivers on the other end. The amount of bandwidth in an array like this would be considerably higher than a single fiber cable.
And while there may be some band mangling that works with radio signals and not fiber-optics, there are also some that work the other way. Net result, fiber-optics beats radio with any comparable level of technology.
Today, yes, but that doesn't mean that that will always hold. A fiber line is a fraction of an inch which can carry only a single data channel per frequency. I could easily beat that bandwidth with a 12 inch array of lasers doing line of sight communication. This is with today's technology and although not super practical it's pretty easy to see that a 12 inch diameter chunk of air can carry more data than a millimeter wide cable if you can keep interference to a minimum.
Not just that. I could give fiber speed to ONE user in an area by wireless. To 10% of the population, much less 'everybody'? Not happening.
The only reason fiber beats out wireless so bad is because fiber is a private point to point while wireless is a shared medium. That doesn't mean that it's impossible for you to get the same performance with wireless. It's just impossible with the way it's currently implemented today. If you can beam a small laser directly thru the air or have highly directional antennas that don't interfere with each other and therefore don't share a medium then there is no reason that you couldn't get similar performance wirelessly.
If he has real interest in "doing a Musk", while wanting to avoid the nonsense, he could invest in Musk (or equivalent thereof, like Carter). What we really need is the sort of "Long Range Foundation" described by Heinlein a whole bunch of years ago in his novel "Time For The Stars". If done right, it could legitimately suck up all kinds of loose billions, and eventually reward humanity hugely.
This is exactly what Warren Buffet did. He found an organization that was aligned with his goals and gave his money to them so that they could deal with the day to day instead of him.
But Notch's problem isn't things to do, it's people to do them with. Your cash-spending ideas may be enjoyable to you, but you're doing them alone. That's fine if that suits your personality type, but many people want to do things with friends. When you're suddenly rich, all your current friends are stuck at work so they aren't available to go on adventures.
You can dole it out piecemeal and corrupt all your friends into yesmen but there's a simpler solution when you're an instant billionaire. You hopefully had friends before your windfall, so just give all these friends $10 million a piece no strings attached and no additional money ever. Now they are rich too, the ones that want to be your friends will stick around and the rest, it's a small price to pay to get rid of them. $10 million is enough that your old friends should be able for the most part keep up with most of your adventures now.
When you come into sudden wealth, it changes all the relationships in your life.
Then don't let people know that you're rich. There are plenty of towns you could move to that probably wouldn't recognize Bill Gates and definitely not recognize the creator of Minecraft. I know I wouldn't recognize him.
I'm not super rich but I probably make 2-3 times what my friends make but I keep it to myself. I drive a normal car, live in a normal house, and without looking at my bank account you would have no idea that I make more than most of my neighbors.
That being said, if I had billions of dollars I would definitely open up an R & D lab and employ a half dozen engineers to help me with my hobbies.:-)
By the time you include the cost of excavation, the cost of shipping, and all the labor involved from the research, getting permission, filming it, etc... then $108k is peanuts and likely doesn't even cover a fraction of the costs. My guess is that they would be deeply in the red if it wasn't for the film but they have likely made considerably more than the $108k by selling rights to the film.
Sorry for the delayed response...just back from a 3 day trip.
Your 1.5 drones would have to move pretty damn fast to do what you're suggesting. That's a rate of 333.3 one-way trips per drone. If the average line of sight distance was 3 miles (and it will surely be farther), they'd have to travel 1000 miles/shift. to equal one truck.
In a 24 hour day that's only 42 miles per hour. Most UPS trucks tend to be operating long days almost from dawn to dusk but there is no reason that a drone would need to shut down at night. I could see amazon offering discounts for delayed service just like they do today for prime which could help even out the demand.
I think the issue still comes down to that being a ton of traffic not necessarily for the end neighborhood but for all the intermediate neighborhoods.
I have seen talks of having drones do the last mile where a UPS truck drives into a neighborhood, opens the roof, and a half dozen drones quickly do all the deliveries for that neighborhood. This might be a more reasonable solution as I'm assuming a UPS truck would be cheaper to drive than 1000+ miles of drone traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
See this is the problem with always using 'anonymous coward'. We need to mix it up and add anonymous idiot, unidentified twit, mysterious prat and others to more accurately describe the poster.
My impression was that the post you are replying to has an implied /s tag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And I have a hard time believing the pharma companies have some way to kickback to the doctors.
http://healthimpactnews.com/2014/doctors-earn-3-5-billion-in-kickbacks-from-pharmaceutical-companies/
That title is very misleading. From what I can read there, none of that 3.5 billion is kickbacks to doctors for actually prescribing medicine.
