The wavier they granted is to allow this aircraft to be consider "light-sport", which means you can fly it with out a third class medical. This is NOT that big a deal and the summary makes it sound like some sort of break-through and that the FAA has held everything up. This just not correct.

The flying car sucks because just like the moped, it doesn't excel at either it's missions. It can never be as good an airplane as one designed just for flying and it can never be a very nice, safe car either. I think goal is home garage to destination in one vehicle while flying above traffic. I think the best hope for that is the CarterCopter (http://www.cartercopters.com/). It's not a car, but it's an affordable, safe aircraft that can take-off and land vertically. The downside, it that these guys have been working for years....and making progress...but they probably have many years still to go, with little funding. The CarterCopter will never out run an airplane in it's same price range, but the vertical T.O. and landing makes up for that.

Why do this Apple fan boys always have to oversell their point. Exaggeration is the best way to destroy your credibility. I could have been fine with "free software movements haven't produced products as compelling as...". That would have been a fine strong statement and something most people could accept, but no. This person had to add "anything" and "remotely". So lame.

Wow, you're right!

FS-Cache: Loaded
FS-Cache: netfs 'nfs' registered for caching

Maybe they just don't have it configured for enough disk space or something?

I found the kernel thread where the original author of the FS-Cache patches, David Howell, makes it clear that on a quiet network with a quite fast server metadata will take longer from the cache. However, at my work we have very busy large NFS servers connected over the building network which is very busy. When you try to read a large file repeatedly in the middle of the day the traditional NFS caching just doesn't work if the time between reads is more than about 5 minutes. I've resorted to manually copying my datasets to /usr/tmp on the local disk and seen huge performance improvements. (this has other serious issues, like getting confused about which copy you just modified and migrating any changes back to the official NFS copy.) I know this feature makes sense for me and others in similar environments. The problem of course is: (1) it will be years before it makes it into RHEL and (2) it won't be turned on by default, (3) my system admins are weary to trying anything kernel-related that's not stock RHEL. However, if I can show them an order of magnitude improvement in speed, which I think this will do, they might think twice.

I'm even more confused two of the GPS patents have my name on them. I didn't want to patent them (for the same reasons you state), but NASA management pushed me into doing it and now they're selling them, where does that leave me? What if I use some of the concepts in our GPL'd OpenSource GPS receiver? Would I have to pay for my own ideas back? This is why I left NASA and told them so in my exit interview.