- Sell them slowly so as not to devalue them or draw too much attention to myself.
There's a problem with that. The blockchain is public. The largest accounts have been identified. The Satoshi account has been provisionally identified. It hasn't conducted any transactions in years. If it did, it would make world-wide news. And that transaction would be de-anonymized in mere hours. Suddenly, no more anonymity.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the richest person or persons in the world who can't spend a dime of their riches without being found out.
"Ya gotta" ABSOLUTELY HATE ANY AIRCRAFT "whose sole mission is ground support " if you are an Air Marshal who has no job unless they're doing strategic bombing. Fixed that for you.
Close-air support hands over an AF asset to some Army(!!) lieutenant to boss around with a walkie-talkie. That's why the AF has been trying to kill it for decades.
Which is why I think the A-10 program should just be transferred from the Air Force to the Army by an act of Congress, and the Air Force told to shut the hell up. The Army will always need close air support. The A-10 is really really good at it. The Army should just fly it themselves.
What I want to know, from the summary, is how "two way radios" got to be "gun related"?
Preppers. Doomsday cultists. Nutjobs, basically.
They have this ongoing fantasy that civilization will end and Macho Men with Macho Trucks and Macho Guns will rule the world as God intended. The ones buying the radios are some of the least insane—they at least aren't planning on the Every Macho Man For Himself scenario that so many subscribe to. They want to be able to communicate with Cousin Lenny when all the power is out, all the phones are down, and the Internet doesn't work. But they're too lazy to get a HAM license, so... two way radios.
But people DO break into houses, I'm guessing they do where you live too. They often carry weapons...at least a knife or club or whatever.
No they don't. Burglars are violent only 7% of the time (plus or minus a point or two depending on the year). Of those violent burglars, only 12% of them had a gun at the time. (Just possession, not necessarily brandished or fired.) So burglars with guns? 0.8% of all burglaries.
Burglars are some of the least violent physical criminals, if not the least violent. They are non-confrontational. You don't get to play out your happy little Rambo fantasy. When your house is burglarized and all of your guns stolen, you won't be home. Nobody will be. Not even the dog. Owning guns does not make you safer from burglars. It makes you less safe, because guns are an extremely attractive target to a thief. If you boast about your collection when you're at the range, you had better boast about your gun safe that's bolted to the basement floor too. Or Larry's shiftless cousin will be visiting your house some quiet weekday afternoon.
I'lll start taking this seriously when the come out with an electric F150 that costs less than $30k.
Why would you needlessly hamstring the electric pickup when the average F-150 sale price is over $38,000 and the high end trim packages cost over $45,000? Especially considering the likelihood that a Tesla pickup will out perform an F-150 in all relevant categories, including range. By rights, you should be willing to pay around $50,000 for a Tesla pickup.
What a bizarre notion. Even if Tesla doesn't sell a single electric car 4 years from now, they will still exist, and they'll be substantially profitable too. Selling batteries to Walmart and data center operators around the world. Anywhere there is a daily swing in electricity prices, Tesla will make money. And they won't have to deal with any icky, sticky, picky consumers, either. That's all B2B sales, with lovely B2B profit margins. Tesla will still be around in 40 years. Tesla is likely to be around in 400 years.
This is moreso evident on TV or in movies, but so often you'll encounter someone breaking encryption when, barring some earth shaking development in mathematics, it's impossible to do before the universe's death and they do it in scant minutes.
That one's easy to explain. The mathematics are unshakable. The hacker is attacking the implementation, not the mathematics. All cryptography and system security in books and movies is implemented by a 12 year old in PHP.
And while we're at it, where does Iron Man store the reaction mass for his boot jets?
He doesn't. It's air, compressed and super-heated by the arc reactor. He flies around with a giant invisible ram scoop in front of him.
Wait, did you just imply that comic books are science fiction? When you know they're such ridiculous fantasy that they have their own category? They're comic books. They have cartoon physics. Literally.
I'm going to skip a lot of what you said because you obviously misinterpreted what he wrote. But there's a few things I have to address.
Collecting solar and wind relies on building an expensive global electrical grid because wind and solar is not so easily mined on demand, and storing it is also difficult and expensive.