That money was given to doctors who did the trials, it paid for travel expenses, it paid for doctors to come to conferences so they could come learn
about this new drug and yes, a doctor that knows about your drug is more likely to prescribe it but nowhere is there any obligation or even
incentive to prescribe it to a patient. The pharma companies do have plenty of tricks. They give "free samples" to doctors to give to their patients
which of course the patients love and they do plenty of other things like free seminars that help influence (aka brainwash) which drug a doctor gives
to patients but there is no financial incentive for a doctor to give you prescription drugs aside from the fact that you have to come back every few
months and pay a copay for a refill so there is a sligh incentive for you to be on at least one prescription drug but no incentive to the doctor for which
prescription drug that is.
If you know your place of employment, commuting is up to you - you can live close by if you prefer.
Although I agree that this makes sense and it's probably one of the many reasons that the labor laws are this way, there are plenty of situations where this is just not possible. If you're a housekeeper, work at a fast food joint, etc... in an expensive area then chances are there is not going to be affordable accommodations nearby. I've heard stories of people having 4 hour commutes via public transportation to work a 4 hour shift at minimum wage. Making employers start pay when you leave your home also doesn't help this situation either because even if you did this then employers would discriminate against you for living further away.
It's even worse than a taser. We're talking about firing a lethal bullet at a subject and hoping that the shield in front protects the criminal.
I know I wouldn't want to be the test subject for this technology. With a rubber bullet you know how much powder and how much power
is going to be there. With this device you start out with a lethal bullet and if the shield is defective, slips off, etc... then you just shot them
when you really only wanted to knock them down.
Where is the demo? The article mentions a "short doc" but I see no video in the article
or anything else that shows what the results were.
I agree with the judge on one point: if they were independent contractors, they would be free to pickup passengers not using Uber.
If Uber allowed that, they'd be allowing street hails, which would in effect make them a taxi company. Regulators have been operating stings lately where somebody will wheedle their way into an Uber car without using the app, and then regulators fine the hell out of everyone for violating the law.
How does this affect Uber? If someone gets in a "uber" car without using the uber app then how does this have anything to do with uber and what makes it a "uber" car?
Yes, the individual could be fined for picking up someone but without it being with the uber app, I don't see it any difference than a random person who's never used uber picking up someone.
They are basically "moonlighting" as an independent person with no association with uber at that point.
Leave a note on the bulletin board at your local library offering inexpensive computers.
Yeah, this would be great if they were ready to go. If they were ready to go, I could sell them on craigslist. The problem is that most of
them are in various levels of disrepair. Most of them are missing their harddrives and the ones that aren't missing their harddrives would
still need their harddrives wiped before giving them away. A "computer club" could probably get them all up and running in a matter of
a few days but I don't have the time to do it myself.
Microwave and light wave are on the same spectrum so if you could see in microwave then it would just illuminate objects just like
regular light or ultraviolet light but with the awesome effect that it would actually penetrate some objects. A camera that shifted
microwave down to visible light would be really cool similar to how a ultraviolet camera lets you see ultraviolet light.
What on earth am I going to do? The end of western civilization. If I cannot get my daily fix of the Washinton Post, I'm just going to end it all...
umm actually no, I just won't visit their site. Just like I haven'y visited their site for years.
This is the best way to vote but it does have its limits. I use google news and I notice more and more sites are paywalled (or limit you to 5 articles a month or something). I block them from the feed and move on but this only works for so long. If enough people do this, then they will either change their business model, go out of business, or someone with a profitable business model will replace them. If enough people put up with ads and/or pay then eventually the people insisting on no-cost ad-free content will be very limited on what they can see.
I hope that puts the final nail into the coffin of online advertising.
I highly doubt it. It's more likely to put the final nail in the "ad blocking" industry. As soon as ad blocking goes mainstream then ad supported sites will start to actually care and start actively circumventing ad blocking via either embedded content or requiring you to download an app, etc... The vast majority of people have voted and they have voted that they don't want to pay for apps and websites and would rather see ads instead.
You want a working computer for less than a $170 Chrome book? Well sure, who doesn't. But, no such thing exists. Seriously WTF kind of Ask Slashdot is this?
a monitor alone will set you back $100
Go on Amazon.com and type computer. there is your answer.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but this is an excellent ask slashdot. And if you have to pay $100 for a monitor then you are not thinking very hard.
17 inch CRT monitors can be gotten for LESS than free. Most places now charge a disposal fee for them. And that's even assuming you need a
monitor as even most poor students have access to a TV and as the OP stated, he wasn't opposed to a solution that allowed a keyboard to connect
to the smartphone the kids likely already have.
That said, I think there's a real limitation as to what can be achieved at such low pricepoints. At about the $170 range you can have a decent screen, processor, storage, and RAM. As you go below that price point things have to be sacrificed.
