My bank (Chase) got hacked last year, and Teh Evil Haxx0rz might have gotten my vital info, but all of my money is still in the bank.

Months before that, someone used my Chase CC to buy a couple of Amtrak tickets (presumably to then refund them for cash). Got a fraud alert from Chase, and called them to confirm that it was in fact fraud. They immediately canceled my card sent me new ones. Checks of my & my wife's credit reports show no unusual activity.

So, thank you very much, but I'll stick with fiat money stored in an actual, regulated American bank.

If the actual flight was only 6 hours, you'd still burn a whole day in each direction; it just wouldn't be as stressful of a day.

OTOH, were you able to nap on the flights to and from your destination? That helps to reduce stress and fatigue too.

Economic feasibility is not just "will the ticket prices cover operating expenses".

It also entails having a large enough market that the incredibly high development costs can be amortized out across a large fleet of vehicles. Otherwise, each plane is going to be S-U-P-E-R expensive, and the price of the tickets -- which must also include a portion of the price of the airplane, since Boeing and Airbus don't just give their planes away -- will be concomitantly enormous.

The bottom line is that there comes a "good enough" point where people stop paying more for better service. Naturally, that point will be different for different income levels, but... remember Occupy Wall Street and "We Are the 99%"?

There just aren't enough people out there who's "good enough" point is high enough to pay for a fleet of sub-orbital (and supersonic, for that matter) planes over the ocean (since that's the only place they'll be allowed to fly). If there were, Aérospatiale-BAC would have made more Concordes, and Boeing would have proceeded with development of the 2707 SST.

The rest of us factor in things like time to travel to the airport, waiting in TSA checkpoint lines and our bank balance to then say "Meh, 550 MPH is Good Enough."

Glad (kinda, in some perverse manner) that I'm not the only one.

10 hours, nonstop.

The Concorde turned a 6 hour flight across the Atlantic into a 3 hour flight. Why, then, was the Concorde economically unfeasible? Cost

Those sub-orbital flights will cost a lot more than the Concorde flights. People will say, "$1200 for a 10 hour flight, or $5000 for a 4 hour flight?" Sure, a handful will pick the $5000 ticket ($20,000 when you add in spouse and a couple of children) but most will say, "4 hours is not worth $15,200."

Trying to balance a big pencil on a postage stamp that's moving unpredictably and simultaneously in 4 axises (pitch, roll, yaw, altitude) doesn't seem to have very high odds of success. And the worse the sea is running, the lower the odds.

If it works, though, count me really impressed by what would surely be a Crowning Moment of Awesome.

We won't mention that vertically-launched multi-stage rockets powered by RP-1/LOX are pretty "me too".

Or an original IBM PC/XT. All the chips were socketed, and every IO device (except maybe the KB) required it's own card on the ISA bus.

Yearly major releases and more frequent bug fixes was a solved problem long before billg co-founded the Evil Empire...

Given the time it takes for people to become alert from a deep sleep, the time it takes a telephone to be automatically "dialed" and connected, and the fired trucks to arrive, ISTM that a 5ms response to a fire alarm signal is no more needed than a 500ms response. OTOH if houses were nuclear powered or flew at 1000 MPH then 5ms response times might actually be considered slow...

An analogy: we hold back guns from four year olds -- even when we show it to them and say, "Very dangerous! Never touch!", but not from legally competent adults; when said four year old gets his hands on a gun, bad things can happen.

Likewise, we should not hold back *copies* of data from the world. However, so as to protect the "chain of provenance", edit privileges should be limited in some way, so as to prevent abuse by sock puppets and the anonymous. Maybe something as simple as requiring editors to log in using a cryptographic certificate signed by a trusted third party which requires some form of official ID and manual verification.

(1) Wikidata would either have to keep (many) multiple copies of possibly quite large data sets, or keep diffs. How much of a strain does it put on a busy server to generate a dataset from a huge original and lots of large diffs.

(2) Not too many people pay attention to Wikipedia changelogs. If only the current form of the data is easily visible, that's what most people -- especially amateurs and those with political motivations -- will use.

Most revolving around laziness and academic corruption. Allowing data (for example: historical weather gauge readings, or IQ scores, or any other data having to do with hot-button topics) to be edited is an invitation to socio-political fraud on an unheard-of scale.

I can't be the only one who thinks that is a terribly bad idea... It would rip the guts right out of repeatability, and confidence that "this" is what $RESEARCHER found.

WordPerfect 6.0 ran great on a 286 w/ 640KB, and WordStar was zippy on a 4MHz Z80 with 64KB (it was the floppy disk IO that hurt performance).

So... the answer to your question is: not very!