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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2013 10:07:48 GMT -8
The future is here! Flying robots will, any second now, be delivering your Christmas books, DVDs and gadgets to your door within 30 minutes of you ordering them, thanks to a new initiative announced by Amazon on CBS News' 60 Minutes on Sunday. It's a brave new world, a whole new paradigm. Or so you'd think if you read most of the breathless coverage about the announcement, which will only get worse: expect a torrent of turgid think-pieces in the next 48 hours about who's going to get "disrupted" as a result of this latest shake-up – and what it means for the US's already beleaguered postal service. Here's the problem: it's all hot air and baloney. As Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, acknowledged in the 60 Minutes segment, his plan to begin delivery by drone won't be enacted until around 2018 – and that's a hugely optimistic timeline. The practical issues are manifold: the technology to make the drones operational in any sense is not yet in place. It's all well and good for the unmanned vehicles to fly to a particular GPS site, but how does it then find the package's intended recipient? How is the transfer of the package enacted? What stops someone else stealing the package along the way? And what happens when next door's kid decides to shoot the drone with his BB rifle? None of that starts to come close to the legal minefield using drones in this way entails. At present, flying drones of this sort for commercial use would be illegal in the US. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which regulates this area, intends to make commercial drones legally viable and workable by 2015, but this deadline is all-but impossible: managing the skies with this much low-level traffic is a problem people are nowhere near solving. Opening up crowded urban areas full of terror targets to large numbers of flying platforms is always going to be packed with conflicting interests and difficulties. And all this has come before the first lawsuit caused after someone is injured by a faulty drone (or that one your neighbour shot), crashing down to earth. What Jeff Bezos announced amounted, essentially, to an aspiration to change how his company delivers products, in about five years time, if technology advances and regulation falls his way. If his TV appearance hadn't included the magic word "drones", Bezos's vague aspirations to change an aspect of his company's logistics probably wouldn't have made waves. Lucky for him, he did – winning his company positive publicity just ahead of what is usually the biggest online shopping day of the year, the dreadfully named Cyber Monday. Floating an exciting-but-impractical innovation for a swath of press coverage is such an old PR tactic you'd hope no one would fall for it, and yet everyone still does. In an industry dominated by page views, stuff people will click on that is easy to produce is an irresistible draw. Who cares if it actually stands up? Bezos' neat trick has knocked several real stories about Amazon out of the way. Last week's Panorama investigation into Amazon's working and hiring practices, suggesting that the site's employees had an increased risk of mental illness, is the latest in a long line of pieces about the company's working conditions – zero-hour contracts, short breaks, and employees' every move tracked by internal systems. Amazon's drone debacle also moved discussion of its tax bill – another long-running controversy, sparked by the Guardian's revelation last year that the company had UK sales of £7bn but paid no UK corporation tax – to the margins. The technology giants – Amazon, Google, Microsoft et al – have have huge direct reach to audiences and customers, the money to hire swarms of PR and communications staff, and a technology press overwhelmingly happy to incredulously print almost every word, rather than to engage in the much harder task of actually holding them to account. It's too late for the clickfarms already. But outlets and journalists who'd like to think of themselves as serious must stop regurgitating this crap. And, even more importantly, you,concerned citizen, must try to stop clicking on it.
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Post by Willing Sniper on Dec 2, 2013 10:14:28 GMT -8
Not going to happen.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2013 10:25:46 GMT -8
What?? but I just sent you a gift. It should be there in about 10 seconds.
