As ever, Bill HIcks was on this before us (twenty years before us…):
“See, everyone got boners over the technology, and it was pretty incredible. Watching missiles fly down air vents, pretty unbelievable. But couldn’t we feasibly use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people? Know what I mean? Fly over Ethiopia, ‘There’s a guy that needs a banana!’ SHOOP.”
Flying drones … the last thing I want to see (or hear) above my house. Given the near term availability of driverless cars I would bet driverless delivery “vans” (legged if you want ultimate manueverability or wheeled if cheaping out) will come on line long before we (if ever) see flying drones. Think smallish, say the size of kid’s wagon, autonomous, designed to stay out of the way of normal traffic, get right up to your doorstep, vastly more energy efficient, won’t fall on anyone, etc., etc… Flying drones, cute idea, won’t fly.
Oh, how tempting that was, but no digressions today!!
I think that trials should be performed on this method of delivery. And I would think that @jonobacon would be a perfect candidate for such trials. And, of course, such trials should be documented by video. I am interested if the bottle of tonic remained intact, and, if so, what are the results when he opens it.
Will probably be better at phone calls than the Fire phone.
Can’t think of an example of an open source project where the head was the problem and went away?
How about ReiserFS?
ReiserFS 3 is old stable and in the kernel but v4 was proposing loads of new and potentially revolutionary stuff and was close to acceptance I believe when it was detailed by founder and head coder Hans Reiser getting arrested for and then convicted of the murder of his wife and sent to jail. Reiser4 never made it into the kernel and the backing company Namesys went out of business
Ah reminds me of an epic wikipedia defacement:
features: “murders your wife”
And Matter Net is delivering drugs and medical supplies in Africa.
Or an angry chimp can swing a stick at you. You just never know…
http://www.cnet.com/news/watch-chimp-smack-drone-out-of-sky-with-a-tree-branch/
–jeremy
Haha that’s excellent. I shall hire a chimp to swat down drones carrying tonic water.
On a more serious note, it appears the FCC has improved substantially on approval time.
Amazon’s drone team must have heaved a collective sigh of relief: the company only had to wait a few weeks for the FAA’s approval this time. The agency has officially granted Amazon’s request to test its new UAVs in the US on Wednesday, April 8th. If you recall, the company’s previous request spent six months in limbo, forcing it to take all testing overseas. By the time the agency allowed the drone noted in the first application to be flown within the US, the machine was already obsolete, and Amazon was already using a new model.
–jeremy
Drones carrying tonic water will float on pure majesty, able to avoid your pathetic attempts at subterfuge.
Back on other uses for drones, I wonder if the insurance industry has used them for preliminary inspections? I live in an area where hail, wind and other storm related damage is common. I would think that a drone would be handy to inspect a roof for damage.
The technology of drones is inevitable. But the social impact is much under-discussed. Corporations hate hiring people and seek to eliminate them from operations as soon as possible. There have been many sci-fi stories about people turning themselves into cyborgs to compete with robots in a post-human workforce. The social consequence heads towards the Dickensian “surplus population.”
From a human economic and health point of view, the investment in drone technology would be so much better spent on developing a bicycle powered transit system. You employ more people, you exercise them, you free yourself from large automotive/oil/military manufacturers that tend to want to control the economy and tax laws.
I don’t really think drones are exciting, I think they’ve already been cast as an example of worldwide poverty-creating and remote-killing machines. They remove jobs and allow people to stay fat and cowardly.
A bicycle delivery service would probably be more feasible economically, especially considering the mass of many of the items ordered, such as a 20 pound object.
I agree with the fat part, and would probably agree with the cowardly part if this thick old man understood what you meant by ‘cowardly’.
I keep thinking that too. Bicycle deliver seems like a better technology for delivering most items around a city than quad-copters.
The distinction is that you have to pay people all the time they’re working, and you don’t have to pay drones. By definition, no matter how much a drone costs up front and per minute, there comes a point when you have enough deliveries that people on bikes are more expensive; the current effort is to lower that point until it dips below the size of an existing city, and then that city gets drone deliveries.
You may argue that it’ll never drop below that point. That’s a reasonable argument, but it’s against the flow of history; the cost of a given item of tech drops over time, but the cost of people increases at the rate of inflation; that’s what the rate of inflation is. Drones may be the first technology in history to buck this trend, but that’s be an extraordinary claim to make, and thus requires extraordinary evidence.
Hmmm… That’s a good point. I wonder if… nah.
Maybe if… Well. Huh.
I got nuthin’.
Apropos to my comment about USPS drone adoption:
http://thestack.com/octocopter-shortlist-us-postal-service-horsefly-workhorse-210415
The delivery system is based around a ‘base’ van – called ‘WorkHorse’ – and an itinerant drone attached to it – called ‘HorseFly’. The latter is an eight-rotored autonomous unmanned vehicle (UAV) which can wirelessly recharge itself in two minutes from the base van. The delivery method involves the self-sufficient drone scanning the barcode of a package before using GPS to calculate the best route from the van to the address. The short distance between the van and end-point addresses some of the most prominent concerns raised in the last few years regarding the viability of delivery droids undertaking relatively long flights over urban areas.
–jeremy
That’s one way of thinking of it - another way of thinking of it is that, with every generation, there are jobs that get replaced with automation, and new jobs that get created as a result of that automation. People who train in doing a job that gets taken over by automation are left jobless and feeling resent toward new technology. It’s happened for a while now, but some people think that it happens faster now than it did before. I watched part of a TED talk that talked about this a while ago, but I forget which one.
I’m not 100% sure which to believe, but it seems mostly like this process has gone on for quite a while, and has accelerated for a while as well.