Training shouldn't be too difficult. A dronish aircraft isn't anywhere near as complicated as a plane or copter.
That said, if any of the prop motors has a problem, it's simple as well - you just fall like a rock, and probably die.

My best guess is these will be really hot items until some prominent person gets turned into mush. Then the lawsuits and buh-bye.

I believe the human rated ones have enough props and prop motors that they can at least make a controlled emergency landing after losing a few of them

Less quadcopter and more duodecopter

I'd mentioned I brought meds, and things necessary to get through....but that stuff doesn't take much room.

And as for clothes....if they delay or lose my bag, the very few times this has happened to me, I just bought a few new clothes at my destination.....no big deal.

Though simply buying new clothes assumes that you can afford to, that stores reliably stock clothes in your size, that you can get to the stores, and that you arrived while stores are still open.

I'm glad at least the first two seem to be no problem for you -- but I've been stranded by missed late night connections before; and you don't have a lot of options for clothes shopping at midnight. And if you end up connecting through a foreign country and miss your connection you might not be allowed to clear their customs - which would sharply limit your shopping options.

So, yeah, I tend to make sure I have at least one change of clothing in my carry on.

Harbor Air also does tourist tours in their De Havilland Beaver seaplanes - those are just half an hour or so of circling around describing the scenery to the up to 6 tourists before returning to their departure sea plane port.

So even a short-ranged EV conversion of the Beaver, would be more than adequate for those as well And the EV conversion is probably quieter, without that noisy radial engine roaring away a few feet in front of you, and so would make for a nicer tour experience anyway.

And they're not talking about converting all their planes, or even all their Beavers, so they'd still have conventionally powered seaplanes for their longer (or higher capacity) routes. But using EV for the short haul where you don't need range and combustion engines are at their least efficient makes a lot of sense. They're quieter, they're lower maintenance (and old radials need a lot more maintenance than modern turbofans on the big jetliners) and so they're probably cheaper to operate over the plane's total lifetime.

So good for them for looking to use EV planes where they make sense -- on many of the kinds of routes they were already flying.

Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster is these?

Bravo!

Pre-clearance would be best. The US and Canada already offer that in several Canadian airports for flights to the US, and the Amtrak website indicates that trains from Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal already have you go through US customs, so I can't see any reason the concept couldn't be extended to high speed rail.

Also I imagine a lot of the folks who will ride this will end up springing for a Nexus card which will greatly expedite their customs interactions in either direction.

A big reason people buy flat pack furniture is that assembled it's too big to fit in most vehicles.

I envision people devoted to getting their store credit tying up the return area reassembling items that they had to break down to transport. What a mess to get a bit of store credit back. (Plus however great shape it was before you broke it down and reassembled it it'll likely be scratched and wobbly afterwards.

I get that the returns desk can't properly assess the condition while it's unassembled; but this sounds like it's a nice PR announcement while being designed to be too annoying for most people to actually take advantage of.

The concept is identical for cars and planes. You're trading off engine's efficiency for drag.

The thing is with cars the engine efficiency is decoupled from speed through the gearbox and a piston engine is most at ... well it varies between diesel and gasoline, but the point is higher != better, it's somewhere in the middle of the operating range. This together results in a peak efficiency somewhere at the 45-55mph range.

For an aircraft peak thrust efficiency from a turbofan is actually at full throttle largely because an increase in speed results in an increase in thrust due to the air being sucked in and expelled from the engine. But there's more variables. You split drag up into parasitic and lift induced drag, one increases with speed while the other decreases. Both of them are also related to air pressure which change with cruising altitude giving the entire equation an extra dimension.

The reality is aircraft do not fly at their most fuel efficient point. They fly slightly faster than it (peak efficiency is also close to lift problems), and significantly shy than the speed at that altitude (570mph cruise speed vs 670mph speed of sound at 30000ft )

Though there's another important difference between jet airplanes and cars.

Jets can easily vary their altitude and by flying higher they experience less atmospheric pressure which reduces the drag the surrounding air imparts on the jet. Cars don't get that luxury.

But to fly in the thinnest possible air the jet must be flying very fast in order to generate sufficient lift from that thin air. But if it goes too fast, getting very far into the trans sonic speed range, the drag caused by compression shock waves more than overcomes the reduced drag from altitude. So to be fuel efficient a jet wants to fly at a high subsonic speed and about as high as it safely can given that speed and its current weight (it can climb higher at the same speed as it burns off fuel)

So in a very strong tailwind the aircraft could slow down, but if it slows down much then it'd probably be running its engines at a less efficient power setting and have to descend to avoid stalling which would increase drag; so combined end up using more fuel than if it had kept to its normal airspeed.

