Remember Atlas? An Atlas rocket launched John Glenn into orbit as part of the US Mercury program, and was an ICBM in 1958. They are launching an Atlas rocket in August 2018.

(I know, Atlas in name only. Not the same technology).

I was talking to the Ziosk people about 4 years ago, and yes they are Android based tablets. The management of the company was pushing these tablets to reduce costs, since "wait staff won't have to take your order" and "you won't have to wait around for your bill".

I went to Outback recently, and yes they had the Ziosk tablets also. I just pushed the screen towards the wall of the booth, and had a wonderful time chatting with the waitperson, never having to touch the device the rest of my visit.

I think it is a solution looking for a problem.

Any parachute system requires a minimum height. If your magic vehicle is at 75 feet, and everything quits, the occupants are going to get hurt.

The parachute will potentially get tangled in urban environments (poles, spires, etc), bouncing the craft into buildings and such risking additional injuries.

Parachutes and windy days are not a good thing. The craft may land softly enough to survive, but the dragging and tumbling may cause further injury. Imagine a lull, the occupants start to climb out, and a gust grabs the parachute, dragging the craft across the survivors.

Yes, the long blade helicopters will auto-rotate. Most quad/hex/octocopters (multirotor) craft propellers will not have the mass needed to auto-rotate, even with variable pitch.

Helicopters are able to auto-rotate in the case of engines quitting because the rotors have lots of mass that can hold energy until needed close to the ground.

These wimpy drone propellers are not as efficient, and don't have enough mass to store the energy to use at any height.

The wings will help in glide, but in an urban area, there still may not be a place to glide through the buildings to a safe place.

Electric motors are reliable, but all the wiring and engine controls contain multiple single points of failure.

Remember their big splashy people carrying Octo-copter?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/g...

Do you still want to ride in one of these?

Actually there were "hobbiest" RC model aircraft in the 1930's.

The 1950's had small tube based RC units.

http://www.stormthecastle.com/...

If coal is such a good idea, why don't people use coal to heat Condo's in New York.

Money where your mouth is.

I know people who are actively *NOT* buying Oracle because of stupid lawsuits.

But maybe Larry doesn't care anymore, he has enough money to play, and can't spend it all before he dies.

Weird.

While you are negative on the FAA, there is more to be negative about.

Experimental licenses are available for the developers of the system to go out and fly these things with people in them. Why aren't people flying in them now?

Well, what is plan B? When something bad goes wrong (batteries die, mid-air collisions, bird strikes, etc) what happens to the occupants? Flights about about 10 feet will cause people to get hurt. Parachutes only work at higher altitudes (hundreds of feet).

Bright sunny days aren't everyday. Winds, clouds, fog, rain, hail, etc happen in real life, how will this plastic pod survive all the weather in the world?

Batteries take longer to charge than the flight they were used for. Charging can take 2-3 times longer than the use time. Unless some huge improvement in battery technology happens, these will be very expensive to fly. Batteries wear over time, and after hard use over a years time, the capacity could be as low as 50% of new, meaning longer charging, and shorter flights.

Triple redundancy has failed before (UA flight 232), but there are other options you say. What are they?

5-10 years is a pipe dream.

The B757 never had WiFi or any other common networking on it. The closest thing might be ACARs, or one of the databus that aircraft use.

The 737 classics that Southwest has, had WiFi added, but nothing connected in the cockpit. Even the 737-NGs had WiFi added, but again, nothing to the cockpit.

The newer 737-MAX's are Boeings responsibility. So far Southwest doesn't have enough of them to threaten the company should the need to be retro-fitted.

A fix to one line of code, would apply to several thousand aircraft. It won't be $1mil per line per aircraft. A software fix that cost $100million would be applicable to about 5000 unique aircraft.

There is a high noise to signal ratio in the original article, but it sure generates a lot of speculation and worry.

I worked in an auto plant that was supposed to build 1000 cars per day.

When I started, they were running 1 shift, hoping to get to 500 cars per day, but were building about 300-350. They added the second shift, and with training and all, barely got about 500 cars per day. After about 9 months, the management said we will try our best for one day, really pushing things. That one day the plant built 700 cars. After that, the plant was building 600-650 consistently, with a few days around 700. After that they added an extra hour to each shift (9 hours) and were able to build about 700-750 consistently every day. After about 2 years the plant was building about 750-800 every day.

This was in the early 90's and we could sell every car produced. The company had to put quotas on dealers and they would sell cars above retail price, making customers unhappy.

Troubles included Just In Time parts delivery being late, and line workers wasting materials (they dropped a plastic clip, and rather than picking it up, use another one, but the JIT predictor didn't account for that much waste, and we were short parts). There were silly troubles too, like it couldn't read the body number out of the paint shop sometimes, so the line wasn't sure what car just came out.

The only time a fully autonomous airplane will work, is on a clear day with a perfect airplane.

Go fly in unforecast icing, thunderstorms, and in the dark, with a couple MEL deferments, and watch the AI get all confused.

Air France 447 was put down as pilot error, but the reality is the autopilot gave up with too many confusing inputs, then the pilots had to take over, and one (of about 5 pilots) made a bad choice.

Software isn't the only thing to rely on, there are a ton of sensors that have to be dealt with as well. I've been around aircraft long enough, constant high speed and vibration take their toll on all equipment. Many times the autopilots fail on aircraft, it keeps the mechanics employed, and pilots earning their pay.

Again why does anyone buy anything from Amazon. They are an evil evil evil company. They don't make anything better, only more expensive (long term).

Most likely this patent was asked for by Amazon so they *STOP* retailers from doing this. If a retailer does this, then Amazon can ask the store for all their profits since the beginning of time. Amazon hope customers will do this so they will find it cheaper through the amazon store.

Please people, stop giving Amazon any money, don't buy from these creeps.

GPS fails or is not accurate enough for airplanes to rely on 100% of the time. The local Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSP) like the FAA have space based augmentation like WAAS in the US to make things better, but still not 100%. I could see cars going out of control when the GPS signals are no good. 5 cars are occupying 00'00.000" on this place in the freeway, they all jam on the brakes.

Who gets to program the kalman filters that predict the closing rates and such, they never fail. GPS only can tell you where you were when the signal came down, not where you are when it is done calculating. The Kalman filter tried to adjust to where you are when the calculations are done.

Too much Theory, and not enough Practical.

As long as folks don't just re-encode h.264 content. Record things in with an x265 encoder, at the beginning, and have more actual bits in the B and P frames.