$1000 is way too much. I can build one for $300 that can take off, take (waypoint/altitude) mission off an Android device or PC (wireless). Navigate all on its own, trigger a few relays or servos (to do what ever) come back and land. Fly time around 17-20 minutes with a payload of 500g and a total weight of say 1.5 kg.

Well, $1000 is a nice limit showing how functional and automated/autonomous these drones are. Commercial ones are around $1000, and Arducopters can be built from $300-800 depending on all the features desired.

Contrast this to an RC helicopter where the hobby ones are barely able to be bought for $1000 - when you have $400 radios and receivers, $200 engines, $300 kits, $100 gyros, etc (rough pricing). And there's a pilot in the loop - no such autopilot as on a drone.

It's just like lasers - they're so cheap they're in "idiot" territory which is why the FAA and others are cracking down.

Did it just become cool to call every unmanned aircraft a drone, after we started murdering people with them?

No one called toy helicopters drones 8 years ago. No one.

Because a modern quadrotor is much more functional than an RC helicopter.

There is so much electronics in one that they literally do fly themselves. Push a button and they lift themselves off the ground and hover there automatically - something that no RC helicopter can do without continuous input by the pilot.

So while you fly an RC helicopter, you pretty much just direct a drone - want it to move forward? You command it forward and it obeys (even figuring out "forward" - yes, a modern drone can determine which way you're pointed and determine that to be forward regardless of orientation).

And drones with this capability cost under $1000.

It's also why we see more incidents around - learning to fly is a skill and you generally have to practice it (with both time and cost). With a drone, you push the button that says "Fly" and short of sudden gusts of wind or eddies, they sit there in the air waiting for your command.

And yes, there are projects that turn RC helicopters into drones, but they generally are far more expensive and limited. Quadrotors require a computer anyways due to their instabilities so it doesn't take much more effort to add in flying software.

It will be interesting to see if Apple becomes more charitable under Cook. Jobs was pretty stingy that way (very stingy in his perosnal life, but I think Apple unde rhim did do a few charitable contributions)

Apple has become more charitable under Cook. An employee perk is that Apple will match donations up to $10,000 or so per year to an employee's charity.

Now, Jobs himself we don't know the extent of his charity - his records of public philanthropy are generally scant, though it's possible that Jobs himself requested the donations be kept anonymous (probably for marketing reasons to keep charities from trying to raise funds under his name or to promote the fact that "famous Steve Jobs donates here" in their records).

One nit: Tesla has not yet solved the recharge time problem. Sure, you can drive cross-country in a Tesla, but if you value your time, it's not nearly as convenient as doing so in a regular ICE car. But they're doing their darnedest to make it better.

If you value your time over every thing else, including safety, you mean.

So yeah, if you're the kind who'll do a 3 day drive non-stop, you'd probably go ICE (then again, if you really valued your time, you might consider flying - either commercially or general aviation). But those people generally are rare and most normal people do want to stop to stretch legs and eat outside of the car, which means easily a 30-40 minute stop at a rest stop which is an ideal time to charge up.

Apple attacked Samsung for using the same elements that Apple stole from others, Samsung attacked back with *real* patents to back themselves up.

Except both were real patents. Apple's patents were Design Patents which cover ornamental designs unique to the covered item. Samsung's patents were FRAND licensed Utility Patents.

And yes, if you want people to learn about computers, you gotta learn all about IP law because it's complex and tricky.

Samsung made a phone that did violate Apple's design patents - which are purely for decorative purposes (rounded slab with grid of icons). In fact, you can't have any utility in a design patent - because the features are ornamental, slight non-functional changes can be made to not violate the patent. (And face it, when all the reviews of the Galaxy S (the original one) all said "It's an iPhone clone", you know you're in trouble. Especially since no other Android device gets that mention).

Samsung fought back using FRAND patents that earned it considerable consternation and censure by the EU and the DoJ who promised to look into the issue should Samsung actually proceed. And South Korea, too, Samsung's home turf.

