With WebRTC, developers will be able to build voice and video applications using nothing more than HTML and JavaScript. This is a powerful technology which can...
... implement some truly awesome spy technology. Implemented both by site owners and site hackers.
Everyone else will start doing it too, and he'll have to go back to his day job.
I think the problem is living in NYC on "less than $1000 / wk" is probably physically impossible unless you eat rats and live in a homeless shelter. Or you're playing games like claiming you only get $20K of income but you're getting $50K of student loans / grants / scholarships so you're really spending $70K/yr...
Where I live, 50K will get you a lifestyle of roughly "small, older house" or a Very deluxe apartment, decent mid-level new-ish car or brand new cheapie, somewhat above average day to day groceries, and leave enough left over to take some fun vacations and buy plenty of cool tech toys. Given a working spouse or roommate, you could achieve an even higher standard of living. Only about 20% of the individuals in the population will make more that you, you'll be relatively rich.
Your analogy is confusing. Can I get one with cars?
A better comparison is if you wrote up an email for your driver with very detailed instructions on how to run over a dog and you included the security code for your garage door. Then, you thought it would be a terrific idea to share your great dog running over tips with an email list and forwarded your original email without editing out your garage door code. Now anyone who accesses your dog running over tips has access to your garage.
I don't think anyone would have a problem if Verizon limited your daily bandwidth speed to what their network could actually support. But that wouldn't look good in the marketing proposal.
I disagree, I'd sign right up. I'd much rather get a random and unknown but probably usable download rate with no really horrible worst case scenario, than a random and unknown bill with a worst case scenario of something absolutely crazy like $25K.
I'm a fixed income guy because I have a full time job in tech.. I'm not like one of those retired guys who get COLA raises every year... So I'm not interested in uncontrollably random high bills.
Does having wives in different countries qualify as Bigamy?
No, its a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Wives or a RAIW. Some encourage RAIW-5 although I've heard RAIW-1 with two identical twins is pretty hot. As often said on/., you need to realize that RAIW is a high availability solution not a backup solution, they hate being told they are the backup device, they all want to think they're the primary.
BTW if anyone out there can explain how to "underclock" my wife from "normal wife" to "inexpensive wife" let me know. I'm sure its all about soldering a jumper somewhere or uploading new BIOS firmware (Is this where the ethernet cable is inserted?)
Having my parents join completely changed my use of FB, and to some extent real life. as now every possible drunken shenanigans picture might get a comment from my mom.
Now I can have my overbearing over protective mom follow me and judge me all the time?
It goes both ways. I, uh, friended your mom last night, if you know what I mean... and the kids are all like "TMI" "do not want" "must scrub image from mind". Mom seeing kids act in public like idiots is "sorta OK" since she did that in real life for about the first 5 to 35 years of kids life (depending how fast the kid grew up), but kids seeing mom act like idiot in public is "not OK".
But I also have no information on facebook. No pictures at all, no checkins aloud, no constant updates. Do what they want with security, I got nothing there.
Then whats the point of joining or having an account? Once you block "everything" you have no reason to be there.
I went thru the same thing. 1) Sick of privacy violations? OK from now on, I'll never post anything I wouldn't put on a lawn sign. Boring! 2) Sick of useless game/survey updates? OK I'll make a "game" out of spending time every night blocking each new app from my feed. Boring! 3) Sick of the single and/or unemployed trolling daily for the obvious? OK I'll block them. Boring! 4) Sick of the political wannabe agitators? OK I'll block them too. Boring! 5) Sick of the top40 / pop culture / celebrity gossip babblers? OK I'll block them too. Boring! 6) Sick of "non-friends", mostly ancient acquaintances, sending "friend" requests? OK I'll commit a major social faux pas and not friend them. Boy did I catch heat for that!
Eventually all I had left was the real people doing real thing who were too busy to use facebook, so I had nothing to see.
Seems to be chock full of stalkers, spammers and generally maladjusted people talking to themselves via status updates
Why are these people in your friends list in the first place? The whole internet is full of stalkers, spammers and generally maladjusted people. The point of Facebook (or any other messenger service) is that you only white-list those you want to associate with.
They're the only ones left using it. If all the normal people drop it, or never use it, the only posts left are the weirdos.