Storing electricity is neither difficult nor all that expensive, and it's getting cheaper fast. A single Tesla Powerwall configured for 10 kWh costs $3500, storing enough power for a week worth of cloudy days for most households. Tesla's Gigafactory will cut that price by 30% in 2 years. Not 50 years. 2 years. Not speculatively, either. It's just mass production of a well-known industrial technique. As for the difficulty, it's two hours of an electrician's time to install it in your basement or on your garage wall. Done. And then it just works, for years. What could be easier? No super-expensive national grid upgrade required. Quite the opposite. When the Powerwall is charged by the solar panels on the roof of the building it's housed in, the residential grid starts to go away entirely. Only the commercial grid is necessary.
Synthesizing aircraft fuel from nuclear power is a solved problem, doing so from wind and solar is not.
Synthesizing a hydrocarbon fuel from any power source is a solved problem. The source of the power is irrelevant.
Renewable energy makes up less than 5%. Nuclear power makes up more than 10%.
Wikipedia is substantially out of date. Solar and wind now make up 11%, while nuclear makes up quite a bit less than 10%. Solar and wind deployments have been happening like crazy for the past 3 years, and Japan shut down all of their nuclear plants. It shifted the balance dramatically.
There is growth potential in nuclear because it does not rely on geography or weather to function.
Current nuclear power plants are very much restricted by geography. They can not function in the absence of copious amounts of water without dramatically increasing their operating costs. Nuclear plants are built on rivers and lakes for a reason. Secondary loop coolant water is far cheaper if it comes from a body of water rather than a tank, because it's much cooler than tanked water can reasonably be.
If we add cost into the equation then things look even better for nuclear power. Right now nuclear power is on par with coal, combined cycle natural gas, and hydro. Wind and natural gas turbines cost nearly double those I listed before. Solar, even in favorable environments, is double or triple anything else we have.
Again, your numbers are substantially out of date, and your numbers for nuclear are flat out wrong. Nuclear has never been that cheap, due to cost overruns when building plants. Solar is on par with coal now, and far faster to deploy. I can go online and order a pallet of solar panels, with a nameplate capacity of 7370W, for $7170 and have them on my doorstep by Thursday.
Going to the moon for helium is insane, expecting to rely on wind and solar for energy is even more insane.
Going to the moon for helium is insane. Photovoltaic power is reasonable now, without any further benefits of scale or technological advancement, both of which are coming at a steady pace.
Imagine the big mail/freight carriers having to pay them every time they have to translate a 3 word address. Not going to happen.
Obviously Congress needs to pass a law mandating that the USPS charge money for access to their address database. This taxpayer funded government service can't possibly be efficiently enabling commerce. Then what3words can compete on a level playing field. Which is only fair and proper. Or possibly fair and balanced.</sarcasm>
Yes, most of the complaints are nonsense, but if we are engineers and scientists we should measure and test before discarding valid reports with the nonsense.
Nearly my entire post described exactly such testing. If testing the people who claim they have the "disorder" isn't sufficient, what more can be done? Random testing of the entire population? That seems particularly pointless.
The biggest problem with all of these complaints is there is no physical basis for them. We already know that AM, FM, and wifi bands do not affect anybody's optic or aural nerves. This has been definitively proven with invasive surgery (attempting to correct blindness and deafness) and extremely sensitive instruments attached directly to nerves, not to mention repeated exposure experiments, some of them military. The human body is completely transparent to AM and FM frequencies. They go right through you. Water molecules in the human body can absorb wifi frequencies, and we know precisely what they cause. They make the water molecule vibrate a tiny bit faster, contributing to heating. There are no other effects distinguishable from heating. For the energies used by wifi, sitting in front of a space heater is thousands of times "worse" for you, if getting warmer can be considered worse. For cell phone frequencies, you don't even get that. The human body is transparent to them too.
Here's why:
To have a physiological effect, the energy of the radiation must be absorbed. To be absorbed, there must be quantum energy level pairs which match the photon energy of the radiation. If these energy level pairs are not available in a given frequency range, then the material will be transparent to that radiation.
