First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes

Post by SimHacker » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 6:06 AM UTC

enneff wrote: post #157

IBM wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 to get into. I'm sorry, what Google "innovations" are you referring to here?

Post by SimHacker » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 6:22 AM UTC

olefoo wrote: post #127

001sky wrote: post #65

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I've already seen what supporting Walmart has done to our country Have you ever shopped there? Or do you just repeat what you read all the time? Wall mart typically only exists in rural poor areas, and I doubt a drive-by HN commenter has any sense of proportion on the real issues at play. Wall-mart migh mean more competition for mom & pop stores, but they also bring reliable and affordable access to otherwise unaffor…

> Wall mart typically only exists in rural poor areas This is factually wrong. Walmart (note the spelling) follows suburbs and population centers. They may have been mostly rural one or two decades ago, but they are now most likely to be found near an intersection of freeways within 10 miles of a downtown. See http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4330486 for a map. As for the rest of your screed... it's possible to be down on…

Post by ericd » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 7:58 AM UTC

Crito wrote: post #146

krallja wrote: post #142

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Almost all helicopters have constant speed rotors and use the pitch of the blades to control all but 1 degree of freedom (the last is the pitch of the tail rotor blades, which directly controls the yaw in upright flight).

My understanding is that quad/octo-rotor helicopters do not have constant speed rotors because they turn about by varying the relative speeds of each rotor. They don't have any sort of swashplate. My understanding is that this simplification is more or less the entire point of quad-rotors, since otherwise a single big rotor would be much more efficient.

Post by Houshalter » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:14 AM UTC

wavefunction wrote: post #26

owenjones wrote: post #12

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Also even if the book '... portrays Bezos as a ruthless tyrant and a "penny-pinching ballbuster,"' would that dissuade anyone who was already planning on it from shopping at Amazon? To me, regardless of the truth, being "penny-pinching" given Amazon's razor thin margins seems like a good trait for the CEO.

What about "ruthless tyrant?" I'm making a point to shop locally now. I've already seen what supporting Walmart has done to our country.

Post by VolatileVoid » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:48 AM UTC

downandout wrote: post #133

bandushrew wrote: post #93

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Yeah, that makes sense to me. Organising something like this in a controlled area like a campus must be a few orders of magnitude simpler than organising something like this across the US. it is a fantastic use of technology, I genuinely hope amazon manages to deliver.

> Organising something like this in a controlled area like a campus must be a few orders of magnitude simpler than organising something like this across the US. Not necessarily. When a new address comes up, a human operator might takes a look at a satellite image of the address and give the drone an appropriate location to land on the property. That data would then be stored. 15 seconds with a human, one time only, i…