Wait what? How exactly did you go from people with cars being able to use a drop-slot to people om public transit not being able to do so?

Because it was saying that it was the public transit that could be "an hours long ordeal that can only be performed at specific times which are mostly when you're working."

Doesn't mater if the book drop is open if you can't get to the library after work.

It doesn't reduce drag, but it could potentially be slightly more efficient since the locomotive is smaller and you don't have to haul the fuel as well as the cargo.

I doubt that the small efficiency gain is worth the cost of building the infrastructure for it, though. Cost per pound for freight shipment by train is already dirt cheap.

Of course electric trains already don't have to haul the fuel; they are usually powered from overhead catenary wires.

And even if you did want to remove the weight of the electric motors from the engine it'd be move space efficient to simply stick a linear induction motor between the existing tracks, rather than having to expand the right of way to install some weird side towing pod in a dedicated tube. But even that would be very expensive and it isn't clear why that'd be better than current electric locomotives or to current electric trains where every axle is powered.

This requires a lot of room, but doesn't seem to deliver any higher speeds for the trains (since those are still limited by the existing track's condition and curves.

As for "can be powered be renewables" well so can an electric train. That might be an argument for expanded catenary power networks and forcing freight trains to modify their diesel electric engines to also support running electric only off catenary power (where available) - but powered by renewable electricity is no specific benefit of this magnetic pod moving normal trains concept.

What is in somewhat more short supply is tools like GPG/PGP doing 'offline' asymmetric encryption using ECC. As far as I know, if you were really gung-ho anti-RSA, you'd have to 'roll your own' scheme, which is generally frowned upon.

Unlike RSA ECC doesn't really do encryption, so you can't do the classic GPG/PGP thing of randomly generating an ephemeral symmetric key, using it to encrypt your message, then encrypting that ephemeral key with the recipient's public key.

However you can achieve a similar enough effect using static EC Diffie-Hellman keys in certificates. And there's a draft RFC 4880 for OpenPGP using ECDH + key derivation to accomplish that.

(Difference is that instead of sending the recipient the encrypted symmetric key you instead send them your ECDH public key from which they can calculate the shared secret you made using their published public key; then derive from it the same symmetric key you used to encrypt the data with. As long as the recipient published or shared their public key with you ahead of time, also a requirement for RSA based PGP, there's no need for them to be online or communicate with you when you encrypt something for them.)

But it's true that the standards need to get finalized and widely implemented. Until then you do have the issue that the PGP encryption people have access to relies on RSA.

Yep, it's true for anything, but particularly encryption, as it's trickier and harder to test than most code.

Like for example math code being used in computational physics, or calculating spacecraft trajectory, or the like needs to be correct. But it's not working with secret data and usually isn't exposed to external adversaries.

Crypto code not only needs to be correct, but also worry about information leakage that may undermine its security. For example in normal usage it's a good thing if operations that can perform faster do perform faster. In crypto that can be exploited in timing attacks to learn information about the message and/or the key protecting it by seeing how fast the implementation rejects different specifically corrupted input or by monitoring how quickly it processes different valid inputs.

So you have all the input verification headaches of any public facing code combined with the correctness needs of critical math libraries, plus the need to ensure its response time isn't correlated with variations in input data.

And that's just one class of potential information leakage.

So as a European I'm confused. FedEx don't already do outbound customs checks? I'm surprised because I assumed that was a large part of the reason that shipping things from the US is 10 times the price of shipping it from China.

I can get a small package from China in a week for about $1 in shipping. The cheapest option from the US is at least $8, and most web shops bump that up to a minimum $15 for international shipping.

If the US wants to compete on the export market, this is something you should look into.

It's cheap to ship from China because they manage to abuse the Universal Postal Union system to pay below cost shipping rates; forcing the receiving country's postal services to lose money on each delivery. Effectively your country is subsidizing every postal shipment you get from China.
China did this by managing to keep getting themselves categorized as a developing nation and hence in the third and least expensive tier of international postage rates (rates normally well below actual postal delivery cost).

most banks don't bother and will send you to their HTTPS web site (which hopefully is secure, otherwise they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves a bank) to retrieve your reports.