The physics of the electromagnetic spectrum as it relates to objects is extremely well understood, right down to the quantum mechanics. Your nice white LED backlight on your monitor wouldn't work if it wasn't. Your nice AMOLED phone display wouldn't exist either. These things are really really well understood. And humans are either transparent to the spectrums they're complaining about, or less affected by them than shivering.
but could some individuals be particularly susceptible,
No.
...and would we be able to test for this susceptibility?
Yes. We did. They aren't.
Multiple separate double-blind studies have been conducted. No one is sensitive to WiFi. People who claim sensitivity will develop symptoms when sitting next to a WiFi access point that has NO connected radios, as long as the power LED is on. The LED is on, they have symptoms. Turn off the LED, no symptoms. It also works with a WiFi access point that has connected radios. Turn on the radios and the LED, they have symptoms. Turn off the LED, leave the radios on, they don't have symptoms. It's 100% psychosomatic.
It's now standard operating procedure whenever a new cellular tower is built to leave the final antenna connections completely disconnected for several weeks. After the now inevitable spate of complaints and lawsuits, the tower is shown to have no power at all. The lawsuits are dismissed, the tower is connected, and no one in the area ever knows when it's actually powered up or not, because it doesn't have an LED on it. So symptoms go away.
You missed the most important part of the puzzle, public approval, which IMO is a huge fail. There is no way this is ever going to be allowed in public airspace. The noise/visual pollution and saftey concerns is an unwinnable argument in this day and age.
Are you sure? They're both smaller and quieter than a delivery truck, and move faster, so they're in your way and in your awareness for less time. The FAA is already writing regulations that allow them in public airspace. In the face of regulatory approval, the inevitable lawsuits will have an uphill battle. Government lawyers will no doubt be instructed to employ every delaying tactic they know, which means the lawsuit will take half a decade or more. And by then, public acceptance will happen. They'll be familiar, and the familiar is always acceptable.
And if by some miracle does get approved, as soon as some clown puts a 55lb bomb on one and delivers it to someone he hates, that'll be the end of them forever.
Because the Unabomber's activities eradicated all postal delivery trucks, right? Pfft.
Nobody is going to put a 55lb bomb on an Amazon drone. They can't lift that much. Nobody is any more likely to put a 5lb bomb on an Amazon drone then they are to try to send one through the mail. In fact, it's considerably less likely. Amazon doesn't accept packages from the public. When Amazon succeeds in automating their warehouses (and they will), there will be no human involved at all in picking and delivering your package. So no bombs. And if some one tries to sneak in and load a bomb onto a drone, it will probably shut down the system and sound alarms all over the place, for safety reasons. Not because of the bomb. Because of the presence of a human in a fully automated warehouse.
Unless of course in the dystopian future, Amazon decides to change their policies, and start delivering bombs and munitions, special order. Then if it blows you up on your lawn, it's because you were an idiot and ordered nitroglycerin. You should have ordered the C4, dum-dum.
i spent a LOT of money on a dream desktop (think 64GB ram + 2x 8Gb FC + 2x 4port NICs + many fancy features)
If you can afford to drop that much nosh on computer hardware, you can afford to buy four 300 watt solar panels, a Tesla Powerwall, and an inverter with which to run it.
What will really make or break this (in my opinion) is the financial metrics, i.e. is it profitable to use a drone delivery system? And my guess would be that yes, eventually it will be. Hell, it could be financially feasible right now I suppose.
It's hard to tell with Amazon, since they're perfectly willing to do unprofitable things, but one supposes they have math that says it's in the ballpark, or they wouldn't continue sinking effort into it.
We know a few things about the finances of the idea. Electricity is cheap. Really cheap. Electric motors and batteries are really efficient. And automated flight is a real thing. That means little or no pilot attention for much of its journey. Judging by the video, their explicit goal is no pilot attention for any part of the journey, unless the vehicle cries for help. Which means the labor cost is cheap. That sounds like a trifecta to me.
The main legit use I can see would be to have this drone alone side of the delivery trucks. meaning the trucks get to keep driving, the drones when they get near the correct location grab the box and drop it on the doorstep.
