Make donuts?

The price? At Oshkosh, they were saying around $270k

Nah, for that amount of money I'd rather buy a used exoticar and try my best to make it fly. Plus, chicks dig exoticars. Mine does, anyway.

People are bad enough driving in on two axes, do we really want to add a third?

Well, you should see me driving two chainsaws. Keep your distance, though.

...and the ground is very unstable in many areas, not to mention under water.

Another benefit of flying is straight line transport. Roads -- particularly around here --- add huge distances to any trip because you can't go directly to one's destination, but instead, must go waaaaaay around to get there.

The best solution is actually monorails. There is no need for them to take up much ground other than a post every so often, they don't disturb the greenery or the wildlife or the settlements, they can mostly ignore terrain, they can go whiz-bang fast, they can never hit cows or cars or people (well, REALLY stupid people they might hit, but I see that as a feature, not a bug), properly built monorails can't be snowed in or under, the scenery is better than either aircraft (too high) or car/train/bus (too low) they're quieter than trains by far, the ride is better, elevation means better radio coverage for cell or whatever, two tracks for bidirectional operations can be hung from single poles, thereby taking no extra right of way.

Also, they're hella cool.

Too bad the government hasn't enough sense to Manhattan project a bunch of 'em. Sure rather pay for that than yet another bombing of brownish people with funny beliefs and (coincidence only, of course) oil and other natural resources.

most of them AOL-tier,

AOL-tier. On a +4 post. Is today the day that /v/ finally invades Slashdot?

Wow. An "implying" post reaches +4 Insightful on Slashdot. I guess Anonymous and Anonymous Coward really are the same person.

...and If only we had envelopes that would hold such a light gas without leaking it the heck out through every surface, or otherwise leak away the characteristic (heat) that makes it light... and if only such a technology didn't require such a large envelope as to function as a highly effective sail in any high prevailing wind such that it would take a huge amount of energy to counter said impetus... and if only we had a place to store such a large envelope... and if only such a device wouldn't cost seven figures... and if only there was a place available to land such things at your desired destination...

Yes, I believe you're on the right track. I'll start buying H and He futures immediately, and subscribe to your newsletter as well. Thank you!

I live 300 road miles from the nearest city of with enough resources to be worth visiting. I could actually use a flying car. Air distance is much less than the road distance, for one thing, and for another, max legal road speed is pitiful - 70 to 75 mph. Yet Amazon and the occasional other net vendor pretty much fulfill all our material needs. The big deal when we take a trip these days (usually medically related now) is access to a spectrum of decent restaurant choices.

However, all things considered, I'd rather have a couple of robots. A household one, basically a full featured maid, and another for walking a dog, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, etc.

I expect to get them well before I get a flying car, too, unless someone discovers a low-power, very safe, antigravity system in the interim. Otherwise, it's just not energy efficient.

Right, you emphasize that you're ignoring that assembly is being counted as manufacturing. Yay, you emphasized your ignorance!

If I had made it up, that's what I'd have done. When I stopped having a regular 9-5 IT job and started working for myself (heh heh) it was because 50% of IT workers in the USA were out of work then. It led to a surge of unqualified numbnuts taking up all kinds of jobs they had no business doing, like long-haul trucking. Gotta feed those rugrats. The H1-B problem has only gotten worse since then, and the labor participation rate is at fairly pathetic lows, in spite of the published "unemployment" figures — which are worse than useless, they're deliberate lies.

Enjoy your Kool-Aid, and your sense of smug self-satisfaction. They will brook you nothing.

I did, for the third time answer the point. You're too stupid to be able to read it. Makes sense you're a denialist seing as you cannot read or think independently.

you could cruise the highway 5 feet behind the car in front of you.

The main benefit of flying transportation is to bypass the congestion on the surface of the earth. (You could achieve most of the same practical benefits by digging tunnels everywhere, but nobody knows how to do it cheaply and the scenery is no good.)

Even with 2's complement, quite a few DSPs have saturated add instructions so that overflow does not occur. The MMX unit also has this.

There's usually only one pandemic of flu per year, though I don't believe that there's a rule about it. However just because it killed thousands doesn't mean much when the population is as large as it is. I would guess that most people who caught it (assuming it was a pandemic) were mildly sick for a few days, some people had a bit worse case, and one in a million died of it and was counted.

FWIW, I don't really remember the 2009 swine flu, and that's only 5 years ago, so it can't have been very noticable...in the US. My wife's mother was already frail and around 90, and she's still around, so it can't have been all that devastating.
OTOH, this doesn't mean that when crossed with another strain it wouldn't be highly contagious bad news. If it was a pandemic, then it is good at spreading among humans, even if it's usually so mild that they don't notice it.