Nah, hovering is easy. The hard part is keeping your dirigible-bike from floating away into the sky when you hop off.

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350 pound flight capacity minus 187 pound vehicle weight seems to indicate a 163 pound (74 kilo) passenger limit. Not great, but that's certainly not "anorexic child-size styrofoam dummy" either. I'm an adult male, I could get there if I cut out the peanutbuttercups and switched to diet soda.

Oh well, I guess that means I'm never going to be able to ride it. Diet soda is vile.
How about they work on inventing that? Soda that tastes like sugar-water without being sugar-water? Chuckle.

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Tommy! I told you to stop doing that at 500 RPM! You'll grind it off!

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OK now you are dismissive AND arrogant. Good work, I am more concerned about you and your field of endeavor than I was when this started.

The fact that genomic research HAS enabled the ability to engineer organisms that can be extremely dangerous, and can potentially be dangerous to only targetted groups is intensely intertwined with all the beneficial advances in the field. You simply can't separate the two and pretend the dark side isn't there.

Genomics is simply a very dangeorus field. Its given an ethically challenged species the ability to play god and tamper with life itself. Its just a matter of time until someone will tamper with it and it wont end well.

"Yes, I singled out rednecks and skinheadsâ¦"

There wasn't even a tinge of humor in it, not sure why you are claiming there was.

You are engaging in the very kind of stereotyping and targeting of groups you've been preaching against and dismissing. And to pile on you just added a bunch more groups you hold in contempt and would probably just as soon seen wiped off the face of the earth.

Its the kind of bigotry a well educated, probably liberal, affluent person such as yourself would refuse to accept as bigotry. It doesn't really bother me that you are doing it. It bothers me you don't seem to even realize you are doing it.

" What do *you* think should be done to address the problem(s) that concerns you? What is your contribution?"

Not really sure there is anything that can be done. The genie is already out of the bottle. You can pass laws and try to suppress it which will slow beneficial use and do nothing to hamper malevolent use.

There are already people actively trying to alter organisms in their garage and on kickstarter. I assure you there are nation states like North Korea who have the capacity to do malevolent work. It is also well with in the range of well funded extremist groups.

Probably the best thing I can contribute is the thing I did contribute. Remind everyone that this technology is extremely powerful, if you are going to dwell on the upside you should at least remain aware of the downside. Since you seem to be actively involved in the field your dismissive attitude towards the dangers makes me more concerned, not less.

Your assertion that no one will ever try eugenics again is delusional. There are groups and people who are fully committed to it today, all they need is the power to implement it. Hungary for example is already drifting towards an anti semitic neo nazi state in the heart of Europe. As Greece plunges in to an economic abyss, a fascist state is a highly possible outcome. Genomics would have been a boon to the final solution and breeding a master race.

Claiming your commitment to "wisdom of civilization and culture" while you sling epithets like "redneck" and "skinhead" doesn't put you or your cause in a positive light. Labeling people as "rednecks" indicates you have a tendency to stereotype people the same way eugenicists do.

"A. Are you saying just because a technology can be used for harm it should be abandoned or suppressed?"

Actually, no I didn't say anything remotely resembling that. I think I pointed out if you are going to tote up the upside you should probably at least keep it in your mind there is a down side to most technologies. Their cost can be extremely steep, especially when you whistle past the grave yard and ignore them.

Fossil fuels for example have been a boon to the energy input equation driving civilization, as long as they don't start a run away greenhouse effect and wipe out life as we know it.

You seem to be a poster child for "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

"Just because the technology makes it more feasible doesn't mean we are reckless enough to flirt with it again"

Keep telling yourself that, and hope you have good genes.

"this stuff is not so easy to do accidentally"

Yea, its so tough there are DIY home geneticists "using the Synthetic Biology Parts Registry to engineer yogurt bacteria to produce prozac"

Its a little one side to think genomics will be all upside. The flip side...

A. What will be the costs if someone designs genetically targetted weapons, i.e. biological weapons that only target certain races or even individual people. I read an article a while back that the Secret Service strives to minimize access to the President's DNA, for example skin cells left in sheets, to prevent someone from targetting his genome with a biological weapon.

B. What will the cost be when people or nation states try to genetically engineer for superior intelligence, strength and speed to create an actual master race. It might be a win for them if they succeed, not so much for everyone else.

C. What will the cost be if eugenics returns and people who are considered genetically inferior are sterilized and their genome is wiped out. Reference B.

D. What will be the cost be when someone tries to genetical engineer a virus, bacteria, plant or animal, it goes horribly wrong and results in a global threat.

It's not fear of nuclear power that makes it uneconomical. It's cheap fossil fuels. Back in the 70s it was the Saudis opening the oil spigot; today it's fracking natural gas and of course coal.

Which is not to say irrational fear hasn't created nuclear problems -- particularly when it comes to developing long term storage facilities for high level radioactive waste. We also give fossil fuels a break on externalized costs because we're familiar with the and therefore fear them less than we probably ought. But still, it's hard to supplant a mature, entrenched, *cheap* technology.

