I think this is more like McDonald's hiring Burger King managers than the usual tech employment, hence ne. This is retail, not what most /. readers would think as managerial positions.

Um, no. You don't have a grasp of the geography. It's not beaming a signal across the street, it's more like coast-to-coast, LA to NY. You have to go to space to get high up enough.

Yeah, TV and the desktop might be merging for you, but the rest of the world still sits on the couch for TV and at a desk for the computer. Until I can type comfortably in the same position I watch the TV the two are never going to be the same thing in use or purpose.

Computer video *ports* might be simply divergent, but the same criticisms you're aiming at HDMI can be extended to computer video, too. There's DVI, dual link DVI, HDMI (so computers can play in the travesty that is HDCP), mini DVI, plus a lot of other proprietary variants and the "VGA port" was just a common plug design. Analog computer video signals were and are a mess. Those port designs had next-to-nothing to do with the signals they could transmit.

1,000 feet might be roughly half the height of the WTC twin towers if you stacked them... The spire was 1,727 ft. The roof of building one was 1,368 ft, building two was shorter.

Seriously, wouldn't a 747, flying as close as witnesses seem to remember, actually destroy property? One article quotes one witness as suggesting the plane was "dozens" of feet from the Goldman Sachs Tower. Sure...

Osmosis? They gain knowledge from us through the diffusion of water?

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