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

did you mean that Phorm's servers intercept everything coming across my connection

Have a look at how BT will be implementing the Phorm interceptor line tap. The equipment is located where it intercepts all flows from all customers on the exchange, filtering out port 80 traffic to be passed to the F5 interception engine. The box known as "ACE" in the slides is provided, configured, and administered by Phorm, although it officially is "gifted" in accounting terms to the ISP to circumvent UK privacy laws.

Nobody knows exactly what the "ACE" box is, but from where it is positioned in the ISP network, it can intercept, alter, or block all your traffic. Not just your web traffic, ALL your traffic.

the AC

Several things about this article left a bad taste in my mouth. The author (Hargreaves) attempts to sterotype game programmers and game programming. Hargreaves claims that all game programmers:

1. Don't care about quality, only ego.
2. Produce poor, quick, hackey code.
3. Don't understand scripting languages.
4. Are less usefull than Artists/Designers

He also goes on to say that

5. 3d engines are trivial to program.

Although these stereotypes may exist in the game programmer community, I believe that this is a romantisized view and is not grounded in reality. Here are my rebuttles.

1 and 2. If game programmers didn't care about quality, then most of the titles that ship wouldn't have the level of polish that they do. When you buy a game off the shelf at best buy, take it home, and play it, you usually don't have to worry about whether you have the correct libraries or fear that it will crash. Also, if game programmers produce such low quality code, why is 3d engine licensing so prevalant? Not just Id, but also Unreal, Monolith and friends.

3. At GDC this year, there were several talks about scripting languages that I found quite interesting. Nihilistic is using an embedded java interpreter for their scripting language. Why would the open source community be better at this?

4. There are plenty of titles out there with bad art that are still a lot of fun to play. I wouldn't say that nettrek or xpilot have particularly good art, but a lot of people find these games more fun than the latest stylized buggy games. Programmers are just as important if not more because they implement, rather than simply adding spice.

5. If 3d engines were trivial to develop, why is the industry in a licensing frenzy? Please remember that 3d engine != 3d API. An engine has much more responsibility than simple triangle texture mapping.

Finally, I don't see how such a money driven industry can profit from open source. RAD and other companies like it make all of there money licensing game engine utilities, and would have no source of income if they opensourced their products.

--Tom