I left more than a year ago when I realized I hadn't posted anything I wanted public in over a month, and my news feed was almost entirely cut and pasted politician talking points (mostly right wing neo-con) and single and/or unemployed guys trolling for the obvious, and some games / apps that I hadn't gotten around to blocking yet. How incredibly boring and non-useful.
My friends-list was mostly normal except for a couple weirdos. My news or posts or wall or whatever they call it, on the other hand, was almost 100% posts from the lunatics.
The last commonly used type of NFC which worked (IRDA) different from magnetic induction essentially just vanished after a long time.
If there is one real truth learned by decades of experience in the tech field, its that everything old is eventually new again, and it never really changes.
NFC will roll out to about 1% of users and 1% of retail establishments, then get a couple high profile hacking cases because they will roll their own inadequate security and stuff it full of backdoors for "customer convenience", there will also be a couple high profile phone theft resulting in CC fraud cases, then thankfully the whole technology will get flushed. A couple years later, "Hmm, how about trying that NFC thing again with infrared light instead of magnetic induction". Wash, rinse, repeat. Especially the repeat part.
It generally took the same beatings in the early 90s that Ubuntu took in the late 00s WRT to appealing to the n00bs, although they got some extra frying for trying to charge way too much money in a market where the competition was mostly free. They also got flamed for not including some source code, which wouldn't have been so bad if they weren't trying to overprice it.
My personal, possibly faulty, recollections are it was more or less free SLS except it was some years later to market than SLS and you got to pay $100 for it...
(plus the cost of admission would buy me a pizza, which I'm sure to enjoy more fully.)
What kind of theater charges so little to see a movie? Or you mean some kind of pro-rated monthly cost of a torrenting cablemodem instead of a theater? Around here actually attending a movie at a theater is more like a full homemade steak dinner... a nice london broil with homemade garlic butter slathered on after grilling to perfection and a homemade Caesar salad (well, maybe I'll buy the dressing) and some steak fries (oil the grates and grill until crispy of course) dipped in salsa instead of ketchup and some homemade garlic bread and a small glass of sweet cherry wine to finish it off as desert... is still cheaper that going to the movies and buying some popcorn and sodas. And having said that, I'm feeling really hungry right now... I can (and have, repeatedly) easily serve four adults that quality of dinner for less than the cost of taking them to the theater. Its not like we're talking "theater" vs "kraft mac and cheese" here. Movies at a theater are really freaking expensive for what you get...
There's more sacrifice in real life than there are in modern movies.
OK, agreed, but the business model is endless remakes / reboots / resets / reinterpretations. Lets consider a decent western from the end of the western era... how bout "The Shootist"
Uh, I think thats gonna be a pretty hard sequel or reimagination task. Maybe the kid grows up to be a sniper in WWI and comes home to a "The Deer Hunter" crossover remake kinda thing? Maybe a Dune crossover where they clone the Shootist in to a Ghola and together with the Bene Geserit they save the town from... uh, all the gunslingers were already dead...uh maybe the vampire nest from ringworld? I feel dirty just coming up with these plots, realizing there's probably some coked up studio exec (but, I repeat myself) trying to sell these scripts at this very moment.
As a side issue the weirdest part about The Shootist is it seemed to be set vaguely just before WWI and was made in the very late 60s, so we're getting close to that movie being older than the historical events it portrayed when it was being filmed, what I mean is 1970-1910=60 is rapidly nearing 2011-1970=41
It depends on what items you're talking about. No doubt the US still has a lead in some areas.
Humorously, it boils down to, if its not sold at walmart, we probably either have the lead or are at least competitive.
Most of the worlds giant mining machines are made a couple miles from where I live... Civilian and military aircraft. Speaking of military, most military gear.
WRT to electronics, again, if you can buy it at walmart, its not made here. If you can't buy it from walmart, it Might be made here.
Medical equipment and supplies. Again, if you can buy it at walmart, like generic bandaids, thats probably imported from China. On the other hand, if its an exotic MRI machine, it might have been made right down the road from my house.
I do agree that our government via taxes and regulations is doing its best to destroy private industry in general, for obvious political reasons. But despite their best efforts, we still make lots a stuff with practically no employees.
When I was a kid, I remember other stores had not been pushed out of business by walmart, but they're pretty much all we have now, and they now exclusively sell imported junk from China (admittedly with some clothing from Vietnam and the D.R.). So I can see how people get confused, if the only place they can buy household-scale stuff, only sells Chinese made junk.
