You act as if there's only "honest" and "dishonest" and the line between that black-and-white in this case is universally agreed upon by everyone. Surely you know that's ridiculous.

In the list of fraudelent advertising I've seen in just the past year, ranked by how offensive they are, I'm not sure the Wikipedia appeals for money would even make the top 1000.

Man I wish I had mod points. Brilliant post.

As Homer Simpson said, "It's funny because it's true!"

Jimmy Wales is worth an estimated $1 million. He could probably afford to buy a nice 30-foot sailboat; bigger if he planned to live on it exclusively.

Look, they're planning for the future. If they said, "Please donate or the lights will go out in 10 years", the numbers of donations would go down drastically.

They're appealing to as massive an audience as they can to donate small amounts of money, and sure, they're using mass-appeal language to do it. I'd rather see that than have a few billionaires being lobbied to keep Wikipedia going. It makes sense.

You're right that a lot of that is misleading - but that's framing it in the worst-sounding way. It's really just advertising, although a different sort of advertising. If they said, "Hey we have $53 million in the bank, but the reality is, we need more funding in order to keep our organization going, because if we don't have sustainable funding we may go under in 10 years", how many people would donate?

The wording that they use is carefully chosen to try to get the maximum amount of donations. I'm okay with that.

Or, in the case of many regions (parts of Africa or the Middle East spring to mind) there's often no government presence whatsoever in areas where there's a whole lot of killin' going on.

yeah really, why read the article?

"A mockup shows an Amazon order screen with four options for delivery: “Bring It to Me,” “Home,” “Work,” and “My Boat.”

Right, because no middle-class suburban residents ever commit theft or larceny.

I can why you didn't get my point - you're suffering from the same disease as the OP; that is, you think that the people proposing drone delivery haven't given any more thought to it than you have, and the 5 seconds you've invested in thinking about it is the final word.

Wow, you're right! Jeff Bezos is probably canceling the whole project right now, because no one at Amazon ever thought about any of the points you've brought up, and your post just turned the entire idea of drone delivery into a no-go. It's a little amazing to me than a lowly Slashdot poster outwitted the entire engineering division at Amazon, but it just goes to show, the best ideas always come from naysayers that have no idea what's going on at the company they're tearing down in their heads.

I know 90% of the Slashdot audience is going to talk about shooting down Amazon's drones and shit like that, but seriously - isn't there anyone besides me that can't wait for this? I think it's going to be great, and the "sky is falling" predictions about all the downsides to this seem like nonsense to me, for the most part. Am I alone in this?

or C) neither of the above

https://support.apple.com/en-u...

I don't even know if CNE is really their stock ticker (I assume you know that it is) but I can tell you it's pretty common in the publishing industry to refer to the company as "CNE", so I'd give the summary writer a pass on that one.

I know it's not fashionable to RTFA at Slashdot, but really....

Sheesh, it's only about 10 sentences in.