Nope, I'm just a data mining resource like everyone else. I've only talked with Google Play and Nexus device support, so maybe those groups are better or I just got lucky.

Actually, I've had nothing but good experiences with Google phone support. Every time I've called I got an intelligent person who actually seemed interested in trying to resolve my problem. The success rate on solving the problem immediately wasn't perfect, but they did follow up when a patch was eventually released that fixed the issue.

If esoteric references and deep gameplay are the criteria, Sandcastle Builder may be in the running. It has even been referred to as "the Dwarf Fortress of idle games"

And for extra geek credit, it's based off of a xkcd comic

How much does it weigh in a sane unit like dynes?

They don't even say what weight paper they're using, so the mass could be off by an order of magnitude if you use the wrong one.

I was on Cox, but the same thing applies. I cancelled cable TV about 2yrs ago and since then, my internet service quality has gone down (despite higher peak mbps claims) and the prices went up by ~40%. They're obviously targeting "cord cutters" because the prices of the bundle packages aren't increasing at the same rate. So I finally decided to drop Cox service entirely (at least officially, they still haven't disconnected analog cable TV after 2yrs)

Where I am DSL just isn't a competitive option, so I decided to up my phone internet plan to unlimited data and forgo any wired internet. I'm now paying $45/mo less between internet and phone and the 4G speeds are comparable to what I was getting on cable. The only drawback is that I have a limited amount of tethering data, so I use that sparingly and watch streaming video on the TV through my phone with a slimport adapter.

It seems crazy that wireless providers can offer a competitive service against a company that has a physical cable into the house, but that's the state of affairs when there's no competition in the market. Although I doubt my solution would be acceptable to a majority of the population, it's still a good indicator of how severe the problem is with wired ISPs abusing their monopolies.

If they are reasonable, rational people they should be able to afford the medical bills and nobody else has to pay anything for their treatment. The problem is when people don't get insured because they can't afford it. Of course in that case, they often can't afford the co-pays or deductible anyway and the rest of us end up paying no matter what choices they make about health insurance.

The only way to truly solve that problem is to allow hospitals (ER's in particular) to refuse treatment in some cases. But that isn't really a tenable solution in our society. Although, there is something we can do to reduce the severity of problem: Reduce Costs. If we can introduce competition on medical care costs, more people could afford their own care and the burden on everyone else is lessened.

For this sort of problem, insurance is a red herring. All it does is shift the costs to different groups.

It's not necessarily true that it will increase CO2 emissions. It will decrease peak demand which is almost universally provided by fossil fuel based systems in favor of base demand which has varying levels of emissions (near zero for hydro or nuclear, but relatively high for coal). Even if it's coal, the base power plants are quite a bit more efficient than the on-demand natural gas generators. If they weren't, we would just use the peak load generators for everything.

The company gets to benefit from the flattened power demand and the employees get to charge their cars. Seems like a win-win to me. The additional wear on the batteries is likely minimal considering that there will probably be many more than 6 electric cars in the lot.

I doubt $4800/yr in electricity cost savings will fully offset the charger installation and maintenance costs, but it could be close enough that it can be justified as a marketing tool or as a perk to draw employees.

I just recently got a Nexus 5 to replace my aging Nokia N9 and was amazed by the near complete lack of simple tools that don't want access to your data in return. For the N9, there were a ton of useful free open source tools provided by the community over at maemo.org. That community was great. Every time I thought that there was something that was missing or new capability I wanted, I'd look there and find an app that already exists or a group of people in the process of building it.

The contrast between that experience and the excessive commercialism of Android was startling. After looking around for a while I did find this Simple LED Widget that is just what it says and doesn't require any unnecessary permissions, but I had to sift through dozens of apps like the one in the TFA.

Is there anything even close to maemo.org for Android? I've heard some good things about F-Droid, but I haven't looked into it enough yet to know if it's the best option.

It does seem like you thought about it quite a bit and do "get it", but there are a lot of assumptions being made that could be looked at more thoroughly which may make the question of economic viability more valid. And for the sake of argument, let's assume the technology is there (with the progress in self driving cars, electronics and battery tech we're getting close if we're not there yet).

Is the theft/vandalism issue really more severe for a fleet of drones vs. a fleet of trucks?
There could certainly be an issue with vandalism at the start, but assuming that the general public doesn't reject the idea entirely, it should taper off rapidly as the novelty wears off. As for theft, I think it has the potential to be substantially better for the packages. Since they're one-stop deliveries, they could be scheduled for whenever the recipient is available to receive it instead of leaving them out in publicly accessible areas. The drones are a more difficult part of the equation. If they are easily disabled with cheap remote jammers, that could make it an easy and low risk target which could kill the whole concept. If we assume that they can be designed to defend against this sort of attack, then the risk of theft drops dramatically. Shooting weapons with enough range and power to down a drone hundreds of feet up in the air is already illegal in most populated areas, so that's likely not a major issue. That leaves the landing phase as the most risky point, which can be mitigated by making sure the landing zone is clear of people and taking off again quickly. On-demand delivery should help with this as well since the recipient will be there to witness/prevent the theft.