I think screenless is the best way to get to the sub $100 dollar or even sub $50 range. Most people have access to a TV or monitor.
I like the zotac ci320 zbox but it's over $100 and overkill for what this person is looking for. The better solution would be some sort of hdmi dongle.
A quick amazon search turned up this: http://www.amazon.com/Androset... as well as several
mentions of "finless bob roms". Not sure if they are any good but I would think that would be a good starting point.
On a side note, I have an entire basement full of computers that are faster than most current tablets but are basically worthless.
I could probably sell them for $50-$75 each but it would likely cost me more in labor to get them up and running to a usable state and
unless it's someone local, shipping heavy computers at $20+ a pop makes it even less worth while.
If anyone has recommendations of how to do something productive with several dozen decade old computers running windows XP, let me know.
From the summary: "only a small percentage of cloned offspring survive to term" and they didn't ban it for research.
Noone is going to clone for production until they can get a large percentage of clones to survive and there is some
cost advantage. They didn't ban researching it so basically this sounds like a feel good piece of legislation that does
very little except complicate things.
The extensions will catch up -- this is how the game is played.
The game is only played because youtube allows it to be played. It would be relatively simple for youtube to design something where you can't tell the difference between an ad and the content. I'm actually surprised that you currently are able to. My guess is the reason it's currently separate is because if it was part of the video stream then it would be easier to fast forward thru the ads but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of ways for youtube to design a player that makes ad blocking virtually impossible. Same with other websites, ad blocking is a game that if the content providers got serious then the ad blockers would have an impossible game of catch up. It's different than spam blocking. Spam blocking you have to analyze the message and there will always be an arms race unless you do some sort of server whitelisting. With ad blocking, the content provider could easily make the ad indistinguishable from the content or even interwoven. If youtube for instance made the ad rendered into the video then in order to block it, your "ad blocker" would have to actually re-render the video on the fly. Yes, this is possible, some football games insert ads in predefined spots on the fly, but it's not something that a free ad blocker is going to implement anytime soon.
Funny thing is, IMHO that is where the real connection with mathematics comes in. Not doing calculations (that's what computers and assistants are there for, not mathematicians).
It's how much the
> combine several thousand of those if statements to do something
is similar to "combine loads of theorems and other bits of information to make a proof".
And like in programming, there are horribly convoluted though working ways to do it, and there are good ways to do it.
Though there is more peer review and good/beautiful ways tend to be more appreciated in mathematics.
Funnily, "maintenance" is more intuitively understood as valuable there than in programming - though maybe it's mostly the lack of economic pressures and less pressing practical uses.
Yes, there are similarities between proofs and programming but I'm living proof that you don't need to be good at proofs to be a programmer.
I always had problem with proofs as I would always skip steps or do them in my head and teachers would count off for them.
You can't skip steps in programming, it's more rigid and straight forward and I enjoy and find programming A TON easier than trying to write
a proof which I hate and I fail miserably at.
Because of this: how she taught herself how to code
She didn't teach herself to code. She taught herself how to cobble together a website.
Yes, you can cobble together a website with minimal coding skills by using already created widgets but what if you want a widget that doesn't exist yet?
If you want to cobble together a website, there are plenty of programs like wordpress that require no coding skills at all.
True programming doesn't require math as much as it requires you to be able to understand how to take small pieces like if statements and arrays and
create something with it. I can explain if statements and a flow chart to someone in 10 minutes but the hard part of programming is being about to see
how you can combine several thousand of those if statements to do something like generate an image. Being able to imagine the end product and plot
a course to get there through several thousand steps using rudimentary blocks is what makes programming hard. Building a webpage is not programming.
Why are you comparing a single fibre to a 12 inch wide transmitter?
Why don't you compare a 12 inch transmitter (which requires slightly more than 12 inches wide direct line of sight pathway between end points) to a 12 inch wide bundle of fibres.
No prizes for which has higher bandwidth and less sensitivity.
Better than your horrible example. (Doubly so, since most fibre runs of any length typically run 16+ cores because the glass isn't the expensive part, it's the labor)
You asked the question: "Why are you comparing a single fibre to a 12 inch wide transmitter?" and then answered it with "because the glass isn't the expensive part, it's the labor". A 12 inch wide line of sight would be considerably cheaper to install than installing a 12 inch wide bundle of fibers. Granted with today's technology, the 12 inch wide bundle of fibers would win hands down but that doesn't mean it will remain that way forever. It's very possible to envision a technology that can create tiny beams of light narrower than today's fiber optic lines but even if the beams of light are wider, if you are not having to purchase and install cable then having a 12 inch wide beam is not as big of deal as having a 12 inch wide cable.
Do those same techniques work on frequencies through all different mediums, or do they only work in the air? (this is a rhetorical question by the way).
