I prefer to tele-commute, and save my vehicle entirely. With the cost of global communication being near zero, HD web cameras being disposable commodities, why commute at all if you're a knowledge worker?

Simple: because the managers don't want you to. Just look at Yahoo's Marissa Meyer.

Who's "we"? Anyone pouring money into any flying cars, electric helicopters, etc. at this stage is a fool. I'm certainly not contributing to any such projects.

It makes sense to invest in electric cars these days, since as Tesla has shown, they're perfectly viable (though a bit expensive still). Heck, GM proved them to be perfectly viable back in the late 90s with the EV1, except that too many entrenched interests didn't like them so GM killed it and crushed all the cars. You don't really need long range in an electric car anyway; 100 miles is more than enough for a commuter vehicle. It'd be nice if Tesla later came out with a smaller, cheaper low-range electric car expressly for commuters; I'd buy one in a heartbeat. I just got to drive a Model S and it's quite impressive, but I don't need that range for my ~15-mile commute nor can I afford those prices, but if there were a medium-performance two-seater with 70-mile range for $20-30k, that'd be pretty affordable and easily worth the money (when you factor in tax credits, lack of fuel cost, and lack of maintenance costs).

The tech's there for electric cars, but it just isn't there for anything that flies.

Well one thing you're forgetting is that with combustion engines, most of the energy in the fuel is wasted as heat. Of course, this is mitigated by the fact that part of the energy is coming from freely-available oxygen in the air (except in rocket engines), but still, with batteries ~95% of the stored energy goes to propulsion, whereas with ICEs it's more like ~20-25%. So we don't need energy density comparable to fuel, but still we're a ways off. With some of the latest developments, it might be feasible in a decade.

Yeah, that's basically impossible. With current tech, you could only build something like this to stay aloft for a few minutes. When Teslas have a range of 1500 miles on a charge, then we'll have the battery tech to make electric helicopters feasible.

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.