It just needs to be correctly marked. There isn't a requirement for it to be an actual parcel or envelope. This method has been used with varying levels of success to smuggle people. I suppose us plebs are not likely to hear about most of the times it has been used successfully, but there have been some high-profile failures of this method, including one in the UK where customs stopped and searched a crate containing a former Nigerian government official.

+1 parent.

Hot air balloonist + antenna guy here.

In the UK, the discussion about requiring tracking of all aircraft has made it as far as the Civil Aviation Authority conducting a public consultation on whether we should all carry transponders. I think this is eventually going to include small UAVs (I reserve "drone" for full-scale aircraft that can bomb people from altitude).

For powered aircraft, aside from the initial cost, this isn't too much of an issue - power and weight aren't massive deal-breakers.

For balloons, the issues turn out to be similar to small UAVs, despite their much-enhanced load carrying capability. An ADS-B transponder is a chunky, heavy (and expensive) unit. It strikes me that advances in chip technology won't help much - I'm sure the modulation stuff can all be done on a tiny PCB smaller than a smartphone. Rather, the issue is the massive amounts of power loss while the signal propagates over the air, requiring not only big batteries but decent-sized heatsinks to draw heat away from the power amplifiers. I don't think I'd want a 7W-minimum radio tucked in my pocket.

If ADS-B becomes mandatory for manned aircraft, my best hope of getting a sensible transponder for use in a balloon (where we typically attach instruments using strings and velcro, and have bumpy landings) is actually to hope the same regulations come in for small UAVs thus creating a much larger market for portable ADS-B transponders. But I don't see it happening. Much easier to go the way model aircraft has gone in the UK already: it's illegal to fly them outside dedicated areas (most park land is not permissible flying territory for model aircraft).

Uh, what? If people broadcast content they expect people to tune in to receive it. It's not a private screening, you literally set the whole system up for people to be able to receive the content you are transmitting without any further effort on your part. You make it sound like nobody anywhere has paid for the rights to broadcast the content in the first place. I live in the UK where television is largely "free-to-air" meaning we can all receive roughly 10-20 channels on "Freeview," provided we pay an annual license fee, without needing extra cable/satellite TV subscriptions. Such content is received through a good old Yagi-Uda antenna.

I understand the USA doesn't have a license fee, so this got me wondering how these proposed channels are funded. The most obvious solution would be a combination of grants from local/federal government and sponsorship (ads). This does indeed appear to be it's funded for both radio (from Wikipedia):

...and television:

So your suggestion that using an antenna to receive broadcast content doesn't support content creators is a bit odd. Satellite TV streams are an example of a different system where anyone can receive the signal (the transmission beam from the antenna in orbit covers a decent chunk of Europe), but lawful demodulation (i.e. viewing content) requires a decryption token available only on subscription to the provider.

The LUDDITE APPS guy, on the other hand, would probably have a lucrative career in giving keynote speeches if only he could stick to the ONLY APPS CAN APP APPS part.

In the UK, this is just a re-invention of Argos. Before the internet you'd pick up a new printed catalogue (which they still offer). I spent many a Saturday morning browsing the toys in that catalogue. Writing Christmas / birthday wish-lists was easy, you just wrote down the catalogue numbers. The differentiator here has to be products available on offer, not the speed, surely? I can order more diverse things from Amazon from their massive out of town warehouses than I could from Argos, which has smaller, edge-of-town (or town centre) stores.

Add in that AFAIK, Argos pay all their taxes in the UK.

Agreed. Even the password change dialogue can be incriminating. Two true stories from school:

Maths teacher is observed entering five character password.

Ten minutes later, maths teacher is observed changing password. Similarly:

Football-fan teacher with prominent Aston Villa FC wallpaper is observed entering four character password.

Later, teacher is observed changing password.

I'm up at 0315 for a training flight in a balloon this morning. Sunrise is at 0450. I intend to have landed by 0730, and this has little to do with the heatwave we're experiencing.

The reason balloons operate near sunrise and sunset is not specifically to do with the temperature, but actually to avoid thermals, which are generate by temperature differences (strictly, different heating rates of areas on the ground). Thermals that would be fairly pathetic for a glider pilot (which I used to be), say anything up to 200 ft/min up or down, would be enough to cause issues for balloons. Meaningful thermals (more than 200 ft/min up or down) would make the balloon very hard to control, since up and down control is the only way a balloon pilot can steer and uncommanded up and down movements (especially on landing!) mean you don't know where you're going to end up.

As far as temperature is concerned, the balloon flies a bit better in summer but can carry less weight. The balloon is less buoyant in hot air which is thinner as the parent(s) point out, so in general you can carry more weight in winter (or at lower altitudes - "pressure altitude" is still a relevant thing to look up). The big deal with temperature for me is actually that the fuel pressure drops a lot with falling temperature (liquid propane expands and contracts far more than water does). This means that in winter, less fuel is supplied each time I burn, meaning less heat output per burn. I have to burn more frequently to maintain level flight, or constant climb/descent rates.

If two firms both use computer power to do all of the meaningful work (especially finding prior art and swarm-learning reasonable rates for royalty/licensing), could we see a future where cases such as Apple vs. Samsung are decided in minutes not years?

Human communication is slow. Writing and reading letters is slow. Computers communicate faster than we do. Computers could argue with each other, an automated judge could decide the result, *and* the n-th level appeals could be adjudicated all within a few hundred milliseconds - leaving "mom and pop" corporate lawyers out of business.

I am now struggling to decide whether this would be a brilliant advance or a tragic loss for humanity. Better make this somebody's PhD project.

Chyme

In the absence of an xkcd, have some SMBC instead.

Since the planes allow fluid to pass through them, I see no difficulty in having an airport straddling a river.

For once, AC didn't even need to read the article - it's in the summary. Anna is claimed to be a man.

Japanese curry is an import from the UK, not from India, which gives it its Western credentials.

Said curry is gaining popularity in the UK. For the uninitiated, in both places it's commonly sold under the name "katsu curry" which is a direct corruption of the English word "cuts" (katsu curry is served as sliced chicken with breadcrumbs in a mild curry sauce with white rice). This isn't an exhaustive definition, the curry can be sold with things other than sliced breaded chicken.

There are two slightly odd/amusing things about this. The first is that in England, "katsu" is treated as an exotic foreign word. It really isn't (see above), it's just that Japanese has no phoneme for "cu-" as in "cut", nor "ts", thus it's impossible to say "cuts" in Japanese. The temptation to use "ku-" doesn't work because in Japanese, that's pronounced more like a short "coo-" as in "cooking." The second odd thing stems from the first: having no idea what "katsu" is supposed to mean, it gets interpreted as being the overall flavour. Hence, various food shops that know nothing about Japanese cuisine such as Greggs (a mass-market bakery) are selling nonsensical products such as "katsu bakes," which appears to be some sort of pastry containing chicken and curry powder but otherwise bearing no relation to katsu curry nor indeed the curries created in Britain, upon which katsu curry is based.

Disclaimer: I am a Japanophile who has worked in Japan, and I'm from Birmingham which considers itself the curry capital of the UK.

In Visual Basic.

I'll buy them for my entire department if it means I can inflict Clippy on other people.