The hemp we use... has no THC in it at all - so there's no overlap with any recreational activities," Mitlin says.

Well, every technology has bugs and birthing pains. Keep working at it, and perhaps you can graduate to a better class of hemp, Mr. Mitlin.

The price? At Oshkosh, they were saying around $270k

Nah, for that amount of money I'd rather buy a used exoticar and try my best to make it fly. Plus, chicks dig exoticars. Mine does, anyway.

People are bad enough driving in on two axes, do we really want to add a third?

Well, you should see me driving two chainsaws. Keep your distance, though.

...and the ground is very unstable in many areas, not to mention under water.

Another benefit of flying is straight line transport. Roads -- particularly around here --- add huge distances to any trip because you can't go directly to one's destination, but instead, must go waaaaaay around to get there.

The best solution is actually monorails. There is no need for them to take up much ground other than a post every so often, they don't disturb the greenery or the wildlife or the settlements, they can mostly ignore terrain, they can go whiz-bang fast, they can never hit cows or cars or people (well, REALLY stupid people they might hit, but I see that as a feature, not a bug), properly built monorails can't be snowed in or under, the scenery is better than either aircraft (too high) or car/train/bus (too low) they're quieter than trains by far, the ride is better, elevation means better radio coverage for cell or whatever, two tracks for bidirectional operations can be hung from single poles, thereby taking no extra right of way.

Also, they're hella cool.

Too bad the government hasn't enough sense to Manhattan project a bunch of 'em. Sure rather pay for that than yet another bombing of brownish people with funny beliefs and (coincidence only, of course) oil and other natural resources.

...and If only we had envelopes that would hold such a light gas without leaking it the heck out through every surface, or otherwise leak away the characteristic (heat) that makes it light... and if only such a technology didn't require such a large envelope as to function as a highly effective sail in any high prevailing wind such that it would take a huge amount of energy to counter said impetus... and if only we had a place to store such a large envelope... and if only such a device wouldn't cost seven figures... and if only there was a place available to land such things at your desired destination...

Yes, I believe you're on the right track. I'll start buying H and He futures immediately, and subscribe to your newsletter as well. Thank you!

I live 300 road miles from the nearest city of with enough resources to be worth visiting. I could actually use a flying car. Air distance is much less than the road distance, for one thing, and for another, max legal road speed is pitiful - 70 to 75 mph. Yet Amazon and the occasional other net vendor pretty much fulfill all our material needs. The big deal when we take a trip these days (usually medically related now) is access to a spectrum of decent restaurant choices.

However, all things considered, I'd rather have a couple of robots. A household one, basically a full featured maid, and another for walking a dog, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, etc.

I expect to get them well before I get a flying car, too, unless someone discovers a low-power, very safe, antigravity system in the interim. Otherwise, it's just not energy efficient.

Most people speak at under 150 wpm, anyway, and...

The future here is not using your hands, but is 100% in the speech-to-text area. My phone does a pretty amazing job today, all things considered. Just the tip of the iceberg.

What would you prefer -- a funky keyboard and reams of training, or a tiny microphone and no training?

Seriously, the future of computer interfacing lies in Speech-to-Text, in-eye displays, and something ranging from an earphone to a bone conduction implant. And that's just until they tie the things right to your nervous system.

I love my keyboard, and I'm really, really fast and accurate with it, but I know its time is going to come.

While the technologies and tools underlying this transformation can make development work more powerful and efficient

...and they can also bury them in irrelevancy. It can make them depend on debuggers instead of good coding practices and skills and self-checking that tend to make the debugger an uncommon go-to. It can isolate them further from the hardware so that the difference between what is efficient and what can only be said to work becomes a mystery to the new-style programmer. It can turn what should really be a one-programmer project into a team effort, where "team" should carry the same negative connotations as "committee." It can move critical portions of projects into the black boxes of libraries and objects sourced from outside the primary development effort, and in so doing, reduce both the maintainability and the transparency of the overall result. Languages with garbage collection can create much looser coupling between performance and system capacity, reducing the range of what can actually be done with them. Worst of all, with all the wheel spinning and checking code in and out and the testing methodology of the month, it can make them feel like they're really doing something worthwhile in terms of time spent and results obtained, when what it really boils down to is something far less efficient and effective overall.

There's another factor, too; the industry really wants young programmers. The costs are less for remuneration, insurance, and vacation; the families are smaller or non-existent, and these people will work much longer hours based on nothing more than back patting and (often empty) promises. One of the consequences here is that some of the deeper skill sets are being lost because they simply aren't around the workplace any longer.

