Not exactly, because most of the country is Class G airspace, and aircraft aren't limited to public roads. There's even lots of Class G airspace not too far from cities, located underneath controlled airspace. However you still might have to worry about local ordinances and such.

You don't have to fly helicopters from any kind of designated area, as long as you're in Class G airspace. Of course, this excludes probably every municipality, and means you can only land in your backyard if you live in the sticks. And there's still the problem of where to land, unless your office is also in the sticks.

We already have flying cars: they're called "helicopters". They're absurdly expensive to operate, even the small 2-seater models, they're absurdly difficult to operate and require an enormous amount of training, and they're extremely dangerous.

If you want a way to move people around faster, the answer is SkyTran.

government vehicles only with highly trained operators, so EMTs, Police, Firemen, etc.

Highly trained? Have you seen the way cops drive? They can't even be bothered to use turn signals.

When I drive with my wife on longer trips, she frequently drives while I do navigation with two phones. One phone does the actual navigation (and sits in a windshield-mount), while I use a second phone to do things such as look for restaurants to stop at, check the reviews at those restaurants, etc. It'd be idiotic to prevent me from doing that and force us to pull over for 15 minutes just to figure out where we'd like to stop next, and would only increase our chances of an accident.

You can do what I did and buy a suction-cup mount for your windshield for $6 from Dealextreme.

Lemme guess, you have a Ford? My mom's complained about car computers failing on her over the years too, and she's had Fords for about 20 years now. I never heard anyone else complain about this.

if the object you were holding to your head wasn't a cell phone, just a block of wood, people would think it would be stupid to hold it to their head, but it wouldn't distract them from driving.

Back in the 90s, people used to do something much like that, and people thought it was cool: it was possible back then to buy fake car phones, so that you could drive around holding a fake phone to your head and talking to yourself. Why would you do this? Because car phones back then were really expensive (and totally portable phones even more so), so some people liked to buy these fake phones so they could look like they were rich, and impress all their neighbors as they drove by.

I thought that, largely because of the autism fears, all the childhood vaccines in the US now do not use thimerosal (the methylmercury-based preservative), but instead have switched to other preservatives to allay these fears.

Ok, maybe my comment about the ADHD was off-base, but it does seem there's a trend for extroverted talkers to get into coding these days, and they love the open-plan work environment. It's probably more of an introversion vs. extroversion thing.

No one wants to work in an open environment.

That's not what I see. Go read the article, or other articles about them. There's tons of comments from people saying how much they love working in open environments, how they love the "camaraderie", being able to ask people questions quickly, being able to overhear conversations and know what's going on, etc. Yes, there's also lots of comments from people like you and me who hate these environments, but don't make the mistake of thinking everyone is like us; clearly there's lots of people who aren't, and apparently a lot of those people have infiltrated the programming profession.

Yes, cost savings is also a factor, but it's not the only factor. There really are a lot of people who like working that way.

Better yet, these people get to be super rich AND immune from any consequences for their mistakes and misdeeds, however the engineers working for them, who make middle-class salaries at best (and far less than doctors), are somehow expected to have "ethical standards" and are the first to be blamed when something goes wrong that was really because of a management decision.

It was either that or just don't do the change at all, so that even more people would die. This is the problem with engineering: grandstanding fools like you sit in armchairs and say that engineers should "act ethically", but they're not allowed to by management, because they have zero power in the company, and are really nothing more than interchangeable cogs that management can replace at a whim. Management makes all the engineering decisions, but when something goes wrong, people want to blame the engineers.

Ask the author of this article, who says, "The switch to such floor plans in offices is partly a generational thing. Younger workers, especially in their 20s and 30s, like being social and working in groups, and companies are doing what they can to attract them. That includes revamping office layouts to be more flexible and let in more natural light -- a perk for sustainable-minded Millennials, says Chris Corrado, president of Environments, a 30-year-old office furnishings supplier in Portland, Ore."

Given the size of transmission-line towers, the guy in the van would need a rather large bomb to actually make the tower collapse. Multiply by the number of towers he'd need to destroy, and I think that one van might not be large enough. Also, getting your hands on that quantity of explosives isn't easy or cheap.