Amazon’s delivery drones could live on trains and ships, latest patent shows

Why it matters to you

Amazon is determined to advance its Prime Air drone delivery plan and these patents reveal some of its thinking.

Amazon wants to deliver stuff to customers using drones, but it needs to to get the infrastructure in place first to have a chance of making it happen. As well as a large green light from the Federal Aviation Administration.

While it’s been making steady progress with the design of its Prime Air flying machine, it’s also been filing numerous patents detailing ideas related to various aspects of its proposed delivery service.

They’ve included an extraordinary “beehive” drone tower that would operate in urban areas and manage multiple drones on delivery runs across the city. And how can we forget the wacky flying warehouse idea, essentially a blimp housing an Amazon warehouse and drone airport.

The latest Amazon idea to land on the desk of the United States Patent and Trademark Office is for a network of multi-purpose mobile facilities capable of maintaining drones and acting as a hub for deliveries. Interestingly, the facility would be located on trains, ships, and other kinds of vehicles, enabling its delivery drones to be rapidly deployed to areas where customer demand “is known or anticipated,” whether through purchasing patterns “or events that are scheduled to occur in such areas.”

The mobile units would be able to launch and receive drones while the vehicle is in motion, the patent filing said. A diagram (below) included in the submitted papers shows a shipping container with an open top and a drone hovering above it as the unit travels along a railroad.

Amazon

Amazon envisions such a facility being “loaded with replacement parts and/or inspection equipment, and configured to conduct repairs, servicing operations or inspections on aerial vehicles.” Once a drone has been repaired or had its battery replaced, robots would be able to load it with a delivery and send it on its way.

The idea is similar in some ways to an Amazon patent that surfaced in 2016 showing how it could use street lights and the top of church steeples as docking stations for its drones, allowing the flying machines to stop off for a battery charge to allow it to cover greater distances on a delivery run.

Drone deliveries from mobile units isn’t a new idea either, as UPS has already tested such a service, although Amazon’s plan seems rather more complex.

It should be noted that it’s by no means certain Amazon’s idea will ever see the light of day. Its grand drone delivery project is still in its early stages, though these patents do offer some insight into the company’s thinking when it comes to building the infrastructure for any future sky-based delivery service.

Pilotless planes? No thanks, say more than half of travelers

Why it matters to you

If you’re not cool with the idea of pilotless planes then don’t worry, your favorite airline won’t be switching to them anytime soon.

Although aviation experts often tell us how “planes pretty much fly themselves these days,” the idea of getting on one without a pilot will apparently prompt most travelers to check the train timetable instead.

Sure, most of us would happily take a ride in a driverless car, any fears calmed by the fact that it’s traveling along the ground at 50 mph rather than at 36,000 feet at 500 mph.

New research published this week confirms that most people are still not cool with the idea of stepping on a pilotless plane that can take off, fly, and land without any human help whatsoever.

The report, published by investment bank UBS, found that 54 percent of 8,000 respondents said they would most likely refuse to board a pilotless plane, even if the fare was cheaper. Only 17 percent said they’d be happy to fly on a plane without a pilot.

Breaking down the results by country, the researchers found that Americans were most comfortable about the idea of pilotless planes, with 27 percent willing to take a flight on one if the possibility presented itself. French and German travelers were the least likely, with only 13 percent expressing a willingness to give it a go.

Perhaps not surprisingly, younger respondents — specifically those aged between 18 and 34 — have the least issues about hopping aboard a plane without a cockpit. “This bodes well for the technology as the population ages,” UBS noted in its findings.

The report points out several advantages to having planes flown entirely by computers instead of humans, such as the removal of pilot error that can lead to catastrophic crashes. According to Boeing, around 80 percent of airline accidents are caused by pilot error, while the other 20 percent are attributable mainly to equipment failures.

But travelers nervous about the reliability of the technology would want to be satisfied about the security of the plane’s computers, with some fearing what hackers might do if they gained access to on-board systems or computers on the ground communicating with the aircraft during a flight.

Huge savings … for airlines

Airlines are getting interested in pilotless planes because of one main reason: costs. UBS estimates that the industry spends more than $30 billion on pilots every year, so replacing them with computers offers obvious benefits. The report also suggests that significant fuel savings would be made because autonomous planes would fly more efficiently.

Although it’s hard to say when paying passengers will be flying on pilotless planes, USB points out that “the technology to remotely control military drones already exists, and this technology could be adapted to control … small to medium-sized business jets and, eventually, commercial aviation.” Indeed, plane makers are continuing to improve existing systems that already allow commercial airliners to fly without pilot assistance for much of the flight.

As flight autonomy increases, commercial airlines may first reduce pilots in the cockpit from two to one, while cargo planes would likely be the first large aircraft to do away with pilots altogether. But when it comes to taking them off passenger jets and redesigning the plane to remove the cockpit (and add more seats), well, we’re looking forward to seeing the industry’s marketing strategy for that one.