It's no accident that the range of the drone in the video is 15 miles. The typical major metropolitan area in the United States is about 30 miles across. One depot in the middle of the city, or two at opposite ends, and the vast majority of customers are accessible with no truck at all. That's also why the new drone is a VTOL airplane, complete with wings and a rear propeller. They were chasing that range, and wings was the way to do it.
I have to say that the space lawyers I have talked to share my puzzlement as to what the professors say things that seem so ungrounded.
It's the technique of the Big Lie. If you repeat a blatant lie often enough, there are a billion low information voters around the world who will quite quickly start telling each other that it "sounds reasonable", because everything familiar sounds reasonable.
When you get right down to it, the only people with the funding, the attention span, and access to the required technical skill to pull off mining an asteroid in our lifetimes are US billionaires. This is the beginning of every other country acknowledging that, not finding the idea palatable, and trying to get out in front of it, by the only means at their disposal. Lawyers and lies. (But I repeat myself.)
It's weakness is colour reproduction, but it's getting better. My Panasonic has a THX calibrated mode for colour. The led models do too, but it's not nearly as good.
Samsung's AMOLED for phones now covers 97% of the Adobe RGB color gamut, which isn't bad. LED backlit LCD can now squeeze out 99.3-99.5% of Adobe RGB. Not a wide gap, anymore. AMOLED definitely covers far more than sRGB.
Slashdot Mirror
If only there was a way to mix football NASCAR and guns, then we'd be 100% sure.
Mad Max?
- Sell them slowly so as not to devalue them or draw too much attention to myself.
There's a problem with that. The blockchain is public. The largest accounts have been identified. The Satoshi account has been provisionally identified. It hasn't conducted any transactions in years. If it did, it would make world-wide news. And that transaction would be de-anonymized in mere hours. Suddenly, no more anonymity.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the richest person or persons in the world who can't spend a dime of their riches without being found out.
"Ya gotta" ABSOLUTELY HATE ANY AIRCRAFT "whose sole mission is ground support " if you are an Air Marshal who has no job unless they're doing strategic bombing. Fixed that for you.
Close-air support hands over an AF asset to some Army(!!) lieutenant to boss around with a walkie-talkie. That's why the AF has been trying to kill it for decades.
Which is why I think the A-10 program should just be transferred from the Air Force to the Army by an act of Congress, and the Air Force told to shut the hell up. The Army will always need close air support. The A-10 is really really good at it. The Army should just fly it themselves.
What I want to know, from the summary, is how "two way radios" got to be "gun related"?
Preppers. Doomsday cultists. Nutjobs, basically.
They have this ongoing fantasy that civilization will end and Macho Men with Macho Trucks and Macho Guns will rule the world as God intended. The ones buying the radios are some of the least insane—they at least aren't planning on the Every Macho Man For Himself scenario that so many subscribe to. They want to be able to communicate with Cousin Lenny when all the power is out, all the phones are down, and the Internet doesn't work. But they're too lazy to get a HAM license, so... two way radios.
But people DO break into houses, I'm guessing they do where you live too. They often carry weapons...at least a knife or club or whatever.
No they don't. Burglars are violent only 7% of the time (plus or minus a point or two depending on the year). Of those violent burglars, only 12% of them had a gun at the time. (Just possession, not necessarily brandished or fired.) So burglars with guns? 0.8% of all burglaries.
Burglars are some of the least violent physical criminals, if not the least violent. They are non-confrontational. You don't get to play out your happy little Rambo fantasy. When your house is burglarized and all of your guns stolen, you won't be home. Nobody will be. Not even the dog. Owning guns does not make you safer from burglars. It makes you less safe, because guns are an extremely attractive target to a thief. If you boast about your collection when you're at the range, you had better boast about your gun safe that's bolted to the basement floor too. Or Larry's shiftless cousin will be visiting your house some quiet weekday afternoon.
I'lll start taking this seriously when the come out with an electric F150 that costs less than $30k.