How many drones do you really need to replace one delivery truck? This article claims the average UPS truck delivers ~120 packages per day. If we assume that the bulk of those deliveries take place in an 8hr window, the drone will average 30mph and they both deliver with an average distance from the hub of 10 miles:
UPS truck at 120pkg/8hrs = 15 pkgs/hr and the drone is 30mph * 1pkg/20mi = 1.5pkgs/hr.
therefore, drones/UPS truck = 10

That's certainly more, but then the cost of a drone is likely ~1/10th that of a delivery truck (e.g. 50k vs 5k). So capital costs aren't grossly different and the question comes down to whether the costs to repair/service drones is greater than trucks by more than the cost of paying delivery drivers. Lets assume that 12000 packages need to be delivered in the area each day. That's:
100 delivery drivers * 8hrs * $16/hr = $12800/day

And now I'm a bit stuck. Will it cost $12800/day (or ~$300k/month) more to maintain and repair 1000 drones than 100 trucks? I'd need to put way more thought into that than I can justify spending, so ... let's move on.

This is another hard one to estimate, but maybe we can get a rough idea of the fuel needed for the truck and then take a SWAG at the relative efficiency.

The delivery trucks takes a highly optimized path, so I'm going to pull a number out of thin air of ~100 miles to deliver those 120 packages per day and this paper says they get ~10mpg, so that's 10 gallons of gas per day. Assuming they pay a bit less than average for gas at $3/gal, that's $30/120pkgs or 4 packages deliveries per dollar.

Can a drone carry a 5lb payload 10 miles and return for 25 cents worth of electricity? Hmm ... how much electricity is that? If they get bulk rates of 5 cents per kWhr, they would have ~5kWhrs to play with. For comparison, that will take a Nissan Leaf (34kWhr/100mi) about 15 miles. Conveniently that's a similar distance. Then the question becomes; will a multi-copter designed to carry a 5lb payload use more energy/mile than a 3300lb electric car? I don't know how to answer that accurately, but it doesn't seem like if it is higher, it would be by orders of magnitude.

I don't see any way to come up with a clear conclusion on economic viability from any of this, but it seems to be close enough that it's worth spending a bit more time and effort to find out.

I assume they wouldn't do either of those, but there are simple solutions for both. The drone would drop the package on the sidewalk outside the building and call to notify the customer it's there. This is a low latency delivery service, so I assume that someone would be there to receive it. Eventually, if it becomes a more standard means of delivery, apartment buildings could have a designated spot on the roof or in a courtyard where the package would be less likely to be stolen.

I often buy lunch meat that comes packaged in reusable storage containers and it doesn't add substantially to the cost. So it's possible that it wouldn't be a significant expense compared to things like energy/fuel/maintenance. At least it certainly won't be by the time they roll this service out on any scale. If they can't get the boxes cheap enough, they'll stay with the drone or include a shipping label to send them back.

Except you're not discussing anything. You made a claim that the technology to accomplish Amazon's aims have been around long enough that it would have been done by now if it was of value. Iskender and I have made some reasonable counter-arguments to the fundamental assumption in your argument, but instead of addressing them you give an example that doesn't support your claims and just state that you're right.

If you do sincerely want to discuss this topic, please elaborate on how the technology in the D-21 or any other example from the era could be used to deliver packages from a central hub to an arbitrary location in a city landscape and return without human intervention in the route planning.

The closest thing I can find is the Boeing Condor which was capable of completing a mission automatically, but did not do any route planning onboard or have the sensors and computing capability for obstacle avoidance. That was first flown in 1988, so we were part way there on the navigation side of things 25 yrs ago. This Survey Article shows some of the research that's been completed since then on the computer vision tech needed for safe navigation in an active and uncontrolled environment like a city. With the recent refinements in other applications like self driving cars and development of small power-efficient computers, it seems we're only now coming to the point of having all of the tech needed to make delivery drones (flying or otherwise) possible.

That's only true in the meaningless sense that any theoretically possible technology just takes some time and resources to develop. What you've missed is that we have been actively researching and developing the necessary technologies all along.

The D-21 drone was the state of the art technology at that time and all it could do was maintain heading and altitude and make a few pre-defined course changes. The difference in complexity between that and what Amazon wants to do is like the difference between a player piano simply playing a piece of music vs composing it itself.

You may have heard the Isaac Newton quote "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." It applies here, but is somewhat flawed in that there really aren't "giants" to stand on. It would be more accurate, if less poetic, if it were "If I have seen further it is by building only one level higher on the foundation built by others before me."

What you're proposing is that we could have leapt straight from the Wright Flyer to the SR-71 because in 1903 powered flight and reaction engines both existed. Heck, the Aeolipile had been around for nearly two millenia at that point.

Yes, exactly like that. If you'd actually read that Wikipedia article you would have noticed the program failed because it wasn't reliable and it was easier to launch it with rockets from a B52 than to improve the control systems to safely handle separation.

Thanks for proving my point.

We haven't had the capability theoretically or otherwise to design small, affordable and relatively capable autonomous vehicles that can navigate arbitrary landscapes with collision avoidance to keep pedestrians safe until now.

Packaging the necessary computing capability, sensors and navigation equipment to accomplish this is more than just a bit easier than it was 30 yes ago. It wasn't possible or the military would have been using automated surveilance drones then instead of just the last decade or so. If it was just a matter of a bit of R&D why did we have spy satellites and planes like the SR-71 before such simple craft as a Predator drone?

I'm an aerospace engineer not just some random dolt who jabbers on about flying cars and jet packs. If you really think that these types of autonomous drones didn't exist because there's no economic or strategic value to them, you don't have much of an imagination. Amazon sees them as the ability to deliver things anywhere in a city in minutes without needing to pay for a fleet of trucks and the necessary personnel on standby. The military and (unfortunately) the police and intelligence organizations see them as a way to cheaply monitor an area and gather data to more efficiently direct their forces. If you don't see that, it doesn't really matter. The technology will progress and drag you along with it, even if you don't recognize that it's happening.