111–120 of 200 posts
What the fuck is with all the hit pieces today? Who the hell cares what comes about it. It was an interesting little side show. Guess this is the story that's going to rack up page views for at least the beginning of the week.
They're not hit pieces, they're educated responses to a marketing announcement.
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Sorry, but who are you? Who are you to stand up and call Amazon's idea unviable? Why is their idea unviable? Because they have no proof? Well you certainly proved how unviable the idea is with your lack of proof. Quite frankly, when it comes to Bezos vs "ye", I have to say that the billionaire owner of one of the most successful stores in our world is SLIGHTLY more credible than "ye", random commenter who has no doma…
There seems to be a bee in your bonnet. The person you just berated baselessly pointed out some of the practical problems with this endeavour. He didn't say they couldn't be overcome.
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At this point I wouldn't call it vaporware, its not that far along. Most of the technology to do this is in place now. I won't try to argue that the current generation technology is actually cost-effective for drone delivery, but flight control, navigation, collision avoidance, etc., all exist in some form now. A hexacopter has some robustness (it can be designed to still fly with a single motor failure). Most of the…
All of the technology for Duke Nukem Forever was available. People are just as much of a problem with vaporware products. With the drones, Amazon will have to deal with the tech in various forms, the people problem (shooting them down, capturing them, stealing packages, etc), and the regulatory problem. Five years is an _eternity_ in Internet Time.
It's taken us 20 years from Amazon coming online to Internet sales eclipsing retail holiday sales (which I believe is projected for this year.)
This piece is right on. Amazon package drones are total vaporware at this point; the only reason to announce them is to improve the competitive positioning of Amazon in the press. This is no different than the "slate" announcement by Microsoft and HP at CES 2010, which was widely panned and never produced any actual products for sale. But for a short time, it put MS in all the news stories about the iPad.
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You're confusing huge ridiculously expensive military drones, which are essentially small planes, with what Amazon is showing us, which are essentially small helicopters. There's no way in the world these tiny drones can fly 10 miles each way, carry 5lbs of payload, deliver the package perfectly on the driveway/doorstep, and cost low enough to not be a financial nightmare. That's not even accounting for dealing with…
I may not have sufficiently thought this through, but what about having them take off from and return to mobile flatbed trucks? Use them for last-mile delivery rather than all the way from the warehouse.
It's a cool idea, but imagine a drone hitting a wire and crashing into a car on the opposite lane. It will kill.
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You're confusing huge ridiculously expensive military drones, which are essentially small planes, with what Amazon is showing us, which are essentially small helicopters. There's no way in the world these tiny drones can fly 10 miles each way, carry 5lbs of payload, deliver the package perfectly on the driveway/doorstep, and cost low enough to not be a financial nightmare. That's not even accounting for dealing with…
> There's no way in the world these tiny drones can fly 10 miles each way, carry 5lbs of payload Today, there are prototypes that cost $2000, can carry well over 2kg (high definition cameras and such), and have a twenty miles range (that's 40 miles worth of "fuel"). As for perfect delivery… until you can miniaturize self-driving car technology, you can always have a human pilot manually landing the thing and take off…
What the fuck is with all the hit pieces today? Who the hell cares what comes about it. It was an interesting little side show. Guess this is the story that's going to rack up page views for at least the beginning of the week.
They're not hit pieces, they're educated responses to a marketing announcement.
You can't claim that Amazon destroyed the credibility of CBS and at the same time claim that one of their top anchors regularly gives "soft-ball" interviews. Well, to be honest you can, but you'll sound like an idiot.
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I may not have sufficiently thought this through, but what about having them take off from and return to mobile flatbed trucks? Use them for last-mile delivery rather than all the way from the warehouse.
I doubt FAA would ever allow that. It's a cool idea, but imagine a drone hitting a wire and crashing into a car on the opposite lane. It will kill.
If this idea is going to work at all (and that's a big if) these things were always going to have to fly over roads and land in driveways.
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I agree. I'm totally on board that there was some serious negotiation by Amazon (Prime) to get the piece on Amazon Prime Air to air the eve of "Cyber Monday" so you'd see as much Amazon Prime as possible. I'd believe that it's intentionally out there to put quiet pressure on the FAA to lighten its regulations. I could even see it being run to distract from the Mother Jones-esque pieces about how terrible it is to be…
But it's not just the book (which by the way is getting excellent reviews from people other than Jeff Bezos' wife). It's about the worker strike in Germany and the other negative news about Amazon. They are following the Google playbook of creating goodwill and good PR through these types of "innovations" that are destined to remain as vaporware or never really considered by the company to be a real business for them…