531–540 of 604 posts
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Kills a dog!? I don't know what sort of half-ass dogs these people have but I'd be vastly more worried about my dog fucking up one of these drones and being held responsible for replacement costs.
My dog would definitely try to take it out but it's the same as with cats: I would be more worried about the old guy losing an eye than hurting the cat. Those rotor blades look pretty dangerous to me.
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Hacker News on Dropbox: Why would anyone want this? I can do this already with my home PC, all I need to do is install package xyz and let it run in the background. How does this handle duplicates, this is doomed to fail.
Dropbox is for people that can't use rsync+git. For the unix-competent, it's not particularly difficult and we managed for many years with the previous tools, rsync+svn or even rsync+cvs
While technologically fascinating, is it just me or are we creating a really sad sad world, where we eliminate all human interaction and pollute or skies with these ugly annoying things. I wholeheartedly hopes this fails as hard as possible.
As you post this to a message board on the Internet where hundreds (thousands?) of people will read it. Only face-to-face human interaction is decreasing, while total human interaction is increasing.
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Textbook drone delivery: http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/14/zookal-starts-world-first-d... Cake drone delivery: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1020621... Pizza drone delivery: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/dominos-tests-delivery-pizza-r... Parcel delivery drones: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57601531-76/drones-in-chin... Beer delivery drones: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/brandin…
What, just a story to make sure Amazon dominates the media on Cyber Monday? I'd say your analysis is bang on. The lesson to learn here, folks, is that this is one of those themes that just keeps on giving. Any time you need some quick publicity, reach for a drone...
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Why would a small store serving a local population not be able to offer this? There is a lot of open source drone stuff out there, so the technology should be readily available. At least available within a year of Amazon putting it into service. If my local mom-n-pop store has an app and a drone, I would shop there.
I can think of a few problems: 1) Scale: a small store might not have enough sales to justify buying a single drone and training the staff to use it. 2) Regulation: licensing and certifications to be allowed to use these - particularly in a completely hands-off way - may have high fixed costs that a small store can't afford. 3) Lack of knowledge: most small store managers probably don't have any idea of how to set th…
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The truth is, drone delivery was discussed already here on HN. A lot of the details were already envisioned and suggested. A lot of the commenters on this thread think it's a new idea or its's new here on HN. This is a good PR move for Amazon(edit: equal to Google's self driving car in PR power). It's likely they got inspired by some of the HN discussions. I hope they don't invent silly patents around it, such as "on…
You give HN and its small eco-chamber way too much credit.
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I'm also "intimately familiar" with multi rotors, and I don't think any of these issues you've identified are valid, with the exception of regulations (which Amazon admits won't happen). > Battery recharge time - out for 15 mins flight? Recharge for 2 hours. So? Swap out batteries. The whole drone doesn't have to be grounded for 2 hours. > Flight time / payload - pick one. (20 mins with no payload is a stretch. Add b…
What are other good alternatives to GPS?
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Human-driven delivery trucks hit and kill dogs, cats, men, women and children every day And gasoline-powered vehicles of all sorts catch on fire all the time in collisions, yet one or two of Tesla's catch on fire and all hell breaks loose. Our mass media has an extremely regressive, anti-intellectual, pro- status quo bent.
> And gasoline-powered vehicles of all sorts catch on fire all the time in collisions Gasoline cars do not "catch on fire all the time in collisions". Not remotely. It's unlikely the Teslas do, either. But Tesla's vehicles are both relatively novel, and real-world-untested and hence are both a news story and deserved of scrutiny. Just like these drones.