Why would you needlessly hamstring the electric pickup when the average F-150 sale price is over $38,000 and the high end trim packages cost over $45,000? Especially considering the likelihood that a Tesla pickup will out perform an F-150 in all relevant categories, including range. By rights, you should be willing to pay around $50,000 for a Tesla pickup.
Tesla won't exist in 4 years. Mark this post.
What a bizarre notion. Even if Tesla doesn't sell a single electric car 4 years from now, they will still exist, and they'll be substantially profitable too. Selling batteries to Walmart and data center operators around the world. Anywhere there is a daily swing in electricity prices, Tesla will make money. And they won't have to deal with any icky, sticky, picky consumers, either. That's all B2B sales, with lovely B2B profit margins. Tesla will still be around in 40 years. Tesla is likely to be around in 400 years.
This is moreso evident on TV or in movies, but so often you'll encounter someone breaking encryption when, barring some earth shaking development in mathematics, it's impossible to do before the universe's death and they do it in scant minutes.
That one's easy to explain. The mathematics are unshakable. The hacker is attacking the implementation, not the mathematics. All cryptography and system security in books and movies is implemented by a 12 year old in PHP.
And while we're at it, where does Iron Man store the reaction mass for his boot jets?
He doesn't. It's air, compressed and super-heated by the arc reactor. He flies around with a giant invisible ram scoop in front of him.
Wait, did you just imply that comic books are science fiction? When you know they're such ridiculous fantasy that they have their own category? They're comic books. They have cartoon physics. Literally.
I'm going to skip a lot of what you said because you obviously misinterpreted what he wrote. But there's a few things I have to address.
Collecting solar and wind relies on building an expensive global electrical grid because wind and solar is not so easily mined on demand, and storing it is also difficult and expensive.
Storing electricity is neither difficult nor all that expensive, and it's getting cheaper fast. A single Tesla Powerwall configured for 10 kWh costs $3500, storing enough power for a week worth of cloudy days for most households. Tesla's Gigafactory will cut that price by 30% in 2 years. Not 50 years. 2 years. Not speculatively, either. It's just mass production of a well-known industrial technique. As for the difficulty, it's two hours of an electrician's time to install it in your basement or on your garage wall. Done. And then it just works, for years. What could be easier? No super-expensive national grid upgrade required. Quite the opposite. When the Powerwall is charged by the solar panels on the roof of the building it's housed in, the residential grid starts to go away entirely. Only the commercial grid is necessary.
Synthesizing aircraft fuel from nuclear power is a solved problem, doing so from wind and solar is not.
Synthesizing a hydrocarbon fuel from any power source is a solved problem. The source of the power is irrelevant.
How much of the world's electricity is from unreliable sources? Let's look... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Renewable energy makes up less than 5%. Nuclear power makes up more than 10%.
Wikipedia is substantially out of date. Solar and wind now make up 11%, while nuclear makes up quite a bit less than 10%. Solar and wind deployments have been happening like crazy for the past 3 years, and Japan shut down all of their nuclear plants. It shifted the balance dramatically.
There is growth potential in nuclear because it does not rely on geography or weather to function.
Current nuclear power plants are very much restricted by geography. They can not function in the absence of copious amounts of water without dramatically increasing their operating costs. Nuclear plants are built on rivers and lakes for a reason. Secondary loop coolant water is far cheaper if it comes from a body of water rather than a tank, because it's much cooler than tanked water can reasonably be.
If we add cost into the equation then things look even better for nuclear power. Right now nuclear power is on par with coal, combined cycle natural gas, and hydro. Wind and natural gas turbines cost nearly double those I listed before. Solar, even in favorable environments, is double or triple anything else we have.
Again, your numbers are substantially out of date, and your numbers for nuclear are flat out wrong. Nuclear has never been that cheap, due to cost overruns when building plants. Solar is on par with coal now, and far faster to deploy. I can go online and order a pallet of solar panels, with a nameplate capacity of 7370W, for $7170 and have them on my doorstep by Thursday.
Going to the moon for helium is insane, expecting to rely on wind and solar for energy is even more insane.
Going to the moon for helium is insane. Photovoltaic power is reasonable now, without any further benefits of scale or technological advancement, both of which are coming at a steady pace.
