So someone who straps a couple homemade AP motors to the side of an ultralight qualifies as well? (One could argue doing such a thing would preclude them classification as an ultralight...)

They're daring, sure, but they're not pioneering new territory, as we did this over 50 years ago; they're just making it cheaper. Even when they do get there and make it cheaper, there's no way to expand upon its capabilities without a complete from-scratch redesign. They're not enabling anything further. Unless they directly expand science, industry, or medicine, or indirectly provide the tools for others to do so, they're not benefiting society, just themselves personally. Being a hero implies acting for the benefit of someone other than one's self.

To be fair, we already reached that specific frontier over 50 years ago.

The NASA astronauts were working to expand our breadth of knowledge. Orbital Sciences, SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin, while ultimately working for profit, are building technologies that enable the expansion of expand science and civilization. Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace exist to provide entertainment. Their designs cannot be scaled to actually reach orbit. Their designs cannot be scaled to provide practical transportation. It's for entertainment, and while entertainment is important, it's just a distraction to fill down time.

This is spaceflight in definition only. It's nowhere near orbit. It's not even useful as a suborbital transportation system. If you want to perform tests in rarefied atmosphere or vacuum, sounding rockets are vastly cheaper and offer better performance. This exists for tourism, for people who want a few minutes of weightlessness all at once, rather than a several arches in a "vomit comet" a dozen seconds at a time, and for people who want to claim they technically went to space, even though most people expect that means you actually stayed there for more than a few seconds.

This isn't worth it.

Considering no one has ever done that, are you saying the last half century of spaceflight has just been amateur hour?

The real cost of any (liquid fueled) launch is in the vehicle, rather than the fuel. Thus, the ultimate goal of cheap spaceflight is to recover and reuse that launch vehicle. Whether you achieve that with an extremely elaborate multi-mode gas turbine engine on an SSTO spaceplane, or a traditional staged rocket whose boosters abort and return for a powered landing back at the launch facility, you get the same end result. The question simply becomes which one is cheaper to design and maintain.

Don't forget your life support and re-entry systems.

The entire industrial control world is completely indifferent to security. Things like HMI applications may implement user-level restrictions, but ultimately the hardware they interface with is usually just open access over OPC or HTML. This works in general when you're on an isolated industrial network, of course these networks are typically not completely isolated, allowing remote access for maintenance and support. Even when completely isolated, you still have the issue of operators connecting infected hardware to the network, as seen with stuxnet.

The problem with IoT is that the same embedded and controls engineers are just applying the same methodology to this as industrial applications, and assuming someone upstream will handle the security issue. Security is a double edged sword. While it's necessary at some level, it's going to add considerable overhead and latency, and is all but unusable if you intend to do real time control. The isolated, open network is the only sensible approach. Now IoT parts could completely embrace the industrial methodology, and while the typical controls engineer might think nothing of running ethernet or RS-485 drops throughout their home with a central secured gateway for access, the typical consumer user is enamored will all things wireless. On the other hand IoT parts are not doing any form of real time control over their remote interfaces, so there's no reason for them to be externally behaving like industrial hardware, and programmers stuck in that mindset should not be left in charge of building those interfaces.

I can't tell if this was supposed to be a joke or not. No one uses backscatter X-ray scanners any longer. It's all millimeter wave these days, and if you're concerned about irradiation from those, you better not go outside. As for groping, well I've not personally been groped by TSA, but then perhaps I'm not so well endowed that I look like I'm carrying a weapon, or otherwise pique the officers' curiosity...

The video was about hooking analog gauges into the analog outputs available on an Intel dev board. By that logic, they would be digital outputs just the same.

If you need rate of change, why not actually display rate of change?

The amusing thing, often times these distributors don't even own their own warehouses. They have them built and outfitted to their specs, then sell them to and lease them back from an investment firm.

No one who's qualified should ever compete in these, because they're not for people who are qualified. They're for engineering students to get some hands on practical experience, and maybe come up with some novel ideas along the way.

I admit, I did not read that far down. The first few paragraphs mention the GSK program to develop one, but was only speaking in generalities about vaccines.

There is no vaccine. The article is merely expecting that vaccines will be ready for testing several months, and is questioning how the testing of those vaccines should take place when available.