We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down
LOL doesn't anyone else have a sarcasm detector? If Anonymous expressed their deep manly-love of the TRS-80 Model 3 (a fine machine for its time, BTW) THEN would people get it and LOL?
Reports of their demise seem to be greatly exaggerated. Did they pull out of your county? I know they roll out on a county by county basis, never heard of them pulling out of a county before. They're still willing to deliver to me, anyway.
I don't have to set aside a couple hours a week to drive to the store, find parking, get a cart, go up and down the aisles, deal with people and their tantrum-throwing kids, wait through lines, load up the car, come back home, unload and put away the groceries.
The only thing worse than dealing with other people's tantrum throwing kids is dealing with your own tantrum throwing kids...
My favorite part of the peapod experience was spending 5 minutes each day optimizing my weekly order, right up till the night before delivery. Needless to say, I never had the experience of forgetting to buy an ingredient. The other part you missed was shopping with a cookbook in one hand and a mouse in the other... making the total a little higher than normal because its easy to get a little ambitious while reading a cookbook. On the other hand I also shopped with the ipod and the peapod app in hand in front of the refrigerator, so I rarely bought stuff I forgot I already have, and I never bought impulse items.
Also I've never heard of a service that puts away the groceries for you. Peapod piled the bags on my kitchen table and I had to take it from there. You're still stuck with that task. And the virtual shopping cart is bigger than a real shopping cart, so you can really buy a lot of stuff if you're not careful.
The only part of the UK with lower population density than the USA is the Pitcairn islands.
I donno about that. OP describes it as "UK" not downtown London.
I live in a rural / suburban county about 20 miles from "the big city" with 650 people/sq mile. Think of an environment of very small cities and villages surrounded by dairy farms, theoretically no one is ever more than one mile from a cow, etc. Wales only has 360 people/sq mile, per wikipedia. Wales population is about twice that of my county... so twice the people in half the density means wales is about 4 times the land area. Nothing ever happens in my county, then again, nothing ever happens in Wales, so far as I know, making this a fair comparison.
Of course there's only one Wales that you need to roll out to, whereas "the big city" is surrounded by bedroom communities like mine, and furthermore the US is full of cities like "the big city" so I'm guessing a "country-wide rollout" in the US would be about 10 times as large as a rollout in the UK.
while groceries need a local distribution infrastructure
You meant to write:
while FRESH groceries need a local distribution infrastructure
I would think a box of dried pasta and a bottle of pasta sauce could be mailed to me from south Dakota just about as easily as a SATA hard drive. The stuff that needs refrigeration already has a local distribution infrastructure that serves numerous (competing) retail sites.
I was tangentially involved in the "local distribution infrastructure" for in-grocery-store deli's about 25 years ago... Most of the stuff at a deli is delivered by a local with a truck who drops the same stuff off at every store, deli, and restaurant in the area. Needless to say the competing stores are not keen on publicizing that their coleslaw or deli-roast-beef is exactly the same as everyone else's product. Meat, bread, milk, beer, soda, junk food, pretty much the same situation. Produce was a sort of similar situation, I was never completely clear on which produce items came from central, like the grocery items, and which came from local delivery guys.
I always expected our local delivery guys would have a much more scalable experience pushing down to the individual level than international web-sales guys like Amazon, but the locals never even seem to try, which is kinda odd. Probably because our little grocery store had about a dozen very independent trucks delivering stuff per week. Of course amazon could probably contract with all dozen of them, and that Might be how they're doing it.
Now, perhaps I'm missing something here, but I wasn't aware it had failed.
Is it's failure a US centric issue?
Early adopter anti-effect. The first delivery services were traditional dotcoms, in other words they (loudly) emerged, IPO'd, blew up, and sank, all in about 12 months around 1999. Early adopters make early judgments, therefore its set in stone that the entire market in 2011 is dead, because it died in 1999. So the opinion leaders think its a lead balloon and ignore it.
The masses just look at advertising budgets... the dotcoms spent most of their dough on ads, and failed. The current crop of (successful) delivery services are spending money on the backroom so that they actually work. However, if they only spend 1/100th the money on ads, then they can only be 1/100th as successful as the failed dotcoms, right, at least according to the masses. And the early adopters trash it (see above).