Imagine the big mail/freight carriers having to pay them every time they have to translate a 3 word address. Not going to happen.
Obviously Congress needs to pass a law mandating that the USPS charge money for access to their address database. This taxpayer funded government service can't possibly be efficiently enabling commerce. Then what3words can compete on a level playing field. Which is only fair and proper. Or possibly fair and balanced.</sarcasm>
So you're paying a grossly bloated monthly fee in order to lease a $500 computer that (to you) has all the functionality of a $10 watch from Walmart.
My Casio calculator watch cost $12 you insensitive clod!
Yes, most of the complaints are nonsense, but if we are engineers and scientists we should measure and test before discarding valid reports with the nonsense.
Nearly my entire post described exactly such testing. If testing the people who claim they have the "disorder" isn't sufficient, what more can be done? Random testing of the entire population? That seems particularly pointless.
The biggest problem with all of these complaints is there is no physical basis for them. We already know that AM, FM, and wifi bands do not affect anybody's optic or aural nerves. This has been definitively proven with invasive surgery (attempting to correct blindness and deafness) and extremely sensitive instruments attached directly to nerves, not to mention repeated exposure experiments, some of them military. The human body is completely transparent to AM and FM frequencies. They go right through you. Water molecules in the human body can absorb wifi frequencies, and we know precisely what they cause. They make the water molecule vibrate a tiny bit faster, contributing to heating. There are no other effects distinguishable from heating. For the energies used by wifi, sitting in front of a space heater is thousands of times "worse" for you, if getting warmer can be considered worse. For cell phone frequencies, you don't even get that. The human body is transparent to them too.
Here's why:
To have a physiological effect, the energy of the radiation must be absorbed. To be absorbed, there must be quantum energy level pairs which match the photon energy of the radiation. If these energy level pairs are not available in a given frequency range, then the material will be transparent to that radiation.
The physics of the electromagnetic spectrum as it relates to objects is extremely well understood, right down to the quantum mechanics. Your nice white LED backlight on your monitor wouldn't work if it wasn't. Your nice AMOLED phone display wouldn't exist either. These things are really really well understood. And humans are either transparent to the spectrums they're complaining about, or less affected by them than shivering.
RTFA, Amazon are designing Drones with 55lb load capacity.
Who does that? Anyway, I was talking about the one they actually have working in the video, which most definitely doesn't have such a high capacity.
You can't take a water bottle on a plane and you think a 55lb capacity drone will be publicly acceptable?
What makes you think the public had any chance to express an opinion about water bottles on planes?
Wonder what the DMV Christmas parties are like?
A picnic compared to Post Office Christmas parties...
but could some individuals be particularly susceptible,
No.
...and would we be able to test for this susceptibility?
Yes. We did. They aren't.
Multiple separate double-blind studies have been conducted. No one is sensitive to WiFi. People who claim sensitivity will develop symptoms when sitting next to a WiFi access point that has NO connected radios, as long as the power LED is on. The LED is on, they have symptoms. Turn off the LED, no symptoms. It also works with a WiFi access point that has connected radios. Turn on the radios and the LED, they have symptoms. Turn off the LED, leave the radios on, they don't have symptoms. It's 100% psychosomatic.
It's now standard operating procedure whenever a new cellular tower is built to leave the final antenna connections completely disconnected for several weeks. After the now inevitable spate of complaints and lawsuits, the tower is shown to have no power at all. The lawsuits are dismissed, the tower is connected, and no one in the area ever knows when it's actually powered up or not, because it doesn't have an LED on it. So symptoms go away.
...and the Four Corners of Deceit: Government, academia, science, and media.
And I bet he said that without a trace of irony. While being a media personality...
You missed the most important part of the puzzle, public approval, which IMO is a huge fail. There is no way this is ever going to be allowed in public airspace. The noise/visual pollution and saftey concerns is an unwinnable argument in this day and age.
Are you sure? They're both smaller and quieter than a delivery truck, and move faster, so they're in your way and in your awareness for less time. The FAA is already writing regulations that allow them in public airspace. In the face of regulatory approval, the inevitable lawsuits will have an uphill battle. Government lawyers will no doubt be instructed to employ every delaying tactic they know, which means the lawsuit will take half a decade or more. And by then, public acceptance will happen. They'll be familiar, and the familiar is always acceptable.