I think there is no question that all of this has changed the face of coding. An interesting exercise is to ask yourself: When was the last time you saw a huge project hit the market. Now ask yourself how many little does-a-couple-of-things projects you've seen hit the market in the same time frame. My contention is that there are very few of the larger projects being undertaken at this point, or at least, being finished.

Just one (retired) guy's opinion. :)

Why would I want them? my LAN here isn't the same as the WAN; but my router does what it needs to do to translate the port and IP to the right machine. I send other kinds of realtime data peer to peer; it works fine.

If, however, you've buried yourself behind stuff that won't pass ports and/or IPs around, then this won't work, but you should fix that, really. :)

I am sure that the most recent version of XCode doesn't have the ability to target PowerPC Macs, and I believe that has been true for at least 2 or even 3 major revisions of XCode.

A) I didn't say a word about PPC macs; the mini I am referring to is a fully loaded multicopre Intel mini. Likewise Intel dual core, my 17" supposedly high-end Macbook pro cannot run Mavericks either. But truly, that's ok. I don't need it to run Mavericks. I just wanted Aperture to load the RAW images from my camera. But they tied that ability (yes, the ability of Aperture to load image files) to the OS level. So after paying for three separate versions of Aperture, I ended up with no camera support because Aperture can't load those files under 10.6, and no way to get it on the mini or the laptop with Aperture, because Apple won't let Mavericks run on that CPU, which I repeat, is not a PPC, but a pretty vanilla Intel multicore. I did, btw, buy Lightroom, which works fine. Unfortunately it kind of sucks compared to Aperture, and of course my investment in Aperture is 100% lost money now.

B) The development toolchain under 10.6 can generate applications that run under 10.6 and all the way up to Mavericks. So, if one wanted to develop something that wasn't automatically obsolete under anything but the latest, and one doesn't actually need features from the latest, there's no reason not to use the 10.6 toolchain. In fact, I use it every day. Works pretty well, all things considered, and my stuff works under all levels of the OS going up. Also, speaking of PPC macs, 10.6 retains the PPC emulation, so all the old PPC stuff works too. Pretty nice OS, really. Other than the nonworking features, of course, like UTF-8 printing via lpr.

C) The OS bug I refer to is a consequence of a broken compiler, which they have fixed. All it would take is a recompile of a very small part of the printing portion of 10.6 and it would work as designed. They refuse to do so. I find this both despicable and inexcusable.

Face it. Time marches on, and we really are talking about an Architecture that Apple discontinued NINE years ago. Hard to believe; but it's true.

No, that's not what we're talking about, and it isn't true.

But eventually, if you are still driving a buggy, you gotta accept the fact that, at some point, you simply aren't going to be able to buy buggy whips...

I don't have a problem driving a buggy. I have a problem buying a buggy, and then when I eventually take it for a serious spin, I find out that the roof was attached with chewing gum, and it falls the fuck off, and the buggy manufacturer, as a remedy, tells me "you're going to need our new buggy, and by the way, you can't hitch those horses to it, so tough shit, sonny"

And you could have saved yourself that whole message if you'd read my entire post, instead of part of it, or skimming it.

And as for this:

"clearly you don't understand software development at all"

You're funny. I've been doing almost nothing but software development for the last 45 years. I'm single-handedly responsible for the vast majority of code in one of the most powerful image processing applications ever shipped -- WinImages F/x/Morph -- as well as several CAD programs, compilers, assemblers, paint programs, PCB routing systems, arcade video games, documentation processors, genetic AL software, aurorae analysis software and a whole bunch more I won't bore you with. Even now that I'm retired and enjoying the fruits of my labors, my current freeware, a real time SDR engine, is orders of magnitude more sophisticated -- and sizable in terns of lines of my code -- than anything most slashdotters will ever be involved with on a team, much less write by themselves. I take my own medicine; I don't write features that break previous features; I don't require later OS versions for new stuff I write -- instead I make sure that features that use new OS features doesn't appear under the older (or other, since I write multiplatform) OS, that's all. And I sure as hell fix bugs when they're reported well enough to be able to reproduce them.

But hey, don't let that affect your state of delusion. Keep thinking I know nothing about software development. It's the very best way to distance yourself from a true understanding of what you're reading here.

Thanks. So. If you hang behind a firewall/OtherWare you can't control, you lose a lot of choices overall. Protocols, ports, etc. But for the rest of us, the ones who are actually free to choose our options, no reason, then?

So short answer, Yes. However no such force has been found or postulated in any realistic fashion.

So conceptually, a drive might exist, compliant with the science we know, that does not push stuff out the back of the ship, but instead, acts on something else, somewhere else. As long as it acts on *something*, yes?

That was also very helpful to my conceptual model. Thank you kindly.

There are some very sharp people on slashdot. :)

ok, I see it now -- you're exactly right, I was seeing it as two forces. Thank you!