I'm proposing that the drones be equipped with this to keep them out of the buffer area, not that the actual airplanes. Airplanes operating over cities are already required to operate 1,000 feet above the highest nearby obstacles, placing them far above any drones. Helicopters would be another story, but they are allowed to operate under your proposed 10 foot cap, so that's kind of already a thing.

Why would you expect it to be cheaper or denser than NAND? IMFT says it'll be more expensive than NAND, and even if the cost drops over time, so too will the cost of NAND.

The whole point of this, though, is integrating something new that works radically differently from existing aircraft. If other technological mechanisms can provide sufficient accuracy, why can't they be used?

It's not like they need to solely rely on AGPS either. Consumer IMUs have been advancing at a rapid pace (there's huge amounts of money being dumped in them due to gaming, VR, and mobile phones), and are capable of high accuracy when combined with an external reference. You can also use laser ranging, which is also very cheap these days (my robotic vacuum cleaner has a LIDAR turret on it, although the range would be less than the few hundred feet required here). If you know where you are, and you know the height above sea level at that location, and you know how far you are from the ground...

There are many tough problems to solve to make what Amazon is proposing practical, but accurately figuring out your altitude a few hundred feet from the ground is certainly not insoluble (or even particularly difficult). There are many things you can do to determine altitude at 300 feet than aren't possible at 30,000 feet.

Good modern GPS implementations (which often include information from multiple constellations and other sources like wifi and cellular towers) can provide altitude with far better than 100' of accuracy. They are not particularly expensive.

> Not quite: Just open a 500MB word document and insert a single character at the top of the file.

COW filesystems would have no problem with that scenario, especially when they have dynamic block sizes. There might still be some nasty write amplification (such as writing kilobytes of data to insert the one character), but it wouldn't be any slower than appending one byte to the end of the file.

Would that really make much of a difference? Computers already act, for the most part, like they have non-volatile memory. When you shut the lid on a laptop, it writes RAM to disk and goes to sleep. If you wake it up without having cut the power, it wakes up quickly. If you pull the power/battery, it takes a few seconds longer. In either case, it wakes up where it left off.

There is also nothing stopping developers from doing what you describe right now. Storage is fast enough that changes to most files can be saved directly to disk as they're made. When working in the cloud, this sort of "every keystroke saved" thing is already the norm.

I'm not trying to say that really fast and durable non-volatile memory wouldn't make some improvements in some places, but generally the workarounds currently in use have gotten so good that the impact would be relatively minor.

But at that point you're basically just replacing the current approach of a supercapacitor and DRAM with some of this new stuff. You might save a few bucks, but that's a relatively small difference.

We've already got non-volatile memory with extremely high endurance on the mass market (SLC NAND), so what you basically get out of this stuff is "It's like flash, but much faster."

The question becomes, what is enabled by having much faster flash memory? Sure, you might see some minor power efficiency increases in mobile devices if you don't need to keep the RAM powered, but that's not exactly world changing.

I'm not saying this isn't good, just that people are hyping it up, and I'm trying to determine what it might enable that is worthy of hype.

Ion thrusters are rockets. They still use propellant. They simply use electricity to accelerate the propellant instead of a chemical reaction. When an electric rocket runs out of propellant, it can no longer produce thrust, even if the vehicle can still supply electricity. The EM Drive does not use propellant. What has not yet been verified is if it actually produces any thrust. Nobody has yet tested it in such a matter as to conclusively demonstrate this.

Lifting its own weight is irrelevant. Existing electric propulsion thrusters couldn't come remotely close to lifting their own weight, and yet are still in active use in space.

Existing electric propulsion devices (like ion thrusters) still use propellant, they're just really efficient.

The EM drive would appear to use no propellant, meaning the limitations would only be the amount of electricity that could be produced, along with how long the EM drive could operate before it degrades.

While Cell failed as a platform, the concept itself had merit, and the concept of pairing high-performance and low-performance processors can be found in the HPC market today (like Intel's Phi or GPGPU) and in the mobile market (like ARM's big.LITTLE architecture).

A lot of the content (like Homestar Runner and Weebl's Stuff) is also available via their official YouTube channels. You lose all the interactivity, though.

After that, javascript SWF renderers become the only option. Mozilla reported that homestar runner's content mostly sort of worked in 2013, perhaps it's better now.

I meant to write what does the melting point of an element have to do with the melting point of structures formed from atoms of that element, but somehow left out the second "melting point".

What does the melting point of an element have to do with structures formed from atoms of that element? The melting point of black phosphorus is 590 C.