Amazon.com is quietly trying to resurrect the failed business models of WebVan and HomeGrocer
aka the same successful business model of peapod.com. Talk about trashing the service by carefully selected comparisons with failures. Disclaimer, I'm a very happy peapod customer, although I haven't ordered recently. When we had two newborns, medical issues, and an utterly packed schedule, it was a lifesaver (maybe literally, in terms of food quality vs the alternative of pizza delivery every day or whatever). I also greatly enjoyed shopping online vs in the store because of the "log in and work on the order for 5 minutes each day" ability. Also the experience of shopping while reading a cookbook, or at weird times of day, was oddly pleasurable.
can this idea fail?
About as many times as mom and pop restaurants fail, superficially the number is about infinite. I suspect you can realistically raise capital to do about one every couple years, and it'll be economically feasible to use diesel delivery trucks for only another decade or two, lets say another 10 times.
Oddly enough I only see physical health gadgets. No gadgets for mental health at all. You'd think they could have made even a simple token gesture attempt. Perhaps the stereotypical video conferencing solution, or digital picture frames of the grand kids, or something, something at all.
they won't be stuck with crippling medical bills.
These corporations are not doing work out of the goodness of their heart, in the style of from each according to their ability and to each according to their need. The whole point of this technological exercise is a DIFFERENT group will be delivering the crippling medical bills, instead of the current group. Is this group any better? Eh, probably, more or less. The good news they aren't getting the negative personal interactions and experiences of a nursing home for awhile longer. The bad news is their only personal interaction now seems to be a Wii-based bathroom scale.
Slashdot Mirror
With WebRTC, developers will be able to build voice and video applications using nothing more than HTML and JavaScript. This is a powerful technology which can ...
... implement some truly awesome spy technology. Implemented both by site owners and site hackers.
Everyone else will start doing it too, and he'll have to go back to his day job.
I think the problem is living in NYC on "less than $1000 / wk" is probably physically impossible unless you eat rats and live in a homeless shelter. Or you're playing games like claiming you only get $20K of income but you're getting $50K of student loans / grants / scholarships so you're really spending $70K/yr ...
Where I live, 50K will get you a lifestyle of roughly "small, older house" or a Very deluxe apartment, decent mid-level new-ish car or brand new cheapie, somewhat above average day to day groceries, and leave enough left over to take some fun vacations and buy plenty of cool tech toys. Given a working spouse or roommate, you could achieve an even higher standard of living. Only about 20% of the individuals in the population will make more that you, you'll be relatively rich.
Its all in the local cost of living...
Tabs on top being broken is a feature, not a bug.
Your analogy is confusing. Can I get one with cars?
A better comparison is if you wrote up an email for your driver with very detailed instructions on how to run over a dog and you included the security code for your garage door. Then, you thought it would be a terrific idea to share your great dog running over tips with an email list and forwarded your original email without editing out your garage door code. Now anyone who accesses your dog running over tips has access to your garage.
Better now?
I don't think anyone would have a problem if Verizon limited your daily bandwidth speed to what their network could actually support. But that wouldn't look good in the marketing proposal.
I disagree, I'd sign right up. I'd much rather get a random and unknown but probably usable download rate with no really horrible worst case scenario, than a random and unknown bill with a worst case scenario of something absolutely crazy like $25K.
I'm a fixed income guy because I have a full time job in tech.. I'm not like one of those retired guys who get COLA raises every year... So I'm not interested in uncontrollably random high bills.
Does having wives in different countries qualify as Bigamy?
No, its a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Wives or a RAIW. Some encourage RAIW-5 although I've heard RAIW-1 with two identical twins is pretty hot. As often said on /., you need to realize that RAIW is a high availability solution not a backup solution, they hate being told they are the backup device, they all want to think they're the primary.
BTW if anyone out there can explain how to "underclock" my wife from "normal wife" to "inexpensive wife" let me know. I'm sure its all about soldering a jumper somewhere or uploading new BIOS firmware (Is this where the ethernet cable is inserted?)
Having my parents join completely changed my use of FB, and to some extent real life. as now every possible drunken shenanigans picture might get a comment from my mom.
Now I can have my overbearing over protective mom follow me and judge me all the time?