Whatever you can get in the air, you can get more in a cable or fibre. Sorry, that is just how it is going to be. Find the fastest wireless technology on the market, and then compare it to what you can get over a copper or fibre. Do it at any given point in history, and you see that it is always behind.
There's a reason for that, and I gave the reason.
I disagree. That's the way it is now but it might not always remain that way. Copper and fiber are both single channel mediums. You might be able to put more than one frequency on them but they are still a single tiny channel. There is nothing that says you can't have 10000 parallel channels running thru the air. A simple (though impractical with today's technology) example would be a 100x100 array of lasers pointing to a 100x100 array of receivers on the other end. The amount of bandwidth in an array like this would be considerably higher than a single fiber cable.
And while there may be some band mangling that works with radio signals and not fiber-optics, there are also some that work the other way. Net result, fiber-optics beats radio with any comparable level of technology.
Today, yes, but that doesn't mean that that will always hold. A fiber line is a fraction of an inch which can carry only a single data channel per frequency. I could easily beat that bandwidth with a 12 inch array of lasers doing line of sight communication. This is with today's technology and although not super practical it's pretty easy to see that a 12 inch diameter chunk of air can carry more data than a millimeter wide cable if you can keep interference to a minimum.
Not just that. I could give fiber speed to ONE user in an area by wireless. To 10% of the population, much less 'everybody'? Not happening.
The only reason fiber beats out wireless so bad is because fiber is a private point to point while wireless is a shared medium. That doesn't mean that it's impossible for you to get the same performance with wireless. It's just impossible with the way it's currently implemented today. If you can beam a small laser directly thru the air or have highly directional antennas that don't interfere with each other and therefore don't share a medium then there is no reason that you couldn't get similar performance wirelessly.
If he has real interest in "doing a Musk", while wanting to avoid the nonsense, he could invest in Musk (or equivalent thereof, like Carter). What we really need is the sort of "Long Range Foundation" described by Heinlein a whole bunch of years ago in his novel "Time For The Stars". If done right, it could legitimately suck up all kinds of loose billions, and eventually reward humanity hugely.
This is exactly what Warren Buffet did. He found an organization that was aligned with his goals and gave his money to them so that they could deal with the day to day instead of him.
But Notch's problem isn't things to do, it's people to do them with. Your cash-spending ideas may be enjoyable to you, but you're doing them alone. That's fine if that suits your personality type, but many people want to do things with friends. When you're suddenly rich, all your current friends are stuck at work so they aren't available to go on adventures.
You can dole it out piecemeal and corrupt all your friends into yesmen but there's a simpler solution when you're an instant billionaire. You hopefully had friends before your windfall, so just give all these friends $10 million a piece no strings attached and no additional money ever. Now they are rich too, the ones that want to be your friends will stick around and the rest, it's a small price to pay to get rid of them. $10 million is enough that your old friends should be able for the most part keep up with most of your adventures now.
When you come into sudden wealth, it changes all the relationships in your life.
Then don't let people know that you're rich. There are plenty of towns you could move to that probably wouldn't recognize Bill Gates and definitely not recognize the creator of Minecraft. I know I wouldn't recognize him.
I'm not super rich but I probably make 2-3 times what my friends make but I keep it to myself. I drive a normal car, live in a normal house, and without looking at my bank account you would have no idea that I make more than most of my neighbors.
That being said, if I had billions of dollars I would definitely open up an R & D lab and employ a half dozen engineers to help me with my hobbies. :-)
By the time you include the cost of excavation, the cost of shipping, and all the labor involved from the research, getting permission, filming it, etc... then $108k is peanuts and likely doesn't even cover a fraction of the costs. My guess is that they would be deeply in the red if it wasn't for the film but they have likely made considerably more than the $108k by selling rights to the film.
Sorry for the delayed response...just back from a 3 day trip.
Your 1.5 drones would have to move pretty damn fast to do what you're suggesting. That's a rate of 333.3 one-way trips per drone. If the average line of sight distance was 3 miles (and it will surely be farther), they'd have to travel 1000 miles/shift. to equal one truck.
In a 24 hour day that's only 42 miles per hour. Most UPS trucks tend to be operating long days almost from dawn to dusk but there is no reason that a drone would need to shut down at night. I could see amazon offering discounts for delayed service just like they do today for prime which could help even out the demand.
I think the issue still comes down to that being a ton of traffic not necessarily for the end neighborhood but for all the intermediate neighborhoods.
I have seen talks of having drones do the last mile where a UPS truck drives into a neighborhood, opens the roof, and a half dozen drones quickly do all the deliveries for that neighborhood. This might be a more reasonable solution as I'm assuming a UPS truck would be cheaper to drive than 1000+ miles of drone traffic.