Wing's delivery drones take flight for the first time in Virginia
Wing's drone delivery service is now live in Virginia. The Alphabet subsidiary is now delivering snacks and health care products to residents of Christiansburg, Virginia, after receiving approval from the government and teaming up with major players like FedEx and Walgreens. Wing says it's the first commercial drone delivery service in the US.
Earlier this year, Wing became one of the first drone operators to be certified as a commercial air carrier by the Federal Aviation Administration, allowing it to deliver goods to people who may live miles away and not in the drone operator's line of sight.
[...] The company says it hopes to replace deliveries that are typically made by car or truck in order to reduce the number of vehicles on the road. It also bills itself as a delivery service for people with limited mobility options. Wing promises deliveries within "minutes" of the orders being placed to customers who live in Christiansburg's "designated delivery zones." And there are no extra fees for the deliveries, a spokesperson said. (If you live in Christiansburg and are interested in opting in, click here to sign up for the waitlist.)
Also at: CNBC and DigitalTrends.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 20 2019, @01:55AM
Send an extra huge party size order of Popeyes wings for all my niggers!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 20 2019, @02:07AM
I'd like 16 ounces of your finest cannabis, direct flight
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 20 2019, @05:16AM (6 children)
If a drone should just accidentally fall out of the sky, and tumble to the ground at my feet, can I keep whatever it was carrying? I mean, they can't charge me for it, can they? Food, entertainment, ammunition, contraband, or whatever? It would be mine, if the drone "delivered" it to me, right?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 20 2019, @08:38AM (2 children)
How long until all of these drones are carrying 360 degree fisheye 8-16k+ cameras on their underbellies and being used as an ancillary money source by providing up to the week/day/hour/minute surveillance footage from above all properties in a town?
All of a sudden code enforcement, vehicle speeding, etc becomes cheap and easy to enforce. Almost everyone's comings and goings can be tracked through a combination of cell phone, constantly moving skyborne surveillance, traffic cameras, and corporate security feeds. If you thought you had nosy neighbors or enforcement officers before, just imagine when they have an axe to grind and hundreds of gigabytes or terabytes of footage on you to pick and choose from, while overlooking or deleting that of their friends.
We're approaching a hell on earth scenario like only some of the most dystopia authors, musicians and things chose to write, sing, or even ponder the repurcussions of.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday October 20 2019, @10:36AM
It might be better to mount most of the cameras on electrical poles next to busy streets. Like red light cameras but every 100 feet and both sides of the road instead of every intersection, and full 360-degree video. Charge the batteries with little solar panels. Drones don't get much flight time, but if battery energy density triples, maybe it's feasible to set up stations on rooftops with multiple drones, and have them capture footage, return to base, and cycle out. They could use algorithms in real time to store license plate photos, facial signatures, etc. with timestamps, so that the most relevant info can be easily searched later. The 32K resolution 360-degree footage [soylentnews.org] could be useful, but storing snapshots of license plates, faces, and other identified objects requires much less storage.
Storage will be immense. The state of the art right now is 1 TB microSD and SD cards. SDXC limit is 2 TB, but that has been raised to 128 TB by SDUC. I see a clear path to 10 TB microSD, and perhaps much higher (if DNA storage can put 200+ petabytes in a gram [sciencemag.org], maybe a better-than-NAND storage technology could approach at least multi-petabyte in a 0.5 gram microSD). SD cards are 10 times the volume of microSD cards, so maybe they can theoretically hold 4x or 8x more storage. post-NAND technologies may be able to solve write endurance and data retention issues.
Of course, if it is a tool of the state and not a perv's camera, it can just send the data over the 5G or even 6G network to a datacenter, where much bulkier data storage can be used (5D superman crystals? [soylentnews.org]).
Again, battery energy density (among other battery attributes) is where it's at. A world in which a particular drone can stay up for 60 minutes instead of 15 minutes becomes a very different place, because more things become logistically possible. 3x improvement in density is likely. 5x is a Department of Energy goal [computerworld.com]. 10x may be feasible. And there has been some noise [eetimes.com] about 1000x energy density.
The higher the battery energy density, the more stark
yourour dystopia. Batteries affect almost everything else.[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Sunday October 20 2019, @03:53PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days [wikipedia.org]
"The wormhole technology is first used to send digital information via gamma rays, then developed further to transmit light waves. The media corporation that develops this advance can spy on anyone anywhere it chooses. ... When the technology is released to the general public, it effectively destroys all secrecy and privacy. The novel examines the philosophical issues that arise from the world's population (increasingly suffering from ecological and political disturbances) being aware that they could be under constant observation by anyone, or that they could observe anyone without their knowledge."
That page also lists several other stories with similar themes.
Also related non-fiction by David Brin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society [wikipedia.org]
"The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy. The work first appeared as a magazine article by Brin in Wired in late 1996. In 2008, security expert Bruce Schneier called the transparent society concept a "myth" (a characterization Brin later rejected), claiming it ignores wide differences in the relative power of those who access information."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Bethany.Saint on Sunday October 20 2019, @03:18PM (1 child)
No more so than if someone accidentally dropped their purse in front of you it wouldn't become yours. You could steal it but it wouldn't legally become yours.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 20 2019, @03:30PM
Well, I don't do purses, but I do do pizzas and beer. ;^) But, in your scenario, someone drops the purse. In my scenario, an inanimate object has delivered a pizza. Somehow, that doesn't look the same to me. If I happened to be wandering around the mountains in Wyoming, and some of those Younger rocks slide down the mountain, leaving some nice gold nuggets at my feet, I would claim them as my own.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 21 2019, @03:46PM
You can't be charged for accidental deliveries or for things that you didn't order. Something crashing into your backyard or whatnot, I'm a little less clear on. I mean, you don't get to keep a car that's accidentally taken out your dining room window. There's recourse for that, though. Not so sure about the whole drone dropping in your backyard thing. You might be able to at least make a stink about it and get some sort of compensation, whether for trespassing or whatever. The items/drone might not legally be yours. Though as they say "Possession is 9/10 of the law".
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bethany.Saint on Sunday October 20 2019, @03:29PM (1 child)
I like how the drone is delivering to a wealthy (did you see those houses) sparsely populated suburban neighborhood. If this appeared around my neighborhood people would be throwing rocks at it and trying to yank it out of the sky while it dropped that string. Maybe mount an M61 first (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M61_Vulcan [wikipedia.org]).
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 21 2019, @03:50PM
I'm pretty sure we're talking about different sizes of drones at that point. Unless these delivery drones are Helicopter / Military Strike Drone size. I'm guessing not, though. Might could mount you some pepper spray or Nerf guns, though.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"