It goes both ways. I, uh, friended your mom last night, if you know what I mean... and the kids are all like "TMI" "do not want" "must scrub image from mind". Mom seeing kids act in public like idiots is "sorta OK" since she did that in real life for about the first 5 to 35 years of kids life (depending how fast the kid grew up), but kids seeing mom act like idiot in public is "not OK".
But I also have no information on facebook. No pictures at all, no checkins aloud, no constant updates. Do what they want with security, I got nothing there.
Then whats the point of joining or having an account? Once you block "everything" you have no reason to be there.
I went thru the same thing.
1) Sick of privacy violations? OK from now on, I'll never post anything I wouldn't put on a lawn sign. Boring!
2) Sick of useless game/survey updates? OK I'll make a "game" out of spending time every night blocking each new app from my feed. Boring!
3) Sick of the single and/or unemployed trolling daily for the obvious? OK I'll block them. Boring!
4) Sick of the political wannabe agitators? OK I'll block them too. Boring!
5) Sick of the top40 / pop culture / celebrity gossip babblers? OK I'll block them too. Boring!
6) Sick of "non-friends", mostly ancient acquaintances, sending "friend" requests? OK I'll commit a major social faux pas and not friend them. Boy did I catch heat for that!
Eventually all I had left was the real people doing real thing who were too busy to use facebook, so I had nothing to see.
So I deleted my account.
At one point, Blockbuster had similar numbers. Now look at them.
And Government Motors. And Standard Oil. And the local manufacturers of pretty much everything sold in a Walmart (now made in China)
Seems to be chock full of stalkers, spammers and generally maladjusted people talking to themselves via status updates
Why are these people in your friends list in the first place? The whole internet is full of stalkers, spammers and generally maladjusted people. The point of Facebook (or any other messenger service) is that you only white-list those you want to associate with.
They're the only ones left using it. If all the normal people drop it, or never use it, the only posts left are the weirdos.
I left more than a year ago when I realized I hadn't posted anything I wanted public in over a month, and my news feed was almost entirely cut and pasted politician talking points (mostly right wing neo-con) and single and/or unemployed guys trolling for the obvious, and some games / apps that I hadn't gotten around to blocking yet. How incredibly boring and non-useful.
My friends-list was mostly normal except for a couple weirdos. My news or posts or wall or whatever they call it, on the other hand, was almost 100% posts from the lunatics.
The last commonly used type of NFC which worked (IRDA) different from magnetic induction essentially just vanished after a long time.
If there is one real truth learned by decades of experience in the tech field, its that everything old is eventually new again, and it never really changes.
NFC will roll out to about 1% of users and 1% of retail establishments, then get a couple high profile hacking cases because they will roll their own inadequate security and stuff it full of backdoors for "customer convenience", there will also be a couple high profile phone theft resulting in CC fraud cases, then thankfully the whole technology will get flushed. A couple years later, "Hmm, how about trying that NFC thing again with infrared light instead of magnetic induction". Wash, rinse, repeat. Especially the repeat part.
So why don't more systems lock you out after 3 tries for another 10 minutes or an hour?
That would deny brute force attacks.
Copy the file of passwords to your local machine, then hash against that file using software than intentionally does not implement such a delay.
Heck if you have access to backups, or vmware images, or backups of vmware images, just copy and NOP out the delay code...
If Hollywood is getting to the lesser-known superhero comics, I'd like to see
"Black Hat Hacker" and "Megan" from XKCD? Now that I would actually pay to see...
(*Sidenote: why on Earth does Yggdrasil need to be in the firefox spellcheck dictionary?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
It generally took the same beatings in the early 90s that Ubuntu took in the late 00s WRT to appealing to the n00bs, although they got some extra frying for trying to charge way too much money in a market where the competition was mostly free. They also got flamed for not including some source code, which wouldn't have been so bad if they weren't trying to overprice it.
My personal, possibly faulty, recollections are it was more or less free SLS except it was some years later to market than SLS and you got to pay $100 for it...
(plus the cost of admission would buy me a pizza, which I'm sure to enjoy more fully.)
