About a year ago, a delicious idea proliferated through the Internet. A small start-up company in San Francisco had an idea to deliver tacos anytime, anywhere in San Francisco using unmanned drones. The source of the tacos was irrelevant, and so was the price. All that anyone could imagine was a flying robotic Tacocopter delivering fresh, airborne Mexican food to your door.

Unfortunately for couch-potatoes in the area, the dream remains far from reality. The aviation and food safety logistics make it implausible enough. The MIT engineer behind the concept has admitted the technology, which will ideally have use beyond simple fast-food delivery, is still far from scalable deployment.

But little else about drone technology is quite so distant.

It’s true that