This is the 2nd video where the author got the Concorde story wrong... It became profitable 8 years into service (1984), largely due to BA raising ticket prices and making it more of a luxury. And the Concorde division remained profitable until the crash in France, when they grounded all Concordes while they investigated the root cause. After they started flying again, people were still wary to buy Concorde tickets, and airlines could get more profit out of 1st class tickets on larger, slower planes. So both BA and AF phased them out ~2003.

Most airliners have wings designed to be used in low transsonic. They can't effectively go faster. They would literally lose lift if they went faster. Their wing shape is made to only delay the onset of shockwaves on top of the wing (flat-ish top), allowing it to safely creep closer to mach1 than otherwise, but not to operate within/past mach1.

Fan/propeller blades themselves are also mach limited.
(They can be designed to be supersonic, but then you end up with something like this... which in hindsight nobody wants : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H)
A subsonic airfoil in a fan/propeller, operating near/at supersonic speed, loses the ability to move/redirect air, due to shockwave disruption of the airflow.

Fans/propellers with subsonic blades that spin at subsonic speeds are effectively speed limited. They lose efficiency above ~500 mph, where they begin to stop generating thrust as they travel faster. Their pitch has to increase higher and higher, until they are no longer much of an airscrew and more of a 'feathered' configuration.

Supersonic jet engines use intake devices (such as shock cones) to decelerate incoming air to subsonic speeds, so the compressor (itself a fan, i.e. a highly multi bladed propeller) can operate on that air to compress it and feed the engine combustion chambers.
Airliners have no intake devices to decelerate incoming air, and they would lose engine compression when entering near mach1 speeds.

Furthermore, their bypass fans (which are glorified propellers) would stop providing thrust.

You would need to design different planes (like the concorde). You can't just throttle up a modern airliner and go faster [than X limit] - like you can in a modern car.

-scheherazade

Came here to say exactly this.

I'll add that Anwar al-Awlaki wasn't just hiding out in Yemen. The Fort Hood shooter was emailing back and forth with him. The attempted bombings in Times Square and of Northwest Airlines flight 253 were also linked back to him. So yeah, there were absolutely guys in Yemen helping launch attacks on American nationals and American soil.

That all said, blanket bans on everyone from the country period is only A answer and mayhaps not THE answer, baby with the bath water and all. Most of our Islamic allies, and the highest percentage of victims of jihadist terrorism are the moderate muslims in those same countries.

"Uhhh, hello from the flight deck. This is your captain speaking, Captain Badass. We are currently flying at an altitude of negative 1 feet. If you look out your right window you will see water. If you check your left, more water. Don't worry folks, first were going to blast the shit out of a forest fire, do it all over again, then have you home for dinner. Thanks again for flying Adventure Airlines!"

Maybe in the future there will be whole aircraft parachutes on commercial aircraft.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Detachable-Cabin-Commercial-Airline-Safety-System

Detachable Cabin Commercial Airline Safety System has been added as a related post - related requested by TheFreak.

I was hoping for more meat to his presentation, and was disappointed. I feel that he said absolutely nothing to help anyone in the audience understand what quantum computers actually DO or what sort of problems they'll help to solve. They'll absolutely not increase your FPS, as that's not what they're well-suited to do. What they are quite excellent at is taking a problem with many possible solutions and finding the correct (or best) one at an extremely high speed.

One example would be the Traveling Salesman problem. In brief, find the optimum route for traversing a number of points on a map. This is useful for things like scheduling package delivery routes, airline flights, etc. With a classic / current computer we write software that cleverly chugs through the possible solutions, throws out any that prove to be poor, and eventually gets to what appears to be the best or is at least a "good enough" solution. As the number of necessary points to be visited increases this problem scales in complexity quickly, so eventually a current computer would just choke on the problem and at best return an ok-ish solution in a reasonable period of time.