What kind of theater charges so little to see a movie? Or you mean some kind of pro-rated monthly cost of a torrenting cablemodem instead of a theater? Around here actually attending a movie at a theater is more like a full homemade steak dinner... a nice london broil with homemade garlic butter slathered on after grilling to perfection and a homemade Caesar salad (well, maybe I'll buy the dressing) and some steak fries (oil the grates and grill until crispy of course) dipped in salsa instead of ketchup and some homemade garlic bread and a small glass of sweet cherry wine to finish it off as desert... is still cheaper that going to the movies and buying some popcorn and sodas. And having said that, I'm feeling really hungry right now... I can (and have, repeatedly) easily serve four adults that quality of dinner for less than the cost of taking them to the theater. Its not like we're talking "theater" vs "kraft mac and cheese" here. Movies at a theater are really freaking expensive for what you get...
There's more sacrifice in real life than there are in modern movies.
OK, agreed, but the business model is endless remakes / reboots / resets / reinterpretations.
Lets consider a decent western from the end of the western era... how bout "The Shootist"
Uh, I think thats gonna be a pretty hard sequel or reimagination task. Maybe the kid grows up to be a sniper in WWI and comes home to a "The Deer Hunter" crossover remake kinda thing? Maybe a Dune crossover where they clone the Shootist in to a Ghola and together with the Bene Geserit they save the town from ... uh, all the gunslingers were already dead .. .uh maybe the vampire nest from ringworld? I feel dirty just coming up with these plots, realizing there's probably some coked up studio exec (but, I repeat myself) trying to sell these scripts at this very moment.
As a side issue the weirdest part about The Shootist is it seemed to be set vaguely just before WWI and was made in the very late 60s, so we're getting close to that movie being older than the historical events it portrayed when it was being filmed, what I mean is 1970-1910=60 is rapidly nearing 2011-1970=41
It depends on what items you're talking about. No doubt the US still has a lead in some areas.
Humorously, it boils down to, if its not sold at walmart, we probably either have the lead or are at least competitive.
Most of the worlds giant mining machines are made a couple miles from where I live... Civilian and military aircraft. Speaking of military, most military gear.
WRT to electronics, again, if you can buy it at walmart, its not made here. If you can't buy it from walmart, it Might be made here.
Medical equipment and supplies. Again, if you can buy it at walmart, like generic bandaids, thats probably imported from China. On the other hand, if its an exotic MRI machine, it might have been made right down the road from my house.
I do agree that our government via taxes and regulations is doing its best to destroy private industry in general, for obvious political reasons. But despite their best efforts, we still make lots a stuff with practically no employees.
When I was a kid, I remember other stores had not been pushed out of business by walmart, but they're pretty much all we have now, and they now exclusively sell imported junk from China (admittedly with some clothing from Vietnam and the D.R.). So I can see how people get confused, if the only place they can buy household-scale stuff, only sells Chinese made junk.
We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down
LOL doesn't anyone else have a sarcasm detector?
If Anonymous expressed their deep manly-love of the TRS-80 Model 3 (a fine machine for its time, BTW) THEN would people get it and LOL?
Do they pay the coders this much too? or are the code submissions all donated?
They could:
1) coder will submit a javascript parser provided by me in an envelope containing both half the cash bounty and a buffer overflow ....
2)
3) Profit!
Peapod seem to have failed years ago
Reports of their demise seem to be greatly exaggerated. Did they pull out of your county? I know they roll out on a county by county basis, never heard of them pulling out of a county before. They're still willing to deliver to me, anyway.
I don't have to set aside a couple hours a week to drive to the store, find parking, get a cart, go up and down the aisles, deal with people and their tantrum-throwing kids, wait through lines, load up the car, come back home, unload and put away the groceries.
The only thing worse than dealing with other people's tantrum throwing kids is dealing with your own tantrum throwing kids...
My favorite part of the peapod experience was spending 5 minutes each day optimizing my weekly order, right up till the night before delivery. Needless to say, I never had the experience of forgetting to buy an ingredient. The other part you missed was shopping with a cookbook in one hand and a mouse in the other... making the total a little higher than normal because its easy to get a little ambitious while reading a cookbook. On the other hand I also shopped with the ipod and the peapod app in hand in front of the refrigerator, so I rarely bought stuff I forgot I already have, and I never bought impulse items.
Also I've never heard of a service that puts away the groceries for you. Peapod piled the bags on my kitchen table and I had to take it from there. You're still stuck with that task. And the virtual shopping cart is bigger than a real shopping cart, so you can really buy a lot of stuff if you're not careful.
Is it's failure a US centric issue?
The only part of the UK with lower population density than the USA is the Pitcairn islands.
I donno about that. OP describes it as "UK" not downtown London.
