That wouldn't make it across the Pacific, simply because when the sun goes down your motor stops turning. You'd need solar panels enough to not only power it during the day, but with enough excess to charge batteries for the night, which makes the drone much heavier, which means bigger structures made with fancier materials and more energy use.

The Greek government got you into this state in the first place, with the full, willing complicity of Wall Street who helped hide Greece's massive debts (which should have disqualified it from joining the euro). Unfortunately the EU in its headlong and breathless rush to get the euro under way didn't do their proper due diligence. Greece is now paying for these mistakes.

I disagree with your message 100%. Happily you're mistaken on the demise of the ability to design and experiment with electronics.

In fact we are living in a golden age of electronics tinkering.

Through hole components are still made in humungous quantities. Even the classic Z80 CPU is *still manufactured* and readily available, as are all the chips you need to do something with it. It's easier than ever and cheaper than ever to buy a grab bag of components, ICs and a bread board and experiment. Only recently, just for fun, I made a Z80 based computer on breadboard. The chips were all brand new and sold through mainstream channels (Premier Farnell) and arrived the day after I placed the order. 74-series logic is still made in vast quantities, as are the classic analogue chips like comparators, op-amps, and of course the versatile mainstay of the hobbyist's parts box, the 555.

If you want to do something bigger, there are free and open source schematic capture/PCB layout programs available for Linux, Windows and Mac. There are companies catering towards hobbyists who need a PCB made. You can get four layer PCBs of your own design made for under US $100. Four layers! You have things like the Arduino. You have things like the Raspberry Pi with its GPIO interface. You have cheap FPGA development boards and Xilinx's FPGA design software can be downloaded for free (and will run on Linux) and needs no extra hardware other than an FPGA dev board and a USB programmer (which can be had for $20 off ebay). You can make your own PCBs at home easier than ever with laser printer toner transfer. (I've made my own 2 sided PCBs at home using a laser printer, clothes iron, and some ferric chloride - and I've made a successful working PCB with a 0.4mm pitch SMD IC on it, soldered with a normal soldering iron).

Information is easier to get than ever. There are hundreds of great SMD soldering tutorials on YouTube. Master it - it's easier than you think - and you can make circuits at home that weren't even in my wildest dreams 15 years ago. There are hundreds of good resources for learning how to design circuits. Test kit that used to be the reserve of only the wealthy or labs are now cheap - you can pick up a really good Tektronics oscilloscope of ebay suitable for the hobbyist for a great price.

It has never been better to be an electronics hobbyist. There's TONS of stuff of substance. End of the ability to design and experiment with electronic hardware? I wager this is the most wrong statement you've made in your life! :-)

Having not done math (or maths as it's called here) since school (GCSE at age 16) I always thought I was bad at the subject. And that it wasn't fun.

Years after leaving school I needed to get a better grasp of it so I could do more things with my electronics hobby, so I signed up for an algebra course on coursera, then a precalculus course, and last year I did calculus 1. It was a revelation. Not only did I prove that I was not "bad at math" it was sort of mind blowing. Working through algebra and precalc, and the first stages of calculus 1 felt like sort of scrambling up a steep mountainside, through brambles and bushes, with it all being hard work and then all of a sudden I crested a ridge and there below in all its splendour was a wide and stunningly beautiful fjord illuminated by the morning sun, as it all suddenly started coming together and all the tools that I had learned to use in algebra suddenly all made perfect sense - and what's more - made perfect sense why we had learned a lot of these things, and how they can give insight into seemingly intractable problems.

I found that doing calculus 1 fundamentally made a difference about how I think of a great deal of things just in every day life. I think a lot more about rates of change and how rates of change change, and how things accumulate.

And yes, it has become enjoyable and fun.

Wok is amazing. You can make something really nice with not much time, and you can scale it quite easily from one to four persons.

A receiver like that would have a power draw that is almost infinitessimal compared to the power draw of the motors. A simple radio receiver adequate for the job would possibly reduce the flight time by less than a second.

With the exception of BGA a decent soldering iron is fine for SMD. I can solder a 144 pin 0.5mm QFP quicker than I can solder a through hole 40 pin DIP component.

But it's usually not those things that actually fail. Most of the random failures on electronics I've seen recently are:

* bad memory modules in computers (trivial to fix)
* bad capacitors (easy to fix)
* linear power regulators breaking their solder joints to the PCB due to heating/cooling (easy to fix)

Although we did have some LCD backlights that failed because as the capacitors started to fail, the power transistor in the DC-DC converter would also go (but it was extremely easy to spot due to the melted hole in the power transistor). We just replaced the LCD backlight DC-DC converter rather than doing any soldering.

It's very rare that some BGA chip is the thing that died in your gadget.

SMD components are not hard to replace (with the exception of BGA and their ilk). But the usual 0.5mm pitch QFP type stuff, to get the dead one off I use a hot air gun, and to put the new one on, flux, solder, normal soldering iron, solder braid and kapton tape are the tools I use.

Also I design most of my hobby electronics stuff to use SMD. Smaller PCB = lower price for the PCB, and a lot of the interesting chips only come in some SMD package.

What requires incredibly fancy machinery to fix?

While it takes some knowledge to fix a lot of things, fixing for example a faulty washing machine most of the time needs nothing more than basic hand tools and the ability to diagnose what is actually broken, then buying the replacement part.

There are some things that will require fancier stuff to fix, for instance replacing a chip in a BGA package on a circuit board requires specialist tools but a huge number of repairs don't require this kind of thing to be done.

Unfortunately ftp has far from died. There are so many other organizations I deal with that haven't been hit with the ssh/sftp clue stick and can't do anything other than ftp. Or worse still, ftps which is a firewall administrator's nightmare.

We even deal with one company who not only refuses to use sftp, but they refuse ftp in passive mode and want us to connect to an ftp server of theirs that only supports active mode. Their admin reckons ftp in passive mode is insecure and won't deal with sftp. Sigh. They are of course a Windows-only shop. Most of the companies who are stuck on ftp are Windows shops.

While I don't know whether "rebirth of VR" is hype or not I can say this.

Elite Dangerous through the Oculus Rift is mindblowing. VR that came before simply doesn't compare, it's like trying to compare a modern Lamborghini with a model T.

Actually that model works very well. In many countries the internet provision is better and cheaper with more ISPs to choose from than in the US.

I live on a small island with 80000 inhabitants. We have an incumbent telecom company which owns the last mile, but they must sell that last mile wholesale. As a result, we have not one but four ISPs we can choose from at a decent price, and you can get at least 50Mbit/sec service pretty much everywhere despite the rural spread-out nature of our population.

We don't get the terrible Comcast-only situation many in the US have to deal with.

If it works in Kerbal Space Program, what the hell, go for it :-)