Two fun bits from today’s Buzz Out Loud listener email:

Smugglers (aka drug dealers) will drop off a package at a FedEx office at a particular time every day for several days. Then on the FedEx Web site they watch the progress of each package and get an idea of when a package hits certain points (i.e. Bogota to Miami, Miami to Memphis, Memphis to Detroit, out for delivery) in the delivery chain. Then they send the contraband from the office at the appointed time. If they see a variation in the delivery times the recipient at the other end knows not to accept delivery. A variation means the package was stopped and time was taken to get a warrant to open it or for the recipient’s arrest.

I’m not sure package delivery is regular enough for that to be 100% reliable, but what’s the worst that can happen — a false positive means you lose some tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars, but you don’t end up in jail. (Not to be used before the authorities already know you’re there, though, because it’s just a teeny weeny conspicuous.)

And I just love the image this one conjures:

I was in the cockpit over the eastern U.S. the other day and decided to take out my laptop and look up some technical data on the 737 I was flying. When I booted up I noticed that wireless networks were available. Just out of curiosity, I opened up the Wi-Fi window and saw that the signal was from an aircraft with Wi-Fi service that was flying just above and ahead of us. I knew it was from that airplane because the signal identified itself as being from a particular U.S. airline that has Wi-Fi service and we heard their call sign on our frequency.

That got me thinking about the proposed balloon network you talked about a while back and I was wondering if you couldn’t come up with an airline mesh network. […] If all those airliners were equipped to create a mesh network you could easily defer the cost of the equipment as well as compensate the airlines for the service.