Oh, man. That sounds like a huge pain in the neck.

Why did you get re-scanned between connections? Usually I arrive at a gate in the secure area, and walk (or run) to another gate, still within the secure area.

I think this is really cool but it seems impractical. Aircraft are very expensive to maintain and you'll need a pilot certificate to fly this. It's probably cheaper to have a car and rent a plane (or, depending on the cost of this thing, just buy a used 172). The usable load is very low, as well (hopefully that 330lbs number is in addition to fuel).

I also look at this from the perspective of being a "dual-purpose" vehicle; most of which are mediocre. A common example might be a dual-sport motorcycle. It's not a great motorcycle and it's not a great dirtbike, but it can do both. Just from the looks (wings all folded up, blocking vision out of the rear windows, etc) this is not going to be a practical car. I guess we'll see how good of an airplane it will be. My question is, what problem does this solve? You drive to the airport, unfold the wings, then get out of the car and do your pre-flight? How is that different from getting out of your car and doing your pre-flight on your regular aircraft?

Either way, this seems like a neat invention. I think they'll have trouble selling 200 of these, especially if they are priced similarly to normal small aircraft, but it would be really cool to see this thing in person.

Did you read the article? Because if you did, instead of rushing to bash my post, you'd see that it mentions things like Goldfish. It also specifically refutes the point your posts makes in the second paragraph. So your point is that keeping goldfish in a tank for the first year of their life is so inhumane and instead, I should buy goldfish from my neighbor and put them in a tank instead? You are thinking of this from the perspective of a poor little puppy from a puppy mill stuck in a shop window. I agree, that's a terrible thing, and that's what the original (which was still absurd) was meant to prevent. However, this law has been expanded to include pretty much all animals. It's so absurd and so ridiculous that I can't believe people (you?) would take this seriously. What it boils down to is we have people who are butt-hurt that the majority of Americans don't care about the feelings of a fish or the feelings of the rat they are going to feed to their python. So these people are trying to push their worldview on everyone else - regardless of the fact that "treating animals like commodities" is something that humans have been doing since the first creature was domesticated. So yeah, I do get your point, I did read the article, and I think you are dead wrong. These people are off-their-rocker PETA wackos that don't want anyone to own any pets, ever. In fact, other sources go on to say that "eventually, there would likely be no more tropical fish or other exotic pets in San Francisco (except those imported illegally). Purebred dogs and cats might become a thing of the past as well."

What does biology have to do with this? Many pets are specifically bred to be sold. If there are no buyers, people are not going to breed these animals (they don't want to be stuck with four macaws, or six puppies). The ones that do breed will turn in to strays. Sounds a lot better.

What lives will it save? Without the pet industry, these animals would never be born.

I'm using a Vaio S that gets 7+hr battery life in Windows, and under 2hr battery life in Fedora. The big problem that I see with this laptop is that Fedora is not utilizing the "hybrid" graphics system, and it is constantly running off of the graphics card instead of the integrated graphics (in windows, this brings the battery life to under 2 hours, as well). It would be nice to be able to switch that permanently to integrated to get the battery life.

There is a reason that less than 1/5 of one percent of the US population are pilots. It's not easy, it requires a lot of work, and it's very expensive (40-50 hours in a cheap cessna at $100/hr plus ~$35-45/hr for an instructor). There are even less instrument rated pilots (about 200,000 less) who are certificated to fly in poor weather/visibility. The problem isn't the "autopilotable" part (flying along a route), it's weather, navigation, landing, emergency procedures. Most people simply won't do it, it's far easier to drive a car.

I am unsure of how this design will handle an engine-out situation. A fixed-wing aircraft will have some glide ratio (9:1, 7:1, whatever) and a helicopter will autorotate. What happens with this design? It looks like it would just become a brick.

50 cents/gb seems extremely cheap. I use data constantly and haven't gone over 2gb. Do you think VZW would really go for charging me $1 instead of the 30 or 40 bucks they are charging now?

happens to me, too (++). If you use the character codes in the URL it works; for me, I have to use http://slashdot.org/~jonamous%2B%2B

I'm both amused and concerned that I've heard statements similar to the ones that you have made at my own workplace. *sigh*

Well, I can't do anything other than type out my experience but it works out of the box on my home network and my work's network. In fact, I have ILSPY on my network share, and used it yesterday from someone else's machine. For reference, the latest ILSPY requires .NET4.0 and the utilities that I talked about previously were built on .NET2.0.

Verizon uses CDMA not GSM, so there are no SIM cards to switch; it's all done with a unique identifier on the phone. I think Sprint is the only other US network that utilizes CDMA.