5 year old girls want a pony with sparkles - or maybe a unicorn, but they can't have one. Commuters want a flying car but they can't have one either.

Aircraft fly by moving a lot of air downward in order to counteract gravity. If they move less air quickly the total power the need goes up (force goes as mass/second * velocity, power goes as mass/second * velocity SQUARED). So, in order to be efficient they need to have very big wings, or very big helicopter rotors, or very big low density volumes.

Look at all conventional aircraft, they have BIG wings. Those wings will not fit on roads. So if you want a flying car you are left with a clunky folding wing contraption that is a terrible car AND a terrible airplane. No matter how pretty the CGI or fiberglass mock-up design it just isn't going to work.

If a military organization discovers a weakness in an enemy country's defenses, it is perfectly reasonable for them to keep this weakness secret and use it in future conflicts. Cyber security is different. Since we are all using roughly the same technology, by discovering a weakness in the defenses of another country, they have discovered a weakness in OUR defenses.

At the moment the US has a strong advantage in conventional warfare, but not so much in cyber warfare. In looking at overall national defense, patching holes in everyone's cyber defenses reduces the effectiveness of cyber war (where we are not clearly dominant), and moves the focus to conventional war where we are dominant.

Even if in a particular application the total cost of using the proprietary software is lower because it makes workers more productive? Remember that the cost of the person using a computer is far higher than the cost of the computer and software installed on it. A full time person costs ~$100K. A 10% efficiency change dwarfs most software costs.

I believe you are honest, I believe a lot of police are, but it seems like these plates create the potential for favoritism. No bribery, but the natural tendency for people to want to support people who support them. In a similar fashion an anti-police bumper sticker might well encourage a police officer to treat someone more harshly.

Police have a lot of leeway in traffic stops - which is fine, but it also makes it very easy for them to be influenced by a variety of subtle biases.

We are not out of physics - still lots of big mysteries: Dark matter, dark energy, unification, quantum gravity etc. It is possible though that we are running out of small scale experiments and future ones will on average become more expensive and take longer. Bigger accelerators. Bigger telescopes etc.

I hope this isn't true and that people can become more clever, but it might be.

What are they doing with the computers? Digital design? Publishing a newspaper? Handling invoices? Controlling a nuclear power plant? Software development? Defense work? Managing a taxi service?

The answer will depend entirely on the type of use.

I have a XP based oscilloscope - 20Gs/s, 3.5GHz, deep memory. The vendor won't upgrade it. A replacement is probably >$20K. One of its features is that it can run on the network, but that requires security. Our lab has other expensive XP based hardware as well.

I don't think Microsoft should be *required* to keep supporting XP, but there are a lot of people who are using it because it is the most practical choice for their application.

For normal desktop computing I upgrade hardware and software on a reasonable schedule. Laboratory equipment tends to have a much longer useful life than desktops and is much more expensive. Most of the computers I use are modern, but most of the $$ value of computers are expensive specialized lab equipment.

Quality of sound is inherently subjective. The sounds were not identical, just the double blind preference did not favor the Strad. If someone believes that a Strad (or tube amp, of vinyl, or whatever) sounds better, then does it make any sense to argue? This is 100% about entertainment, so the Strad may be better IF you are allowed to tell the audience that is what you are playing.

Personally I wouldn't buy a $1M violin (if I still played and could afford it), .and I also don't have a tube amp and got rid of my vinyl records many years ago. However if someone receives more enjoyment from those things than without them, its their $$$ to spend as they like.

Private flying is dangerous.
NTSB statistics (2012 is what I have).

General avaiation (small planes and some business flights): 6.8 accidents, 1.24 fatalities / 100,000 hours
Commercial aviation. 0.155 accidents, 0 fatalities/ 100,000 hours.
There really is no comparison in the safety record.

For cars I see 1.1 deaths / 100M passenger miles. If we assume a 30mph average speed, that is something like .03 fatalities / 100,000 hours.

You can play with the statistics all sorts of (perfectly valid) ways, but by almost any reasonable analysis, general aviation is substantially more dangerous that either commercial or driving.

These and other safety statistics at NTSB.

It varies. Between major airports, commercial will usually win in speed and cost. There are some trips that are faster and /or cheaper in a small plane than by other means, but in my experience (20 years of private flying), it isn't really all that common. I fly myself because I enjoy it, and I like the flexibility, but I can rarely justify it as an efficient means of transportation.

Figure a 4-seat Bonanza or Cirrus costs $200/hour to operate and flies at ~200mph. A Cessna 172 is considerably less, maybe $120/hour, flies at maybe 130mph, but can't carry as much, and has much more limited weather capability. (vague 1/2 of the total cost is fuel)

These are very rough costs, depends on how you count fixed costs, how fast you fly, etc etc.

Small aircraft are NOT a cost efficient way to get around in most cases.

People use aircraft to travel because their time is valuable.

As a private pilot the legal issues worry me. The pilot training, aircraft maintenance, and operating requirements are very different for different types operations. The "sharing costs" is based on the concept that you can fly your friends to Las Vegas and split the costs. It is assumed that you have reasonable informed your friends of the risks. If you are taking other "passengers" for some form of compensation, have they *really* been informed of the risks - which are dramatically higher for private flights than for air carriers.

If there is an aircraft malfunction and someone is injured, what are the insurance / lawsuit issues? what happens if a passenger damages your airplane - stepping in the wrong place, can do thousands of dollars of damage to some planes. What if you can't reach the intended destination due to weather - does the passenger get a refund? What if you are delayed? It is legal for private flights to operate under weather conditions that are not legal for commercial flights -what happens here? Fuel is less than 1/2 the total operating costs for my plane - do I get to split all costs, or just fuel?

We are also talking a lot of money here. A Bonanza or Cirrus total operating cost is probably ~$200/hour, so a "quick flight" from San Francisco to Las Vegas is $1000 round trip, close to 2X that in my Baron. Non-pilot passengers may expect a level of service and performance that just isn't reasonable for small planes.

Its a nice idea, and I'd love to participate, but there are too many possible problems.

Considering the high visibility of space missions, I'd value a statistical life around $1B. For most activities its much less - I forget the official number used in planning things, but probably $10-$100M. Remember that there are ways to spend money that will (statistically) save lives.

I think the life value ceases to be usable as the probability of death gets near 1. I wouldn't for example allow someone to buy a human hunting license for $100M, because the idea that a wealthy person can kill a poor person with impunity is damaging to the idea of american democracy (or at least what I think it should be).

I place a higher value on astronauts lives because their deaths are very visible - in addition to their personal death (worth say $10-100M), there is the demoralization of the 300 million Americans who are aware of that death.

All these numbers are very rough, I haven't thought about them carefully.

You are right and wrong. The specific problems that killed the Apollo 1, and Challenger astronauts were preventable, but in general with very complex systems you can't eliminate all risks. Engineers make mistakes. Managers incorrectly evaluate risks. Adding bureaucracy and reviews can reduce these risks, but also slows down and increase the costs of the projects, so there has to be some limit. Is it worth spending an extra $1B to prevent a death?

We are in a hurry because just as there is a time value to money, there is a time value to information. Learning something now is more valuable than learning it 10 years from now because we have an extra 10 years of use of that knowledge.