And if by some miracle does get approved, as soon as some clown puts a 55lb bomb on one and delivers it to someone he hates, that'll be the end of them forever.
Because the Unabomber's activities eradicated all postal delivery trucks, right? Pfft.
Nobody is going to put a 55lb bomb on an Amazon drone. They can't lift that much. Nobody is any more likely to put a 5lb bomb on an Amazon drone then they are to try to send one through the mail. In fact, it's considerably less likely. Amazon doesn't accept packages from the public. When Amazon succeeds in automating their warehouses (and they will), there will be no human involved at all in picking and delivering your package. So no bombs. And if some one tries to sneak in and load a bomb onto a drone, it will probably shut down the system and sound alarms all over the place, for safety reasons. Not because of the bomb. Because of the presence of a human in a fully automated warehouse.
Unless of course in the dystopian future, Amazon decides to change their policies, and start delivering bombs and munitions, special order. Then if it blows you up on your lawn, it's because you were an idiot and ordered nitroglycerin. You should have ordered the C4, dum-dum.
To be fair, those are 1.5 ton trucks at most. UPS makes (or has made) their own custom Aluminum bodies.
OK then, you're right. Completely harmless.
And silent. Don't forget silent.
i spent a LOT of money on a dream desktop (think 64GB ram + 2x 8Gb FC + 2x 4port NICs + many fancy features)
If you can afford to drop that much nosh on computer hardware, you can afford to buy four 300 watt solar panels, a Tesla Powerwall, and an inverter with which to run it.
What will really make or break this (in my opinion) is the financial metrics, i.e. is it profitable to use a drone delivery system? And my guess would be that yes, eventually it will be. Hell, it could be financially feasible right now I suppose.
It's hard to tell with Amazon, since they're perfectly willing to do unprofitable things, but one supposes they have math that says it's in the ballpark, or they wouldn't continue sinking effort into it.
We know a few things about the finances of the idea. Electricity is cheap. Really cheap. Electric motors and batteries are really efficient. And automated flight is a real thing. That means little or no pilot attention for much of its journey. Judging by the video, their explicit goal is no pilot attention for any part of the journey, unless the vehicle cries for help. Which means the labor cost is cheap. That sounds like a trifecta to me.
The main legit use I can see would be to have this drone alone side of the delivery trucks. meaning the trucks get to keep driving, the drones when they get near the correct location grab the box and drop it on the doorstep.
It's no accident that the range of the drone in the video is 15 miles. The typical major metropolitan area in the United States is about 30 miles across. One depot in the middle of the city, or two at opposite ends, and the vast majority of customers are accessible with no truck at all. That's also why the new drone is a VTOL airplane, complete with wings and a rear propeller. They were chasing that range, and wings was the way to do it.
I have to say that the space lawyers I have talked to share my puzzlement as to what the professors say things that seem so ungrounded.
It's the technique of the Big Lie. If you repeat a blatant lie often enough, there are a billion low information voters around the world who will quite quickly start telling each other that it "sounds reasonable", because everything familiar sounds reasonable.
When you get right down to it, the only people with the funding, the attention span, and access to the required technical skill to pull off mining an asteroid in our lifetimes are US billionaires. This is the beginning of every other country acknowledging that, not finding the idea palatable, and trying to get out in front of it, by the only means at their disposal. Lawyers and lies. (But I repeat myself.)
It's weakness is colour reproduction, but it's getting better. My Panasonic has a THX calibrated mode for colour. The led models do too, but it's not nearly as good.
Samsung's AMOLED for phones now covers 97% of the Adobe RGB color gamut, which isn't bad. LED backlit LCD can now squeeze out 99.3-99.5% of Adobe RGB. Not a wide gap, anymore. AMOLED definitely covers far more than sRGB.
And what makes bad people do good things, if not religion? Mother Teresa comes to mind.
'Mother' Theresa did many bad things, and was definitely a bad person. Try again.