Now there's a taxpayer funded option I would vote for. I wonder how many we could send with her?

They'd never be able to run together - they both want to hold the handbasket.

Ikea: just some oak and some pine and a handful of Norsemen
Ikea: selling furniture for college kids and divorced men
Everyone has a home
But if you don't have a home you can buy one there

I can now wait for the day that some idiot shows up at my office asking me to certify/upgrade their Ikea shelter the bought on CraigsList for use as a permanent dwelling.

Compared to downtown Hong Kong, Japan is mostly uninhabited country. Everything is relative.

What this means is that coastal areas where tsunamis are likely are off limits to certain types of development. Farm land would be a great application for this area, for example, but not so good for high rises, nuclear plants, and hospitals. The actual impact force of the tsunami is far, far smaller than the flood area (which can be relatively easily dealt with). You're talking about the major restrictions covering a fraction of 1% of the land area.

I see a future full of kids facing jail time and their parents facing 6 figure fines. These drones will have cameras and radio links.

And if they make an error, they can just amend the rules, just like I did in that topic line.

I'd rather the FAA take a proactive, and active, role in creating rules which allow operations and enforce existing damage and nuisance laws. Letting the FAA "take it's time" is like telling ID that there's no rush on getting Duke Nukem Forever out as long as they do it right.

They're not going to be flying UAVs continuously. If Amazon gets the autopilot right, everything except the final approach and landing at the delivery location will be automated. A bank of "pilots" could easily cover 25-30+ drones each, given a 30 minute flight time from the distro center to the delivery and a 2 minute land/deliver/relaunch sequence. Distro centers would have automated guidance and pads that wouldn't require piloting. It would be far more human-cost efficient than truck delivery which requires the "pilot" to actively travel with the vehicle (weight limitations notwithstanding). That's 200 deliveries a day per person - twice what a UPS/FedEx driver does.

They will never solve the problem, because they will always be one step behind. Every safeguard is a vector for abuse, and every limitation can be circumvented if there are humans involved at any point. And humans are designing and operating the system.

It's already the safest (per passenger or traveller mile) way to travel in the world.

You could not build any critical infrastructure within a set distance from the coast, and no habitable buildings within a second less restrictive distance. This is basic risk mitigation. You don't build critical facilities on a fault line, you shouldn't build one in the direct path of a (potential) tsunami. Go look at the USGS website, or any of a number of wind zone maps. All this stuff has data and is plotted out for the US - all you have to do is set your risk factor (50 years for hurricane/snow, 500 for earthquake in the US) and note your exceptions.

Yes, but a better question was: does he *require* 300GB of data a month, and is it really that ping sensitive? Most things which require huge b/w and low pings are entertainment related. LTE if you need lowish pings, Sat if you just need data.

Oh, those batteries - they'll happen to be in swappable modules that just happen to fit Tesla automobiles. You pay for the infrastructure, Musk magically creates the 1 minute electric car fill-up.

Distribution is generally a monopoly, generation is not.

And "less than they pay for utility power" is a very, very high bar. Installation of a parallel grid, storage, and solar collection? Ignoring the grid, most solar companies I work with will contract to use your rooftop and install a solar system to tie into your grid-based power. You agree to pay $0.30(!) per kWh for all the generated power, they maintain the system. The cost of energy is fixed for the life of the contract (usu 20-30 years), and that's how the financing of the project is secured.

It's all find and dandy, but to break even you have to assume a large annual increase in local electricity cost (>10% inflation every year iirc). That's a pretty big bet to make, and one that relatively few companies are taking for cost reasons.

I might actually consider a passcode if I had this feature. As it is, I don't have a passcode on my phone because it's too big of a hassle. Any passcode which is sufficiently secure will be simultaneously too complex to enter every time you unlock your phone. I struggle with this using my password manager. I had to simplify my master password just to make it usable on my phone since typing in a 24 character password with upper/lower/numerical/specials on a phone is annoying at best. I'm back down to a 10 character pw, and even that has some "patterns" in it to simply entry.

If it only takes you 2 seconds to enter your passcode, your passcode is insufficiently secure.