HBO hackers return with exec emails and a ransom demand

After hitting the headlines last week, the hackers responsible for the HBO data breach are back. And, this time they’re demanding a ransom. On Monday, the group leaked internal emails, and multiple documents relating to Game of Thrones — including a detailed summary of the upcoming episode, due to air this Sunday. In a video letter, the hackers urge the broadcaster to cough up money (although the figure has not yet been released). They claim HBO is their 17th target in the clip, and only three have failed to pay, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The text in the video message reads: “We successfully breached into your huge network…HBO was one of our difficult targets to deal with but we succeeded (it took about 6 months).”

The leaked emails belong to an as-yet unidentified HBO exec. Their contents have not been divulged. However, the mere fact that the hackers have correspondence belonging to HBO’s management is a worrying sign for the video service. The entire debacle is increasingly starting to resemble the infamous Sony Pictures hack from 2014, which proved very embarrassing for the studio. More recently, the motive for the Netflix breach in April was also extortion.

Earlier this week, HBO revealed that thousands of internal documents had been stolen. The update followed the leak of episodes from a bunch of shows, including Ballers, Insecure and Room 104, as well as two from Bill Hader’s upcoming comedy series Barry. Then, just days later, the fourth part of GoT’s latest season was dumped online ahead of its intended release. However, that leak was not thought to be related to the HBO hack.

As of writing, it’s unclear who has their hands on the latest HBO materials. Therefore, it could just be a matter of time before the documents end up on the web. They also reportedly include financial balance sheets, employment agreements, and marketing-strategy PDFs. And, of course, GoT fans should stay alert for potential spoilers circulating online.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter, Variety

The military can shoot down drones that fly over bases

Drones can cost a pretty penny, so make sure not to fly them too near an airport… or a military base. The Pentagon has approved a new policy that gives military bases the right to shoot down or seize both private and commercial UAVs that encroach upon their airspace and are deemed a threat. While details about the policy remain classified, Pentagon spokesperson Navy Capt. Jeff Davis says the new guidance gives bases “the ability to take action to stop these threats (i.e. UAVs or drones) and that includes disabling, destroying and tracking [them].”

Problem is, you’d think it’s simple enough to avoid military bases, but it’s not always clear who owns the air space. As Military Times points out, the Pentagon sometimes leases lands from local farmers to build installations. If your drone accidentally wanders over those lands, will the military still have the right to shoot it down? Further, a lot of farmers now use drones to check on their livestock and crops. If their UAV hovers over the patch of land the military is leasing, is it also in danger of being seized or destroyed?

Since the full policy is classified, we might never know the answer to those. Davis said, however, that the military will deal with each drone differently based “upon the specific circumstances,” so bases might not always shoot down or seize every machine that crosses their territory.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: Military Times

Intel’s push for petabyte SSDs requires a new kind of drive

There aren’t many ways to make data center storage exciting, but mentioning a drive that could hold up to one petabyte (1,000 terabytes) comes close. Intel is making the case to swap out old disk-based drives in data centers with SSDs, and as part of that it’s showing off a new “Ruler” form factor. Instead of molding to the 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch size of traditional drives or just the dimensions of a PCIe slot, its long skinny shape fits into a standard rack mounted server. As TechGage notes, with regular 10TB hard drives would take up a 100-bay 4U server. The new Ruler drives aren’t available yet, but Intel claims it will offer them with both its Optane and 3D NAND SSDs in the “near future.”

Source: Intel

IBM speeds up deep learning by helping GPUs communicate better

Why it matters to you

Deep learning can work wonders in fields like scientific and medical research and this project cuts down the time dramatically — without sacrificing accuracy.

Deep learning uses algorithms inspired by the way human brains operate to put computers to work on tasks too big for organic gray matter. On Monday, IBM announced that a new record for the performance of a large neural network working with a large data set.

The company’s new deep-learning software brings together more than 256 graphics processing units across 64 IBM Power systems. The speed improvements brought about by the research come as a result of better communication between the array of GPUs.

Faster GPUs provide the necessary muscle to take on the kind of large scale problems today’s deep-learning systems are capable of tackling. However, the faster the components are, the more difficult it is to ensure that they are all working together as one cohesive unit.

As individual GPUs work on a particular problem, they share their learning with the other processors that make up the system. Conventional software is not capable of keeping up with the speed of current GPU technology, which means that time is wasted as they wait around for one another’s results.

Hillery Hunter, IBM’s director of systems acceleration and memory, compared the situation to the well-known parable of the blind men and the elephant. The company’s distributed deep-learning project has resulted in an API that developers can be used in conjunction with deep-learning frameworks to scale to multiple servers, making sure that their GPUs remain synchronized.

IBM recorded image recognition accuracy of 33.8 percent on a test run using 7.5 million images from the ImageNet-22K database. The previous best-published result was 29.8 percent, which was posted by Microsoft in October 2014 — in the past, accuracy has typically edged forward at a rate of about one percent in new implementations, so an improvement of four percent is considered to be a very good result.

