The JetCat isn't man-rated. It's for model aircraft.

A JetCat needs an overhaul every 50 hours of operation. Mean time to failure is maybe a few hundred hours. A commercial jetliner turbine needs an overhaul every 3500 to 5000 hours of operation. Mean time to failure is around 100,000 hours.

A Williams FJ44 is suitable for light aircraft, and could be used for a VTOL, but a pair of them costs over $1M.

Current status: "€140 raised of €2,250,000 goal".

The thing is, it's quite possible to build a flying car. The prototypes of the 1950s make that clear. The world needs some good small VTOL craft. But none of the people doing it seem to be able to bring it off.

Small jet engines cost too much but can make VTOL work. Wankel engines (the Moller embarassment) or electric motors and batteries (this thing) don'tt have the power/weight ratio needed to do it well. It's probably quite possible to build a battery powered VTOL today, but the flight time will be a few minutes, like quadcopters.

Clearing recently used memory is cheap, because it's in the cache. Clearing memory in general is cheap on modern CPUs, because the superscalar features do it really well. MOV is 35% of instructions, so CPUs are designed to do it efficiently.

It's security code. You have to scrub memory.

Anyone can buy Google Glasses right now on eBay. The going rate is about $1100. Google Glass "invitations" have been for sale on eBay for months. The going rate is about $50.

As an "exclusive launch", this is a flop. There have been XBox and Sony PSn launches where pre-order prices exceeded list price. Google Glasses are already selling at a discount before the launch. This thing is overpriced. It needs to launch at $995, and that will only hold until Samsung starts shipping.

Aviation human-factors people call this the "head-down time" problem - pilot looking at panel for too long. Big efforts are made to minimize head-down time during takeoff, approach, and landing. In combat aircraft, huge efforts are made to eliminate it outright, with heads-up displays and all essential controls needed during combat on throttle and stick. Pilot training emphasizes these issues.

Car UI people are just starting to get a clue about this. Early car interfaces were just awful. BMW's original iDrive is considered a classic example of how not to do it. There have some better interfaces since, but the tendency to emulate phones and do everything through a touchscreen is a step backwards.

Phone people have no clue at all. They assume they own the user's attention.

We're getting close to what could be the start of World War III. It looks like a land war between Russia and Ukraine is about to start. Reuters: Ukraine prepares armed response as city seized by pro-Russia forces. This is not about Crimea. Russia has now taken over cities 150Km inside the eastern part of Ukraine.

WWII started very much like this. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland.

The trouble with drones is that most of them don't have enough sensing to avoid other aircraft. Most don't have aviation transponders. Yet some of them are big enough that they're a hazard to other aircraft. Many of them can get 500 feet above ground level (AGL). (Aircraft other than helicopters are supposed to stay 500' AGL, 1000' AGL in congested areas. Around airports, airspace is controlled all the way to the ground.) This puts them in conflict with other aircraft. Here's a small Parrot drone at 1553 feet in the UK. It's little, but if it was sucked into a jet engine, the engine would definitely be damaged and might fail. In 2013, someone was flying a drone near JFK in New York and the drone had a near miss with a jetliner.

The Academy of Model Aeronautics used to have a 450' AGL rule, and the FAA has a clear rule about doing anything off the ground within 5 miles of an airport without coordination with the tower. That's enough to keep the little guys from interfering with aircraft.

The other side of this is that aircraft regulated by the FAA are considered not to be violating the property rights of the property overflown. Being overflown at 100' by an HDTV camera isn't a hazard to aviation, but property owners may object.

Look at how Occupy Wall Street fizzled out.

It's prohibited in aerospace, where you have traceability back through the production process, but not unheard of in automotive. In electronics manufacturing, some changes are permitted. Here's Flextronics policy on component changes.

When this was supposedly "fixed" in OpenSSL, did the fix just fix this one known bug? A real fix includes fixing the storage allocator to overwrite all released blocks, so no other old-data-in-buffer exploit would work.

Bloomberg reports NSA has been using this exploit for two years. This looks a lot less like an accident now.

Me either. But that's what the manual says.

This sort of thing is why Linux is a failure on the desktop. The "real way" to do something is by editing a text file. Then there are third party hacks to make it "easier", until the third party hack screws up something.

Right. Fogscreen does this commercially. With better image quality, too. "Fogscreen" really is a fog screen. Here's Fogscreen in HD video, so you can see the quality of Fogscreen, which is OK for PR but not that great. They do interactivity, too.

Water screens are available, too. Those things can be huge, hundreds of feet long if desired.

All these technologies suffer from poor resolution. It's hard to keep a layer of fog smooth and flat. Resolution gets worse further from the nozzles, too.

It's not that there's not more to discover, it's that the cost and effort for major discoveries has gone up. This is especially true in high-energy physics, where each generation of accelerators is far more expensive than the previous one. On the other hand, there's been lots of discovery in low-energy physics in recent decades. Exploring physics around absolute zero has been very productive and not hugely expensive. Semiconductor device physics continues to make progress. Lots of low-energy effects once thought useless, like the Hall effect, turn out to have practical applications.

But the return on investment for basic research really has decreased. That's why big corporate research labs have disappeared in the US. AT&T and IBM used to do basic research in physics, and out of that came the transistor and the high density disk drive. Few companies do that today. Even pharma research is very product-focused.

An "accidental bug" which enables not only the microphone (even when it's supposed to be turned off) but text to speech conversion? No way.

If anyone can find an honest prosecutor, criminal prosecution is in order.