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Post by Willing Sniper on Dec 2, 2013 10:26:43 GMT -8
Lol! Laser guided gifting.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2013 10:28:50 GMT -8
If an Amazon drone were to stumble into the airspace above Phillip Steel's yard in Deer Trail, Colo., he knows exactly what he'd do: Grab his shotgun. "I would shoot it down, ordinance or no, I would shoot it down," he tells me over the phone, later adding, "I will shoot it down and go to jail with a smile over my face."Deer Trail is one place Amazon probably won't pilot its "Air Prime" drone delivery system. The town is poised to vote in the next week and a half on an ordinance that will allow drone hunting, an ordinance Steel authored. That is, the measure will allow citizens of Deer Trail to purchase $25 drone-hunting licenses and then bring pieces of shot-down drones back for a bounty of up to $100. The text of the ordinance oozes with a not-on-my-lawn disdain for the copters. "As such, every unwanted unmanned aerial vehicle is hereby declared a threat to ... precious freedom," it reads. And, yeah, the kids can get in on the drone shooting too. "There shall be no age requirement or restriction for issuance of the hunting license." No background investigations will be needed to obtain a drone hunting license. It's that essential of a right. Perhaps you've heard of this. It's the kind of stunt that gets noticed by the Colbert Report, and that's kind of the point. Steel's the type of person to make his case to a town council wearing a cowboy costume and brandishing a plastic nerf rifle. He says he sent a drone-hunting license to Vladimir Putin. He also says he has Edward Snowden's phone number, but hasn't called him yet. Last week, he staged a drone-hunting practice session using model rockets in place of UAVs. e tells me he spent 14 years in the Army as a Psychological Warfare officer. I asked him what that meant and he summed it up as "propaganda." And he says he's using that experience in what he more euphemistically calls "marketing" to get the word out about drones. "I wouldn't say that I'm a fear monger; I'm trying to illuminate an imminent threat that is on the horizon," he says. "The perception in the absence of fact becomes reality." Basically, he's creating a farce to make his central point: What does the mass proliferation of drones mean for privacy? For property rights? If a drone flies within 1,000 feet of a person's airspace, is that a trespass? These are the questions the FAA will have to deal with as it makes recommendations for commercial drone use. FAA chief Michael Huerta outlined a five-year roadmap last month charting how the agency plans to integrate commercial drones into national airspace, beginning with the announcement of six test site locations by the end of the year. A draft rule is expected early next year, but it is only expected to cover applications for drones that would fly under 400 feet above ground and remain within the visual line of sight of a pilot during daytime. It's a far cry from the drones Bezos imagines, which would travel up to 10 miles from a distribution center. "You have to pity the poor guy at the FAA," Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says. "I have this image of some poor guy at the FAA eating his leftover turkey sandwich, watching 60 Minutes and going, 'oh, crap.'" "Do I think 1984 is going to happen?" Steel says, downplaying the hyperbole. "Not in the same sense as George Orwell did—but I think its going to be a lot trickier than that, a lot more subtle." And it's true: Expansions of technology from retailers have limited the privacy of consumers. There's that infamous story of Target knowing a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did. But that's just the tip of a massive industry that rests on selling consumer-behavior profiles (detached from key identifiers, but still, encompassing the shadow of a person's buying habits). "Technology advances far quicker than the law does; as a society we are too eager to embrace the next new toy," Steel says. The Supreme Court every year has such a case—can GPS units track cars without a warrant, is a DNA database search an invasion of privacy, and so on. And while the Deer Trail ordinance is a bit of a joke, there are many states that have considered drone privacy laws, to lay the legal groundwork before the technology becomes commonplace. Amazon has put forth a tantalizing scenario: the skies buzzing with instant gratification. But that's bound to have some unintended consequences—if it's even practical.
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Post by whisker on Dec 3, 2013 15:03:48 GMT -8
I saw that on the telly the other evening. It just flew through the sky and dumped the parcel on the concrete in front of a building, then took off again. Looks like a lot of work needs to be done on this before it's ready to go.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 3, 2013 15:20:37 GMT -8
I saw that on the telly the other evening. It just flew through the sky and dumped the parcel on the concrete in front of a building, then took off again. Looks like a lot of work needs to be done on this before it's ready to go. Rough landing eh?
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Post by Crusher on Dec 3, 2013 15:40:20 GMT -8
How loud are these things? I don't live by an airport because I don't want to live by an airport. I don't want buzzing overhead so someone can get their rabbit dildo in 30 minutes. Wait in line like everyone else!
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Post by Deleted on Dec 3, 2013 15:59:49 GMT -8
I believe Amazon could actually do it if they said versus lying Obama who can't accomplish a damn thing.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 3, 2013 16:03:34 GMT -8
Oh snicks...Bitterness is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 3, 2013 18:18:38 GMT -8
Tastes delicious.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 3, 2013 18:19:36 GMT -8
Well you have that right. I may die but you are still left with the rat! Lol!
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