Yup. MAYBE there is a law somewhere that would help with that, but it isn't like you can just make murder illegal and solve the problem. I'd also say that the US is not unique in having problems like this. Sure, the EU doesn't have so many guns floating around, but look at all the issues France was having with conflict between various religious communities lately.

These sorts of issues are cultural in nature. For starters, people need to not have a laundry list of issues they're willing to kill anybody for disagreeing with them on.

So, obviously you've never looked for them. I have. The best options right now are Roundcube and Squirrelmail, or the less-FOSS Zimbra. None of them let you archive/delete/spam email with a single keystroke, and I don't think any of them support tag-based email either. That function in Gmail lets me blast through an inbox in about a minute or two, has an offline cached client for Android, and works in a browser.

And it won't work on a Chromebook or a mobile device with only a browser.

If you're doing it on a client, then it is useless when you're not using that particular client. That's the whole point of the cloud - you're not tied to one client. MAYBE I could get by with a curses-based email client over a terminal, but giving up a GUI seems like a poor move anytime after around 1990.

My email is all sorted as well, typically in more than one way since I'm using tags. Stuff I follow goes in the inbox, stuff I browse more by group doesn't go into the inbox.

There is no reason that ADS-B has to cost more than $30. Just have the government bless a reference platform instead of having everybody invent their own.

ADS-B is a GPS and a modem. Guess what you'll find on every SoC in every cellphone sold today?

There is a lot more to the cloud than a page full of links behind .htaccess or whatever.

I'd love to self-host, but I don't see any FOSS options that are equivalent to the likes of Gmail or Google Docs or Google Music. There are some web-based email applications, but they're pretty weak. I've yet to find one that lets me archive/delete/spam an email with a single keystroke.

If only. It is lacking most of the features of Gmail/Google Docs/Google Play/Google Music.

I'd really love to have open-source alternatives to the cloud. The problem is that the best anybody seems to come up with are X11 apps plus some kind of dropbox synchronizer or something. If it doesn't work entirely from a browser, then it is a non-starter.

The rules of the air are useless 400' above the earth - they're only designed to allow pilots to operate around other aircraft, and these drones won't operate there, at least not for now. Frankly, if they ever do operate autonomously at altitude the rules of the air that exist today will be worthless anyway.

A pilot's license is also not easy to get. For starters, you generally need to not be terrified of flying in a small plane, which by itself is something probably half the US population would fail to satisfy. Mostly it is about stick and rudder skills that are useless in a drone, and which also not everybody has. It is also very expensive - at a minimum you need about 40 hours of flight time, much of it accompanied by an instructor. Planes rent for about $120/hr in most places, if you want something from the 70s.

These drones aren't being allowed "on the road" - they're being restricted to below 400' and in fairly uninhabited areas. You're legally allowed to operate a fully-autonomous vehicle in your back yard without any human inside as long as it doesn't go out onto the roads. Otherwise you'd need a license to buy a Roomba.

If Amazon wanted to test landing a drone at KSFO then certainly requiring an instrument-rated pilot at the helm would make a lot more sense - they're going to be in controlled airspace talking to ATC and essentially operating under IFR in an environment where a mistake might kill hundreds of people. This isn't that.

Meh, they're keeping "see and avoid."

This really strikes me as the wrong way to go about this. Sure, changing this principle would require completely rewriting the rules for ALL forms of air travel. However, I think that see and avoid already works poorly in practice and will become even more untenable once drone technology really takes off. There are far better ways for aircraft to avoid each other, and sooner or later we'll need to come to grips with the fact that you can build a device capable of broadcasting its position to nearby aircraft for the cost of a smartphone (you need a GPS and a radio, which virtually every phone in the US has had for over a decade due to 911 compliance rules - they had them long before they had touchscreens). There is no reason that clearances shouldn't be communicated via modems talking to computers and followed by computers to ensure that airways remain free of conflicts. Humans just mess things up. If you want to have them so that when they get disoriented they can override the computer and crash the plane to give the investigators more work, just find someplace else to fly. :)

They're testing the drones in a low-density area. They could have just said "avoid flying over people" and left it at that.

Which of those rules of the air are relevant to flying a drone flying under 500'? About the only rule I can think of is the one that tells pilots not to fly below 500', which they're intentionally violating. Knowing which way to turn if you spot a crop-duster heading towards you isn't going to be a big help when you're not displaying navigation lights and the crop-duster has no way to know which way you're headed and won't see you anyway.

The problem is that this kind of thing stifles innovation, which means that all the R&D ends up moving overseas and the US will end up being perpetually behind in what is eventually likely to be a technology that completely replaces all aviation today (civil or military). Is that in the US interest? I'm not saying that Amazon should be flying two-ton drones over major cities without any oversight, but this is about testing concepts in the middle of nowhere.

It probably makes more sense to ensure that the people programming the drones understand the rules of flying, and then only if they're actually going to fly in conflict with other aircraft. In that situation the rules would probably need to be changed anyway, since "see and avoid" isn't going to work when you can't see the drone.

They could have different requirements like "just keep it under 400 feet and away from populated areas and do whatever you want as long as OSHA doesn't have a problem with it." I don't see how that would cost taxpayers money, or be any less safe.

The FAA didn't give Amazon permission to operate drones in cities. It gave them permission to operate drones in the middle of nowhere, where there probably are more bunnies than people walking around.

Let me get this. The FAA doesn't consider it safe for Amazon to play around with a drone outdoors in a rural area under 400' altitude unless:

1. It is in VFR conditions.
2. The specific design is pre-approved by the FAA.
3. The drone operation holds a private pilot license.
4. The drone operator holds a medical certificate.

Wouldn't want to have the operator die of a heart attack, and then have the drone go out of control and hit a rabbit. Wouldn't want the pilot sitting in a chair and looking at a monitor to have medical conditions that cause issues with balance and vertigo. Better make sure that the pilot staring at the monitor 12" from his face has good vision.

I get that they want to keep these things close to earth and away from airports. I don't get why you need to be able to glide a plane onto the runway during an engine failure in the landing pattern when you're probably flying a drone that is incapable of gliding at all and which is multi-engine besides.

Flying drones and flying planes are completely different skillsets. The FAA really needs to get away from making drone piloting an add-on to a private pilot license.

Isn't that basically the whole point of the article? Google tries new things, and abandons them if they don't work out.

Sure, but the point is that you often can't do the one without the other. Fear of failure tends to cause companies to just stick with what they already do well. That means they basically aren't learning anything at all.

Of course companies should fund the projects that they think are most likely to become profitable. They'll still fail at some of them, and willingness to embrace that increases the odds that they'll come up with something truly innovative.

A big problem with software project management is that software projects are rarely equivalent to building houses/bridges/etc. You can't just look at the square footage and guess how long it will take to build.

I agree that quality management is a value-add in any industry. However, that doesn't mean that you can manage a sports team the same way as a construction team or an orchestra or an art gallery or an ERP implementation team or a video game studio.

Are you saying that individual employees should be compelled under force of law to perform a job against their will?

The $10 cabs that are already 100% saturated will still be around to not give you a cheap ride out of town even if the option to ride uber for $100 exists.

When you cap prices, it inevitably leads to shortages one way or another. The only time it makes sense is in monopoly situations. The whole point of services like Uber is to get rid of the monopolies. There is no reason there can't be 25 other similar competing services, which means that prices will generally reflect market conditions.

And in a true disaster situation, the national guard should be getting everybody out free of charge anyway. I'm referring to situations that raise prices where the national guard isn't giving everybody free rides. Clearly in those situations Uber couldn't charge a lot of money, since who would pay $200 for a ride the government would give them for free?