A quantum computer is a totally different beast. If it's "big" enough (IE, is comprised of a sufficient number of qubits), it takes the entire set of all possible solutions to the problem, and rather than iterate through them to find the best one, it checks them all simultaneously and immediately returns the optimum solution. It does this by using properties of quantum mechanics, and I think this is where the speaker was drawing his talk of parallel universes. If there are 3 qubits, they would exist as 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111 simultaneously. The software would then define what the best answer would look like, and the computer returns the answer.

You can hopefully see how this totally breaks encryption. With a current computer and a long enough encryption key, an encoded message would take the fastest machines a huge number of years to decipher. With a quantum computer you hand it a gibberish encrypted message, it loads all possible transformations of that message simultaneously, and it then returns the transformation which looks most like a coherent message.

I'm excited to see what these machines can do for us, but they're going to necessitate some significant structural changes in how we handle sensitive data.

I'll bet there's also a fair amount of lobbying against rail development by the auto and airline industries.

You think its due to terrorism? I would guess it's due to the mess that becomes the front of a terminal when people think its okay to leave their cars parked for some period of time. The congestion that creates is horrible. A loading/unloading zone in front of a terminal is usually crazy busy. Anyone leaving a car parked deserves to be towed as it makes a mess of the dropping off and picking up of airline passengers.

I do however love how quickly that tow truck removes cars. I bet this is much more effective (deterrent and cost) than having hired officers standing around telling you/ or ticketing your car for the violation.

It's not IN a vacuum. the pressure is just very low, like a high-altitude jet airliner. The skis the pod runs on aren't even electromagnetic, they use micro jets of compressed air, like an air-hockey table.

As for Thunderfoot, I get he likes debunking things like those retarded snake-oil "smart pavement" people. However, saying Musk is one of them is ignoring what Elon's already accomplished. I can GUARANTEE Elon Musk has dumped more money than Thunderfoot will make in his lifetime in engineers and pure scientists just to see if it was FEASIBLE, let alone possible.

This is the best 44 seconds of video you'll watch today has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

Robert McIntosh - Santa Monica Airlines has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

Perhaps it would have been better to say that fuel isn't the only reason. The Airbus A320 in this example has roughly 55% better fuel efficiency than a pre oil crisis Boeing 707, although as Jimbo's big bag'o'trivia points out, that's barely better than the 1950s era prop planes like the Douglas DC-7.

Better automation has also allowed the A320 to reduce the staffing requirements, the 707 required 3 or 4 crew to operate the aircraft, but the A320 only requires 2. The DC-7 also requires 3 crew, but only seats half the passengers (doubling the flight crew costs per passenger).

Greater competition is probably a larger factor. Talking about airline profitability and competition, Warren Buffett joked that had a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk for the Wright Brothers' first flight, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

Didn't think it was that confusing. Back in the day, planes used way more fuel, so it was a large percentage of the ticket cost.

These days, they use much less fuel per passenger, so the cost of flying has gone down.

His whole point is that flying doesn't actually cost that much these days. In addition to increased fuel efficiency, low-cost carriers have driven prices down to the point where there's almost no margin on flights; hence, why so many airlines are struggling these days.

True, but when they tell you the plane has left the hanger and will be there soon...and then 5 hours later there's still no plane and they say the exact same thing, it's absolutely clear and unequivocal that they lied to you 5 hours earlier, so why would you think they're not lying now?

I always give them the benefit of a doubt UNTIL they lie. Once they lie about what's happening, all bets are off.

This is a big part of why I fly as little as possible. I HATE giving an industry that's SO anti-customer service and that lies at every turn a dime. Sometimes there's no choice, but if there is, I'll drive up to 12 hours to avoid any airline. Screw those liars.

Here's probably the real reason Cenk got booted, a clip of him shouting down the staff as one of the other customers in line is trying tell Cenk to back off.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x43at5z

I find this unsurprising on all levels. The airlines care about profits, and the passengers are just cargo to them so the shoddy situation isn't uncommon. Also, Cenk always seems to have this entitled and enraged attitude in ever video I see him in, so him going ballistic at everyone is unsurprising. Him getting booted from the flight is not surprising, but given how little I think of Cenk's behaviour, it's oddly satisfying,