Sending reports by email is just not worth it.

That's what they do, as do utility companies and pretty much any place that does paperless billing - but in a couple ways that fails to provide arguably important functionality that physically mailed statements did.

1) Physical statements, once mailed, are an record that is now beyond the ability of the generating entity to alter. (I've never seen a bank alter statements, but I did have a utility company silently "correct" the previous month's statement on their website copy -- so it now disagreed with the paper version they'd originally mailed me - and claiming I owed them an underpayment penalty this month because last month's bill was higher than what they'd actually sent me. That was a fun conversation to get resolved). You have to actively log in and download electronic statements in a timely manner to get the same independently stored history - rather than having them automatically appear.

2) Physical statements have a retention policy limited only by my willingness to hang onto them. Paperless billing statements are only available as long as the provider cares to make them available. For some utility companies that can be as little as just 3 statements. If you didn't download it soon enough you can't see that information at all.

I'd be much happier if I had the option to provide these places a public key and automatically receive emailed encrypted copies of my statements as soon as they were available.

Think about it, the U.S. was able to check the might of Japan in Pacific. Government education probably does not emphasize how important this was to the war and how much of an amazing achievement this was. Several years before WWII, in the Russo-Japanese war, Russia suffered a complete and humiliating defeat to Japan. Japan had also conquered China. They were an incredibly powerful nation. If the United States had not entered the War, the Russia would be facing a two front war...against opponents that had been able to easily beat them. So, the Russian resistance was only possible by the U.S. keeping Russia's eastern front safe. BTW, Russia was completely reliant on war material coming in from the open east, or they would have been knocked out.

I don't disagree with the rest of your point, but this is a bit misleading.

The Russo Japanese was was 1904â"1905, more than just "several years before WWII". Also the land part of that war was in no small part lost because Russia had not fully completed the Trans Siberian Railway and its spurs - so they couldn't quickly move forces over land to relieve Port Arthur. Still had they not been rocked by internal revolution that encouraged the Tsar to accept Teddy Roosevelt's offers to mediate peace between Russia and Japan there's little doubt that Russia could, given time, move enough troops overland to recapture all the territory the Japanese had seized.

In the 1930s there were several additional border conflicts between Japan and the Soviets near Manchuria - these culminated with the defeat of the Japanese forces at the Battles of Khalkhyn Gol after which they signed the Sovietâ"Japanese Neutrality Pact. Its unclear whether the Japanese army in China could have made much progress against the Soviets, should they have chosen to violate that pact and bring the Soviets into the war against them, despite the Soviets moving significant troops out of that area to face the Germans. Certainly they were incapable of resisting the Soviets in 1945 when Stalin decided it was time to turn on Japan roughly a month before the German surrender.

So it's misleading to imply because Russia accepted peace with Japan after defeats in the far reaches of their empire in the early 1900s that they'd have been at their mercy should the Japanese Army attack again in the 1940s.

5. Transit Fare Interoperability - Transit systems are typically city-wide or county-wide. Very few cross county jurisdictional boundaries. They are thus, in effect, silo'd. They have their own fare/rate structure (cost per boarding, discounts for multi-boarding passes), pass structure (monthly passes vs. 30-day passes), and absent a multi-jurisdictional agreement (Like Clipper in the Bay Area), many people need to purchase and maintain multiple bus passes for daily commutes. State SHOULD pass laws that require that each county get onboard with multi-jurisdictional pass/pricing schemes by 202X and then set another deadline to have groups of neighboring counties merge their pass/pricing schema until we have statewide transit passes. After all, it has taken over 20 years for the SF Bay area Clipper Card to get to where it is and it still only includes 22 of the local transit agencies. There are over 164 transit agencies in California alone.

Although for a number of urban areas even state-wide transit passes wouldn't necessarily be good enough because lots of people commute across state borders. (Darn those large cities built up against the edge of the state).

Although a number of those metro areas already have arrangements to handle some of that. Washington DC's metro system reaches out into nearby parts of both Maryland and Virginia, Philadelphia's mass transit extended across the river into New Jersey. Etc.
The biggest outlier I'm aware of is New York. You have to switch from the MTA subway to PATH or Jersey Transit to take rail into New Jersey and those systems don't have a shared fare/rate structure with MTA.

Still, state-wide commonality would be a very good start.