Sounds like they're going for the Amazon model — sell at a loss for years until the competition withers, then stop selling at a loss.

Ground effect requires being at lower altitude than the wingspan. Unless that plane is a quarter mile wide, ground effect doesn't play into it. And if it is a quarter mile wide, you'd better hope it doesn't fly into any populated areas. :-)

As others have pointed out, gaining altitude requires some extra energy, but over the duration of the flight, you use less fuel because the air is thinner, resulting in less drag. (This assumes that your propulsion doesn't lose efficiency to match, of course, but I think you can compensate for some of that by changing the blade angle. This is way outside my area of expertise, though, so I'm not entirely certain about any of this.)

One reason not to go to higher altitudes is that it has a range of only 125 miles. The hybrid drivetrain (500-mile range) doesn't exist yet, I don't think. With such a short range, you'd use up half your battery power on the ascent, so the benefit from more efficient travel at altitude would be lost, and you'd likely end up with even lower total mileage.

But 2,000 feet still seems awfully low to me by a factor of four or five. Dunno.

Just wait until it starts training on porn that people managed to upload to Twitch in violation of the terms and conditions. Then your use of the word "rape" in that comment will take on a whole new meaning.

Real-world flight times are likely to be miserable for most purposes. Currently, this plane has a maximum altitude of 2,000 feet. Not sure why. But the plane has a maximum airspeed of 140 knots. For context, a 737 has a cruising speed of 450 knots.

In practice, this means that this plane is only suitable for very-short-distance flights where a jet would not achieve normal cruising altitudes or speeds.

A nonstop flight from SJC to DFW takes about 3 hours and 35 minutes, give or take, for 1440 miles. At cruising speed, it would take 2 hours and 46 minutes. So an additional 50 minutes or so is spent on taxi time and landing at a much slower speed (maybe 140 to 150 knots). Of that, landing takes 20 to 30 minutes and drops the speed to a third, so I'm going to ballpark that as about 15 minutes of added time, leaving 35 minutes for taxi time. So the total flight time is probably about 30 hours at 450 knots.

Assuming that landing speed for the X1 is proportional to the difference in cruising speed (which may not be accurate, but won't make a huge difference), this means that same flight would take 35 minutes plus about 3.2x the flight time, or about 10 hours and 11 minutes.

On the flip side, the low landing speed means that it can fly into much smaller airports, and because it carries a much smaller number of passengers affordably, it could make much more direct flights economically feasible. Combine that with autonomous piloting, and if it actually had enough range to do medium-range flights, such a design would have potential.

When I fly from SJC to my mom's house in West TN, it takes me about 14 hours to fly commercially, thanks to 3.5 hours of driving, an hour of TSA time, and an hour or more of layover, and an extra takeoff and an extra landing. If I could get rid of all of that extra time and fly general aviation rules, then an automated flight with a single passenger to the nearest tiny little air strip would involve only half an hour of driving (3 hours savings), no TSA time (1 hour savings), no layover (1 hour savings), and no extra takeoff and landing (30 minutes savings), reducing the trip to about 13 hours and 15 minutes (12.5 hours in flight, 30 minutes of driving, and maybe 15 extra minutes for landing).

But that all assumes adequate range. With a hybrid range of only 500 miles and an all-electric range of only 125 miles, the X1 would have to make a minimum of four stops to reach Tennessee from California. So this plane, while a great demonstration of the potential for electric flight, still has very little practical use other than ultra-short-range flights. I suppose with this, I could fly into Nashville or Little Rock or Memphis and take a tiny plane to that airstrip if such a flight existed and were cheap, and that might be worth doing if it existed and were cheap, but I'm not holding my breath unless it is entirely automated.

But that *does* require that you believe that they are honest to you about their future actions...and that they won't change their mind later.

Pirates were often hanged by the same countries that issued them letters of marque.

Why do you believe what they say when they continually misrepresent things. I'd say "lie", but that implies they know what they're doing.

If I read that summary correctly, this will only ever be usable to clean small amounts of stuff in a closed container. It's not going to work for, say, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

That's what it meant ever since RUR. I'll grant that PR people keep spinning different meanings for it though.

Please modify this to:
"""Whenever a "discovery" is announced it's best to wait for verification before popping champagne corks."""

If there isn't independent verification then it's poor policy to believe. It may also be poor policy to disbelieve.

Actually, I had measles twice before there was a vaccine. There are two different kinds of measles, but presumably the vaccine covers both.

Not necessarily. If they're designed to achieve maximum penetration, then you're probably correct, but if they're designed as networks of friends, and you can't invite whole networks, then it's a lot more manageable. Say that no group can have more than, O, 254 members, and you don't have the problem you posit. Of course, everyone would have trouble finding the groups they wanted to be a member of that also had room for them, but there are problems with every approach.

How do you prove they represent the company they claim to represent without giving them a credit card number?

I generally assume that they DON'T represent such a company, but occasionally one will claim that they represent a company which forwards positive sales to another company. I've never tried to find out if that's true, but it's believable. But such a company is probably off-shore and with no local assets.

A couple of things to worry about, if you want to.
1) How reliable is that test for measles antibodies?
2) How quickly do those antibodies decay after a vaccination?

I strongly suspect that the answers to both of those questions is variable. Also, at least some diseases with do a reset on your immune system beta cells. (Actually IIRC measles is one of the diseases that will do that.)

Since he's talking about an individual decision, I assume he's talking about that same individual deciding whether it's worth paying for his extended life (in the future).

Well, unless you're arguing that everyone should invest an infinite amount of money in prolonging everyone's life no matter what their condition is.

You're assuming they'll lose tax revenue and that they aren't spending more money on Paramount than they get back. Given this country's penchant for corporate welfare, I wouldn't assume that Paramount leaving would be tax-flow-negative. More specifically, after all of the incentives, tax credits, etc. are taken into account, I wouldn't assume that the loss from Paramount leaving would be greater than the loss from Warner Brothers largely ceasing to exist except as an IP licensing subsidiary of Paramount.