I live in a rural / suburban county about 20 miles from "the big city" with 650 people/sq mile. Think of an environment of very small cities and villages surrounded by dairy farms, theoretically no one is ever more than one mile from a cow, etc. Wales only has 360 people/sq mile, per wikipedia. Wales population is about twice that of my county... so twice the people in half the density means wales is about 4 times the land area. Nothing ever happens in my county, then again, nothing ever happens in Wales, so far as I know, making this a fair comparison.
Of course there's only one Wales that you need to roll out to, whereas "the big city" is surrounded by bedroom communities like mine, and furthermore the US is full of cities like "the big city" so I'm guessing a "country-wide rollout" in the US would be about 10 times as large as a rollout in the UK.
while groceries need a local distribution infrastructure
You meant to write:
while FRESH groceries need a local distribution infrastructure
I would think a box of dried pasta and a bottle of pasta sauce could be mailed to me from south Dakota just about as easily as a SATA hard drive. The stuff that needs refrigeration already has a local distribution infrastructure that serves numerous (competing) retail sites.
I was tangentially involved in the "local distribution infrastructure" for in-grocery-store deli's about 25 years ago... Most of the stuff at a deli is delivered by a local with a truck who drops the same stuff off at every store, deli, and restaurant in the area. Needless to say the competing stores are not keen on publicizing that their coleslaw or deli-roast-beef is exactly the same as everyone else's product. Meat, bread, milk, beer, soda, junk food, pretty much the same situation. Produce was a sort of similar situation, I was never completely clear on which produce items came from central, like the grocery items, and which came from local delivery guys.
I always expected our local delivery guys would have a much more scalable experience pushing down to the individual level than international web-sales guys like Amazon, but the locals never even seem to try, which is kinda odd. Probably because our little grocery store had about a dozen very independent trucks delivering stuff per week. Of course amazon could probably contract with all dozen of them, and that Might be how they're doing it.
Now, perhaps I'm missing something here, but I wasn't aware it had failed.
Is it's failure a US centric issue?
Early adopter anti-effect. The first delivery services were traditional dotcoms, in other words they (loudly) emerged, IPO'd, blew up, and sank, all in about 12 months around 1999. Early adopters make early judgments, therefore its set in stone that the entire market in 2011 is dead, because it died in 1999. So the opinion leaders think its a lead balloon and ignore it.
The masses just look at advertising budgets... the dotcoms spent most of their dough on ads, and failed. The current crop of (successful) delivery services are spending money on the backroom so that they actually work. However, if they only spend 1/100th the money on ads, then they can only be 1/100th as successful as the failed dotcoms, right, at least according to the masses. And the early adopters trash it (see above).
So growth is slow, yet seemingly inexorable.
Amazon.com is quietly trying to resurrect the failed business models of WebVan and HomeGrocer
aka the same successful business model of peapod.com. Talk about trashing the service by carefully selected comparisons with failures. Disclaimer, I'm a very happy peapod customer, although I haven't ordered recently. When we had two newborns, medical issues, and an utterly packed schedule, it was a lifesaver (maybe literally, in terms of food quality vs the alternative of pizza delivery every day or whatever). I also greatly enjoyed shopping online vs in the store because of the "log in and work on the order for 5 minutes each day" ability. Also the experience of shopping while reading a cookbook, or at weird times of day, was oddly pleasurable.
can this idea fail?
About as many times as mom and pop restaurants fail, superficially the number is about infinite. I suspect you can realistically raise capital to do about one every couple years, and it'll be economically feasible to use diesel delivery trucks for only another decade or two, lets say another 10 times.
they'll enjoy a better quality of life
Oddly enough I only see physical health gadgets. No gadgets for mental health at all. You'd think they could have made even a simple token gesture attempt. Perhaps the stereotypical video conferencing solution, or digital picture frames of the grand kids, or something, something at all.
they won't be stuck with crippling medical bills.
These corporations are not doing work out of the goodness of their heart, in the style of from each according to their ability and to each according to their need. The whole point of this technological exercise is a DIFFERENT group will be delivering the crippling medical bills, instead of the current group. Is this group any better? Eh, probably, more or less. The good news they aren't getting the negative personal interactions and experiences of a nursing home for awhile longer. The bad news is their only personal interaction now seems to be a Wii-based bathroom scale.