"Straight physics," prior art, obviousness, all have never prevented a patent from being issues.

Smaller vehicles, logistics, and the knowledge of local couriers.

Deliver it to the front door and take it up on the elevator.

Driverless vehicles. Or just charge enough to cover the cost of delivery.

Doctors' time may be worth enough money to make flying worthwhile. Is a truck driver's time worth that much? Also, a bottle of medicine doesn't care if it takes an extra 12 hours to get where it's going.

And any drone that can carry a package a long distance will also have to carry a lot of heavy fuel.

There will probably be some extremely rare cases where they make sense. Delivery to boats offshore, for example.

They tip over? I don't know. Lets see a prototype.

They waste too much energy staying airborne and they are less efficient and harder to build and more risky to operate and less resilient to weather than wheeled vehicles.

To be frank, I think I would fail that auto-type feature also. Shortcuts shouldn't interfere with long-cuts. People do things out of habit and you shouldn't add shortcuts to disrupt those habits. If they enter the full email URL, then the auto-appended part should be parsed off internally, or better yet: automatically disappear once "@" is keyed.

K.I.S.S. often overrides saving keystrokes when dealing with wide or unknown audience.

LOWSRC has been renamed to the COMCAST attribute :-)

Agreed. It would be easier on many levels to promote and support the browser use of a progressive-resolution image-file format rather than overhaul markup standards and load & store multiple image versions on servers.

Let's hope sanity and logic prevail, and this tag idea is dumped.

And I hope patent issues don't derail it also.

Further, we don't have to have an entirely new tag. Just add something like a LOWRES or LOWRESSRC attribute to the existing IMG tag. Old browsers would still use the regular image and ignore the new attribute. This is better backward compatibility than an entirely new tag. An entirely new tag would outright not function in older browsers. (The HTML standard says to ignore any attributes a browser does not recognize rather than skip the entire tag.)

Job security, shhhhhhhh

In all seriousness, while it may create job security, many developers would rather spend their time making 20 useful products using write-once-run-everywhere rather than 5 useful products with multiple versions handcrafted for different devices.

It's kind of boring re-inventing the same app for different devices even if it does pay.

Slashdot has been epically, if possibly inadvertently, trolled.

Google hardware for linux and you will find the Ubuntu hsl in moments. Bam, done.

Or, just pick any random board and install. You've got to be looking for incompatibility, outside a small minority of parts.

some idiots that are already overpaid

Like oil company executives?

They should promote gayness to take up the slack.

Oh that Palin again.

There aren't enough isolated people getting frequent deliveries for it to make economic sense to deploy drones. Why spend millions of dollars developing a new technology to avoid a few trips a year?

Also, a drone that could carry a package 50 miles and return would have to carry a lot of additional weight in fuel. A driverless "car" big enough to carry a package would probably be able to make the delivery for a fraction of the cost.

citation needed ...
because the broken window fallacy still holds

Indeed.

Using the Obama administration's own numbers, a couple years back, for how much they spent for each job "created or saved", and taking the US median income at the time for the cost->jobs destroyed estimator, I got about a 5:1 ratio. Five destroyed for each "created or saved".

Or more: Thats what would happen if they got the money by taxation. The other options are still worse.

The problem is that the VALUE for the government spending comes out of the economy somewhere else:
  - If they tax it, they just suck it out directly.
  - If they borrow it, it competes for investment money and real job creators don't get to create real jobs and/or have to close or downsize when their funding dries up. (This has an additional multiplier: They have to pay it back, with interest. So it kills still more jobs later.)
  - If they print it, it devalues the other currency. The same number of dollars are spent, but less value is spent. Less jobs are funded as a result.

Unfortunately, the anonymous flaimng lefties only see the obvious jobs "created or saved" and not the "invisible men" laid off or not hired as a result.

Except it won't work for heavy packages. And it won't work near airports. And it won't work in bad weather. And it's a safety risk to people on the ground. And some simpler answer will always be better. In 30-50 years, truck delivery and logistics will have made progress too.

Think about it. What real world conditions would have to exist for drone delivery to make more sense than trucks?

Traffic? Use two-wheeled vehicles instead of trucks.
No drivers? Driverless trucks or some other ground-based driverless vehicle.

Here's the one situation where airborne drone delivery may make sense: deliveries to boats, to the wilderness, or to people across a body of water with no bridge. That's it.

Or maybe in 200-400 years, when all the challenges to drone delivery have been rendered trivial, it will still be easier and cheaper to use trucks, but since all the problems are trivial and airborne drones are cooler and faster, maybe then use drones sometimes.

The main problem is the overall uneconomical and generally nonsensical idea of using delivery drones. Trucks are simple and work well in bad weather. There's a huge non-employed workforce of people who can easily be trained to deliver packages. Delivery trucks can be powered by natural gas, which is so abundant that many oil rigs simply burn it off rather than going to the trouble of capturing it.

in the general case, delivery drones don't work. Trucks do.