It should be noted Google tried to do the same and also got shot down using Motorola's patents - FRAND patents simply have lesser protection due to their special status.

Economic impact would be probably close to zero.

It depends on who blinks first. If the site that's broken is highly reliant on Chinese traffic (and it ISN'T hosted in China), then likely they'll cave and use another CDN. The economic impact to the site owners is probably greater than trying to ride it out hoping China would change its policies. (And many other countries - why is it China is singled out for its firewall, when most countries have similar setups?)

If the site has little Chinese traffic, they likely wouldn't notice.

Edgecast will probably the loser out in all this.

And let's not forget another role of manager - managing the customer.

Unless you want to dress up in a suit and tie because the customer expects it (some do) and babysit them for the week they're here and interface with them, those are tasks best left to the manager.

Dealing with customers is a huge part of being a manager because customers can become extremely demanding especially if they're doing site visits and need to be babysat. Best to have someone else being interrupted every 5 minutes than you trying to get some work done.

I would love one. I would actually pay as much as $100/month for a fully ad-free web experience (and I realize that most adds are not Google ads.) But $3/month is a no-brainer. Hope this includes YouTube.

Actually, most ads ARE Google ads. They're just done by companies and ad networks Google owns. After all, they have like 98% marketshare, while the 2% belong to those more questionable networks (the ones that advertise for sites that Google won't touch - e.g., torrent sites and the like).

Which brings up the question - does it only apply to ads served through Google Ads (which seems to be on the decline), or ads served by ALL of Google, including Google-owned ad networks like DoubleClick?

It's an important question because Google Ads makes up very little ads nowadays it seems, while Google-owned ad companies and networks still are the vast majority out there.

Ditto if it applies to AdMob for mobile apps as well.

The question should be is a moral compass a help to society. Then the follow up is: What should we do given that we know a moral compass is a benefit to society but almost 0% of companies have one.

Actually, a lot of companies have a moral compass, even "evil" ones. I mean, do you consider Apple evil because they sue over patents? But what about their moral compass for environmental causes? Or supporting LGBTQ equality? The latter two have either caused problems with shareholders or the public.

What, you mean they haven't been tracking on demand and streaming video? Then, how are they at all relevant? The TV Tray Generation, who watches TV in real time and sits through the commercials, have been dying out for some time, and as a group are all but irrelevant now.

Actually, more people watch live TV than you think. DVRs are complex, and cable/satellite provided ones are generally unreliable and horrible to use, so most people actually DON'T use it. And a surprisingly large number don't bother skipping commercials because it's a PITA to do so when the box decides to add a second or two of latency to the response while you fast forward.

Plenty of people have DVRs purely because they want their HD programming, and that's what their cable company gave them. But they don't want to bother learning the DVR, they just want to turn on the TV and watch it.

For those third party DVRs like TiVo, if you're investing time and effort into it, then you're going to learn how to use it and use it to its fullest, so you're already a self-selected group that will skip ads and all that.

Thinking about it, this may help to explain why network suits regularly drop promising series that go on to become streaming favorites. It's not just that they don't understand their audience, but also that they're going by statistics from an organization that also no longer understands their audience.

Or, the streaming favorites appeal to the wrong people. Remember, the TV program ratings no one cares about When you hear the Big Bang Theory scored 5.5 last week, Neilsen gives that number away for free. That's not the product. The product stations want is the C3 or C7 numbers (minute-by-minute commercial ratings, live + 3 days or 7 days). The numbers Neilsen gives away for free are known as SD, L+3 or L+7 (Live+Same Day, Live + 3 days, Live + 7 days), which are absolutely worthless.

A show that people skip ads for should have a SD or L+3/L+7 number that's significantly higher than it's C3/C7 number, which means the free ratings of it should be high (e.g., 5.0 for BBT). The C3/C7 numbers for it would be low (which is what stations care about). So if your theory was true, then networks would drop a show with high ratings (C3/C7 numbers are secret because they're paid for by stations, so you rarely find out what they are).

