Hydrogen peroxide powered rocket packs fly for around 30 seconds, because they have a specific impulse of around 125, meaning that one pound of propellant can make 125 pound-seconds of thrust, meaning that it takes about two pounds of propellant for every second you are in the air. Mass ratios are low for anything strapped to a human, so the exponential nature of the rocket equation can be safely ignored.

A pretty hot (both literally and figuratively) bipropellant rocket could manage about twice the specific impulse, and you could carry somewhat heavier tanks, but two minutes of flight on a rocket pack is probably about the upper limit with conventional propellants.

However, an actual jet pack that used atmospheric oxygen could have an Isp ten times higher, allowing theoretical flights of fifteen minutes or so. Here, it really is a matter of technical development, since jet engines have thrust to weight ratios too low to make it practical. There is movement on this technical front, but it will still take a while.

John Carmack

Oh thank you so much for bringing up the crux of the issue. While I was enjoying the joking around here, there is a rather more serious issue at hand here . . . .

The Wired article is, rather irresponsibly I might add, basically giving teeth to all of those lawsuits pending and soon to be pending against video game studios. It is simply bad juju to say "I want to frag all my friends after playing Doom3" and then cry foul when when id Software gets sued for a kid who does.

Video games DO NOT CAUSE VIOLENCE. Cause is a one-to-one relationship. Games are a multi-billion dollar industry and if there was a one-to-one relationship, we wouldn't be able to step outside without bands of teenagers recreating Half-Life and Halo squads (I understand this is really a problem in some of the more urban areas, but I also know the problem there predates Pong). If a person actually emulates the violence they see in a video game, THEY ALREADY HAVE WITHIN THEM THE CAPACITY AND DESIRE TO DO IT. There is no causal relationship between the two.

You said it yourself; you and your friends started thinking these things after playing video games, but you didn't do it because YOU WERE LEVEL-HEADED. You pretty much imply that the people who would go through with it are not level-headed, and you are right. If they didn't have the video game, there would be some other cause later.

Violent crimes have gone down since a peak in 1992, and yet the video game industry has been booming with more and more violent and realistic games. Again, no causal relationship.

That is my opinion. I am a hard-core video game player for most of my life, and while I will admit that my depth perception has been known to change after playing Quake I for muliple hours and it is fun to entertain the notion of jacking the cars you see on the street after GTAIII, it IS still fantasy, because I know where reality lies. People who don't know this line are time-bombs waiting to happen anyway.