Well, it depends. You have to look at each situation individually to see what is at stake. If you know that Anne Frank's family is hiding in the office annex, you obviously keep your mouth shut.

In a case like this, it's important to remember that civil disobedience is most effective when it forces the government to mete out a wildly unpopular punishment. What the government has done is bound to be extremely unpopular because it has come perilously close to passing a secret law.

People think they have fourth amendment protections for most of this data, but long established precedent (Smith v. Maryland) is that there is no Constitutional expectation of privacy for metadata on phone calls. When Congress weakened *statutory* protections against collecting call metadata, American citizens *believed* their calling data was still protected by the Constitution. Nobody has bothered to disabuse them of this idea; not Congress (who despite their current posturing passed the law and authorized the program) nor the Obama administration (their posturing on "transparency" and "accountability" notwithstanding). They knew that the majority of Americans had no idea the changes in the law technically allowed the government to run a program like PRISM.

The exposure of this bit of flim-flammery makes Snowden standing up and outing himself incredibly powerful. His doing that means that this issue will *not* die down anytime soon. Look at how long the Bradley Manning case has dragged on, and *this* one, rightly or wrongly, may prove to be far more powerful in the public imagination. I think Snowden might have been morally justified in laying low if he thought he could get away with it, but his outing of himself will keep this issue alive through the next election cycle at least. That could deal a far more serious blow to the PRISM program than quietly leaking it's existence. The cost of that greater impact is that Snowden definitely loses his job, and he faces prosecution and legal punishments.

OK, now you are in a position where the burden of proof is on you.

It's legitimate to look at somebody's evidence and say, "it doesn't convince me." It's sometimes *also* legitimate to say "I've seen enough evidence to convince myself beyond a reasonable doubt, so I won't bother thinking about your evidence; otherwise you'd have to take the time to examine the workings of every proposed perpetual motion machine.

What you can't do is say, "I'll dismiss your evidence because there's a possibility you have a conflict of interest." Everyone *always* has a vested interest in any position they've taken in the past. If you go there, if you call a man a liar because he has stated a professional opinion you disagree with, it's *your* responsibility to show evidence that lying has taken place. If you can't, STFU.

Doh! I know exactly what happened. That part was small and blurry, and in my initial scan over the graph, before I sorted out what the graph wa showing, it looked like "kp". A corner of my brain thought WTF is "kp", and I kept scanning elsewhere for information. I saw the speeds across the bottom and the thrusts on the left and I recognized the shape of the graph, then saw the HP vs MPH title at the top. I realized the different color lines had to be different engine inputs and I glanced back at that top-right box to confirm it.... that it was listing different HP engine inputs.... and that "k" from "kp" was still lingering in my brain. chuckle. So the blurry "h" was read twice, once as "k" and once as "h". The 250khp to 500khp power figures did strike me as unreasonably large, but I wasn't going to doubt the graph and my attention was absorbed on other issues. Sso without further consideration I just mentally filed it away as presumptively plausible values for a top end (?military?) engine.

Ohhhh noooooo! You didn't...... cry cry cry. LoL.
I follow your reasoning, and it is a kinda cool point, but oh jezus I wish you didn't make that analogy. The prop is NOT spinning as a turbine, and I know that you know that it's not spinning as a turbine, but someone is going to read what you wrote and think that one or both of us said it's a turbine. Newbies already have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that the prop is a fan. Any whiff of describing it as a turbine feeds badly into the exact "contradictory explanations" that set off alarm bells for you.

I wish. You and I went to significantly above average highschools. The majority of U.S. highschool graduates only have one year of science, and it's generally something very generic like "Earth science" or something. It's only in the last few years that most highschools have moved to a two year science requirement, and even then, what percentage are going to include force-energy physics? I think the most common is a year of Bio, and even there most schools avoid or actively deny Evolution in that class :/

What happened there is an entirely arbitrary and semi-self-contradictory cornercase crawling out of the simplifying assumptions. They started with a model of an ideal (frictionless) cart, and then to model a "real" cart they lumped together all losses... including rolling friction.... into one term alpha. They then set alpha to total energy loss... and they were still modeling that alpha on an ideal frictionless cart. They also silently and arbitrarily assumed wind drag *wasn't* zero, despite the opposite parallel assumption of zero rolling resistance. chuckle.

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They say the only computer that can't be hacked is one that unplugged... but when your adversary is (apparently) a U.S. or Israeli Intelligence Agency, even that's not going to save you.

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The HTML code for extracapslock is <B>, like this:
"the <B>WORST WORST WORST</B> idea ever."

The HTML code for doubleextracapslock is <B><BLINK>, but most browsers don't support it because only fucktards use doubleextracapslock.

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In related news, an oil refinery did not explode today. Police and rescue workers report recovering zero dead bodies thus far from the fully intact structure. It is feared that the final death toll may rise as high as zero. We have no reporters live on the scene, so stay tuned for more breaking coverage as it doesn't happen.

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That's great in theory, but evolved monkeys are generally in short supply. Companies usually have to hire the regular kind.

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