No, there are plenty of reasons why a show is dropped. Firefly, for example, was only picked up by FOX because Joss Wheadon forced FOX to pick up Firefly if they wanted Buffy. (And FOX wanted Buffy). So politics ensured that Firefly intentionally wouldn't succeed so FOX could drop it the moment their contract said they could. Or the network plays Ping-Pong with the schedule so the show is at 7:30pm one night, 6:00pm the week after, completely absent the week after that, etc. Intentionally killing the ratings.

Oh, and networks love streaming services like Hulu and having the show up on their website, because they can ensure ads are unskippable.

But the grandparent's point's two and three still apply - a medic sans equipment and supplies isn't much better than no medic at all, and you still need to get the patient evacuated. And all that assumes you know where the injured person is in the first place...

Well, he can carry basic supplies.

In a lot of cases, you just need a trained responder there ASAP while you dispatch a regular ambulance. Said ambulance can take easily 15-30 minutes to arrive even in an urban environment. The jetpack responder can be there within a few minutes, and being administering first aid.

I mean, what's the point of learning to do CPR if you see someone collapse? You're likely not carrying medical supplies so you can't really help the guy by doing anything other than CPR. Yet, the CPR can keep the guy alive long enough so when emergency services arrives, the guy is actually alive rather than dead.

Same goes with AEDs. Why do we wish for them everywhere?

Minutes count, and if you can get the passer by to do some basic first aid for the jetpack responder to arrive who can do more advanced first aid while waiting for the ambulance. Plus, some physically heavy activities like CPR require a crew because it's tiring. Most people probably can't continue for 15 minutes waiting for emergency services. Having a medic as a relief is invaluable.

No it wasnt an amazing piece of hardware. The xbox360 should be looked at as a HUGE monstrous failure of design (RROD) that happened to have some really good games on it. The PS3 was FAR more elegant, complete and forward thinking compared to the 'doesnt even have HDMI' launch 360. I lost 3 xboxen, my day 1 full back compat PS3 is still going strong. Best $600 i ever spent on a device.

However, the PS3 was also slower and had less available RAM for games. Sure, you had 7 SPUs, but hardly any games used them, instead using the 2 PPUs instead (vs. the 3 PPUs in Xbox360). And the 256MB of system RAM (+256MB graphics) was a far bigger limitation than the 512MB available shared in the 360 (less wasted memory due to copied textures, etc.).

It's actually interesting when you boil it down - the Xbone is really a lot like the PS3 was - it was a not a great seller at first, and had weaker hardware. Of course, the PS3 later on became a respectfully decent machine (though the Xbox360 still routinely beat it in sales).

And given the sales numbers are far better this gen than last gen, with competition between Sony and Microsoft, things are only getting better on the console realm. Sony got arrogant after the PS2 to release the PS3 as it did, to which a humbled Microsoft (after the rather embarrassing security problems in the original Xbox) released the 360 to become the #1 console of last gen. Which got Microsoft arrogant and we have the reversed situation.

And the good thing is, the current gen of consoles seemed to have spurred on the PC gaming industry, which isn't a bad thing, either.

By the same logic, computers should not be allowed in any life-critical situation. That includes hospital equipment, airplanes, traffic control, etc. etc.

Fortunately, we don't judge the reliability of computers based on the ability to mathematically prove that nobody has put evil code in on purpose.

In your examples, there are humans in the loop.

In this case, you have a robot trying to autonomously decide "kill" or "don't kill" when it encounters a human.

Hospital equipment - it's generally observed by personnel who after failures can decide to not use the equipment further (see Therac 25), or that changes need to be made in order to use the equipment. The equipment never hooks itself up to a patient automatically and provides treatment without a human involved. Sure there are errors that kill people unintentionally, but then there's a human choice to simply take the equipment out of service. E.g., an AED is mostly autonomous, but if a model of AED consistently fails in its diagnosis, humans can easily replace said AED with a different model. (You can't trust said AED to take itself out of service).