Crucially, IBM’s system managed to achieve this in seven hours; the process that allowed Microsoft to set the previous record took 10 days to complete.

These massive improvements in terms of speed, combined with advances in terms of accuracy make IBM’s distributed deep-learning software a major boon for anyone working with this technology. A technical preview of the API is available now as part of the company’s PowerAI enterprise deep-learning software.

CBS is launching a streaming sports channel this year

CBS isn’t going to lean primarily on All Access to fuel its streaming ambitions — it’s catering to the sports crowd, too. Company chief Les Moonves has teased plans for a “24/7” live streaming sports channel that will launch later in 2017. Most details are still under wraps, but it’ll be modeled around CBSN and even piggyback on its infrastructure (to reduce costs, naturally). That suggests it’ll be part of ‘skinny’ programming bundles through internet TV providers, although it’s not certain which ones.

The broadcaster sees this as both a way to compete with and stand out against ESPN and Fox Sports. Don’t expect it to simply mirror what you get from CBS Sports on conventional TV, then. The question is just what (if anything) CBS can meaningfully do to stand out, and whether or not it’ll be enough to convince you to move to another provider if the CBS channel isn’t widely available.

Source: CBS IR (Twitter)

CBS All Access is making its way around the world

More people all over the globe will be able to watch Star Trek: Discovery and CBS’ other original online and TV shows without resorting to piracy. The network is launching CBS All Access in other countries around the world, starting with Canada in the first half of 2018. More countries in other continents will follow, though the company didn’t reveal an exact timeline for its expansion plans.

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said in a statement that the streaming service is growing faster domestically than the network anticipated. “By going direct-to-consumer around the world,” he added, “we will facilitate new connections between the global audience and our industry-leading premium content.”

The subscription offering has over 9,000 episodes on demand, including shows from the network’s daytime, primetime and late night TV lineup. It has classics like the original Beverly Hills 90210, reality shows like Big Brother, drama like Criminal Minds, sitcoms and other comedy programs, and so on and so forth.

To be able to compete with Netflix, Hulu and other streaming titans, All Access will also have originals on offer. Star Trek: Discovery will debut on September 24th, followed by a couple of other original scripted shows. Moonves told investors during the expansion’s announcement that the company is hoping to gain more subscribers and earn more money by launching its Star Trek entry and its other originals on the service.

Anybody interested in signing up and checking out what the service can offer can access it through the CBS App for iOS, Android and Windows 10. They can also watch shows through Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, Android TV, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Fire TV.

Google employee behind ‘echo chamber’ diversity memo fired

Over the weekend, a Google employee’s internally-shared 10-page document attacking a supposed “echo chamber” around diversity and inclusion went viral. Now, Bloomberg reports — based on an email from the employee himself — that the author of the memo has been fired. Recode has published a note sent to employees by CEO Sundar Pichai, which maintains that while “People must feel free to express dissent,” “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct.” Pichai closed the note by saying he is returning early from a planned family vacation for a company town hall meeting Thursday to discuss issues including “how we create a more inclusive environment for all.”

Source: Bloomberg, Recode, CNN

CBS Content Coming to AT&T’s DirecTV Now Service in the Coming Weeks

AT&T today announced that it’s managed to ink a deal with CBS to bring CBS channels to the DirecTV Now streaming service. The deal includes CBS entertainment, sports, and news programming, plus Showtime, The CW, CBS Sports Network, and Pop.

“This is another key milestone in bringing DIRECTV NOW users access to their favorite entertainment, news and sports from all of the major broadcast networks,” said Daniel York, senior executive vice president and chief content officer – AT&T Entertainment Group. “As we add more live national and local channels, we know even more people will choose DIRECTV NOW as their go-to streaming service.”

Video-on-demand catalogs will be available from CBS, The CW, Pop, and Showtime, and DirecTV Now customers will be able to access live local coverage on close to 25 local CBS and The CW stations in the following areas:

• New York
• Los Angeles
• Chicago
• Philadelphia
• Dallas – Ft. Worth
• San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose
• Boston
• Detroit
• Minneapolis-St. Paul
• Miami-Ft. Lauderdale
• Denver
• Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto, CA
• Pittsburgh
• Baltimore

CBS and The CW content will be available in all DirecTV Now packages, which start at $35 per month. Pop will be included in the “Just Right” and higher tier, while CBS Sports Network will be available with the “Go Big” plan. Showtime can be added to any plan for $8 per month. According to AT&T, the new content will be rolling out “in the coming weeks.”

AT&T also plans to add 30 additional ABC, FOX, and NBC affiliates on DirecTV Now in the near future, bringing the total to more than 170 live local channels in over 80 metro areas. Some DirecTV Now customers have also begun receiving beta invites for the cloud DVR feature that is being added to the service this fall.

Tags: CBS, DirecTV Now
Discuss this article in our forums