"...soon you might well have a targeted, unmanned drone landing right in your back garden and the incoming will have your name on it.
This won’t be the work of a foreign government or an antagonistic power. You won’t be cursing the enemy or cowering in the basement. You’ll know exactly what’s coming your way because you asked for it, quite literally.
This isn’t a nightmarish future of terrorism or government surveillance. Soon you’ll be able to order a direct strike on your own home from a drone and determine the payload too.
This is the future of e-commerce delivery and Amazon chief Jeff Bezos calls it Amazon Prime Air.."
According to an interview he gave on US TV show 60 Minutes on Sunday, Jeff Bezos hopes that his company Amazon will be able to bypass couriers and the postal service, by sending your orders directly using airborne delivery drones within 3-5 years.
If you’re close enough to one of the Amazon distribution centres (which are being developed quickly and extensively in areas of high population density in the US and UK), you might well have that vital purchase within 30 minutes.
Frankly, if he’s serious, this drone technology could be dropping Amazon purchases up to 10 pounds in weight into American gardens very soon indeed.
We’re encouraged to welcome every innovation and rejoice at every new development that means we can sate our consumer urges faster, better and more often. Increasingly nowadays an instant fix is required for the most mundane of events and this is just the next logical step.
It used to be quite normal to wait a day or two for an online purchase to arrive in the post. Now even eBay offers same-day delivery in London and some US cities with some retailers using the eBay Now service. Impatience is a virtue.
And now Amazon are investing in little helicopters that will drop your purchase by before you’ve even had enough time to log off and make a cuppa. Is this a good thing?
If this really, ahem, takes off, we could see the skies clogged with tiny little flying machines speeding deliveries to people all over our cities. Think of all those parcels the postie brings to your street for your neighbours and you, soon they could be coming by air in swarms of little Amazon branded lunchboxes. Even George Orwell didn’t imagine such a dystopia....."
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/02/tech/innovation/amazon-drones-questions/
What do you think guys and gals?
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.....not sure richo......from the little I have read to date it seems that the emphasis is on delivering online purchases/items to buyers in the shortest possible time.....30 mins in cities and possibly within a couple of hours in outer city areas - as an alternative to existing Postal and Courier delivery services.
Guess a drone could be programmed to 'pick-up' an item from a predetermined location and then deliver the item/package to a central sort point to be then 're-droned' and delivered to its destination.......*wow
I just need them to invent a much larger drone....one that can carry something a bit heavier and can travel a bit further.....
.........there are a lot of places I would like to see and visit
I think it's a bad idea! In a perfect world it just might work, but just imagine all these drones delivering to the wrong "gardens", dropping the parcels on the roof (right or wrong address), breaking down and crashing down on roads and cars (and heads) etc but the worst not so hypothetical of all, those drones in the hands of criminals who then, would have the perfect weapon.
But apart from all of that, it would give the birds a lot of competition.... 
ref tas "2 minutes ago
I think it's a bad idea! In a perfect world it just might work, but just imagine all these drones delivering to the wrong "gardens", dropping the parcels on the roof (right or wrong address), breaking down and crashing down on roads and cars (and heads) etc but the worst not so hypothetical of all, those drones in the hands of criminals who then, would have the perfect weapon.
But apart from all of that, it would give the birds a lot of competition.... 
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LOL! ....just imagining a malfunction in the 'system' somewhere-like comms breaks down....for whatever reason and some poor seller (not a buyer-who would be delighted!!) suddenly starts receiving ALL the deliveries in his/her back yard from closest drone delivery service centre for a 20 minute period *LOL!!.....
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/drones-delivering-newspapers-2013-3
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/us-navy-just-launched-a-drone-from-a-submarine-2013-12
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/10/16/flying-drones-to-deliver-text-books/
16 October,2013
"World's First" drone delivery service launches in Australia"
"...a Sydney company has launched a book delivery service that employs flying robots instead of postmen, and declared that "commercial drones are going to become as ubiquitous as aeroplanes