Airplanes - you still have humans "in the loop" and there have been many a time when said humans have to be told that some equipment can't be used in the way it was used. Again, the airplane doesn't takeoff, fly, and land without human intervention. In bad cases, the FAA can issue a mandatory airworthiness directive that says said plane cannot leave the ground without changes being made. In which case human pilots check for those changes before they decide to fly it. The airplane won't take off on its own.

Traffic control - again, humans in the loop. You'll get accidents and gridlock when lights fail, but the traffic light doesn't force you to hit the gas - you can decide that because of the mess, to simply stay put and not get involved.

Remember, in an autonomous system, you need a mechanism to determine if the system is functioning normally. Of course, said system cannot be a part of the autonomous system, because anomalous behavior may be missed (it's anomalous, so you can't even trust the system that's supposed to detect the behavior).

In all those cases, the monitoring system is external and can be made to halt a anomalous system - equipment can be put aside and not used, avoiding hazardous situations by disobeying, etc.

Sure, humans are very prone to failure, that's why we have computers which are far less prone to failure, But the fact that a computer is far less prone to making an error doesn't mean we have to trust it implicitly because we're more prone to making a mistake. it's why we don't trust computers to do everything for us - we expect things to work but when indications are that it doesn't, we have measures to try to prevent a situation from getting worse.

Then your memory is very short lived. Amazon, Google, Apple, Dropbox, and others have all had very notable cloud outages over the past few years.

Of your list, only two are cloud providers, the others use other cloud providers. DropBox works using Amazon S3 and AWS. Apple's iCloud works over Azure.

Dropbox or iCloud dying independently of the underlying cloud provider has zero to do with the cloud as they were application level failures. And application level failures will happen regulardless of if it was done inhouse, offsite colo, or using a cloud service.

And yes, Apple doesn't want to do the cloud because well, Microsoft, Google and Amazon already are pretty big and good at it. Until those guys start abusing Apple to force it to use their own datacentres, it makes more sense to use those services than try to set up your own (usually poorly). Especially Apple - when they decide they want to do it in-house, things generally get very shaky for a while..

Still have problems with Pulse introducing latency and buffering issues in older apps. Still occasionally freaks out adding and removing USB audio devices. Occasionally have issues with Plymouth and new hardware. Why do they build up all these layers and dependencies, and make it hard to remove them?

Because it works. It lets you mix applications that play audio together. It doesn't matter if it's an ancient one looking for an OSS interface that you want to run at the same time as one using ALSA.

Yes, the new way has its issues, but it abstracts away the fact that the underlying interfaces are crude and don't often work the way people expect.

Take sound mixing - for example. Perhaps it's something as simple as wanting to listen to music or video and something happens (say, incoming message from IM or whatever). In the old days, without a mixer, it was exclusive - the second app simply didn't play a sound. Perhaps fine in the early days of computing, but multitasking environments need something better. (Classic MacOS had a mixer for a long time, prior to Windows supporting it (back in the Windows 3.1 days), then Windows 95 added support for mixing audio, and Linux was back in the dark ages).

If you were an app coder, doing sound on Linux in the early days was easy - you just used the OSS API. Then when they switched to ALSA, you could continue or add ALSA to the mix. But then if you wanted your app to work under GNOME or KDE, you needed to add support for that as well, and soon it was like writing for DOS - you having to write drivers in your code and abstraction layers in your code just to play audio universally. PulseAudio went to smooth that out so app developers can concentrate on writing their app, not supporting the dozens of audio interfaces one can have, and users weren't burdened with having to pick the right interface.

Sure, it's a bit tricky if you need a specialized configuration, but for most users, having It Just Works(tm) is far more important than trying to burden the 97% with having to deal with stuff the 3% need.