I own a pickup truck, though I don't use it more than once or twice a month. Pretty low usage (and shitty gas mileage) for a vehicle worth $30-40,000. It would be cheaper to just pay to have everything delivered, or rent a truck when I need one. But the convenience of having it outweighs the cost. The same could be said of a sports car, a boat, am RV, or even a light aircraft.

Why is it you think that the cost of use and maintenance really matters? If that were the case we'd all drive small 2 or 4 door sedans and nobody would both with an SUV, which is large, seats barely more than a 4 door sedan, and cost 3-4X as much to both buy and maintain.

Do I care if it costs me $1/mile to fly? Depends...if I can get my parents house in 20 minutes and spend $40, compared to 1.5 hours and spend $15-20 in a car, there's a pretty high chance I'm going to fly. A trip to DC is 300 miles. If there are 2 or more of us going, it's still cheaper than a commercial flight, faster than a commercial flight (door to door), and I go when it fits my schedule.

Not everyone is cash poor. Not everyone has a severely limited budget. It's why I mentioned somewhere in this story that it's likely that just being a a 2%er would be enough to comfortably own a flying car (400k+/year). And yet there are 6 Million 2%ers in the US. There is a market for it, just as there is a market for Teslas and Beach houses and $3000/night rooms on a atoll in the Pacific. Just because you just aren't part of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Actually, there are very few "builders" who do everything these days, too. Builders have become simple managers - hiring subcontractors to do essentially all of the work except that involving papers to the various building authorities. There are true artisan buillers out there, and some larger builders with everything in house, but they're very rare.

Having worked for NASA, NASA contractors, and since I now run a firm which does design for Architectural and building clients, I happen to have seen the inside of both operations pretty completely. Though apparently the truth came out trollish in the eyes of /.

That's not what I meant - contractors really do assemble everything at NASA. There are isolated areas where actual federal employees are manning the milling machines or putting assemblies together, but I've seen no moves in the past 15 years (since I was at NASA) that has put more federal workers (actual NASA employees) in place to build anything. There are, of course, exceptions- but the rule is that NASA employees either administrate or direct teams of primarily contractor employees to do everything. I spent 9 years on the NASA side and 2 on the contractor side.

That's the first honest assessment of beta by the /. editors so far. I'm calling this progress.

Self flying cars should be easier than self driving cars - heck, we already have them in commercial use. The user space is far larger and the location tolerance is much looser than driving on a road.

And if it's a flying CAR you can land outside of densely traveled/populated areas and drive to your final destination (say, Manhattan or LA).

That was pretty painful

You clearly live in a flat place near an airport hub. Flying cars would be tremendously practical for most of the US, which are not near hubs. It's 40 miles to my parent's house, 100 if you drive. They happen to live two mountain ranges over and across a lake from me so the path to get there is rather circuitous. I'm 3-4 hours drive from 4 different large airports, but the only one within an hour has a horrible flight cancellation record, costs $100-200 more per trip than a hub, and to catch a flight that takes me to a hub I have to leave the house earlier than if I just drove straight to the hub.

Sure, travel more than 200 miles or so is probably more economical on a commercial jet, and more than about 400-500 miles is probably the break point for convenience/cost combined. But outside the big cities, which comprise less than 2% of the land area of the US, there are lots of use cases for a flying car.

Besides, a real flying car (not a roadable aircraft) should be able to reasonably navigate local traffic as well as airborne travel.

It's arguable whether having five million flyers is a safe thing, but as for the utility - it's definitely there.

Ignoring the scratch-magnet that the iPhone is (yes, I have one. yes, I hate it compared to the previous glass version), plastic is the way to go. Make it a durable plastic, give it a good tactile feel, make it cheap to replace. Please don't give me a unibody phone that requires an hour, full disassembly, and a $150 part if I should accidentally scratch or dent it. Of the reasons I ditched the iPhone, this was near the top of the list.

NASA builds almost nothing. They may assemble a few things, but there are precious few machine shops and fab plants that are manned by civil servants. It's contractors all the way down.

Increasing the expected cost reduces the expected profit.

Which takes resources, thus increasing costs, thus reducing the expected profit.

While we're discussing profit as the be all and end all, I'm curious how Spamcop is supposed to monetize this? And does preventing people from seeing spam not "disrupt the flow of money"?

It's great to say there are other ways to go about fighting spam, but anything which makes the spammers' efforts a little bit more difficult or a little bit less effective contributes toward minimizing the industry.

As a product of academia I am professionally trained to get things done on the cusp of deadlines. I'm not joking. Both on the student and instructor side there is simply a great deal of latitude. There's no time management enforced in any form except for "deadlines," so that's when you learn to get things done.

As lovely of a thought as it is that entering the workforce will automatically instill a newfound sense of responsiblity and dedication to all a graduates (and I'm sure it does for at least a few weeks or so), I for one am not surprised that working unsupervised at home at a government job with quarterly deadlines results in people observing the same habits they have for the past 6-10 years.

Admittedly, I wouldn't want to rush a result such that it is inadequately reviewed either, and I don't know if patent clerks have projects which would actually take an entire quarter to investigate, but the first thing I would do is have them sync all of their edits/notes/research in a way to make them reviewable. It's amazing how a little bit of transparency encourages people to make regular progress.

As a professional engineer, I have to certify the designs I send out were created by me. In the past, a rubber stamp and an ink signature were used (still are in many places), but I sign everything digitally. I've created and posted a public key hosted on my web server which has been sufficient for 99.9% of clients to date - all but 2. One client required a know authority to hold the certificate, but wasn't willing to pay for it, so we "compromised" and I hand signed the sheets. The other client simply wouldn't accept digital signatures.

There aren't 8300 people working on each patent application. The USPTO received 609,052 patent applications last year. There are (roughly) 200 working days in a calendar year (accounting for sick leave, vacation, an minimal training/in-service time). Each patent receives (on average) less than 3 man-days total for your diligence in determining the patent background, current state of the art, etc.

Any biometric password should be based on a certificate, not a direct digital representation of the biometric.

The physicists are the ones asking. We better take this one to the Big Guy Himself.

"So, uh, we were wondering if you could explain why our orbital and rotational predictions for galaxies are not matching our astronomical measurements?"

"They aren't? Are you sure? Let me check the source code. Oh, that's not good. Should have caught that a few billion years ago. This is going to be a real pain to patch. Unless. . . ."

"Unless, what?"

*lightning bolt strikes questioner*