Flying Cars, Jetpacks and Rocket Racers, Oh My!

The Experimental Aircraft Association Annual AirVenture Show in Oshkosh Wisconsin.  Which includes exactly what the title of the Popular Science video says it does.  Flying cars  (although we don't see it fly), jetpacks (although its actually a prop-pack not jet and it only "flies" 15 feet and under control of two guys on the ground)

The Rocket Racer section sounds pretty cool and they had one up in the air screaming along on it's rocket.  And the PR guy looked a little like another PR guy I know, talking about the business plan and the consumer.

As a very interesting side note:  The Experimental Aircraft Association's site has been partially pwned!  At there very same time as one of your peaks of popularity.  An article in Pop-Sci, linked via Instapundit.  They just need to remove the index.html file from their server, it's not the default document so this is a rookie pwn.

...in retrospect after a bit of researching, this is in fact a fail!  The hacker thought he knew what he was doing but his weak skillz are exposed.  He didn't replace the default document.  Only index.html (not even default.html)

Screenshot.

Rookie.

Will we come to accept this as the ubiquitous norm?

If you've seen the movie "Minority Report" then perhaps you agree that the creepiest part of that movie is the acceptance shown by the general populace regarding universal tracking via retina scans.  You get on a subway train and blink-blink you're tracked.  You enter a building and blink-blink you're tracked.

Everywhere.

Which is creepy.

But the populace is shown to just ignore it and let it happen.  Is this our future?  Because the calm acceptance is creepier than the act itself.

Well...my alma mater, the University of Washington, is researching the impacts of a similar technology. 

RFID tracking.

"What we want to understand," Borriello said, "is what makes it useful, what makes it threatening and how to balance the two."

They are interested in the implications, applications, privacy and restrictions.  Their explanation is that it is better to test now and understand the ramifications before anything is implemented in the real world.  Better the devil you know as it were.

It's still creepy.  It's also probably easier to implement in the real world than you think.  Just require the next generation of cell-phones to contain an RFID chip.  Done and done.

Like I said...creepy.

So check this out.

This guy in a semi comes into our parking lot and gets stuck.  Instead of coming in and asking for help, having some people move cars, or I don't know...thinking clearly, he guns it and smacks the side of our building.

It gets better...he splits.

Here's a guy that hit and run a BUILDING!  What sorta maroon do you have to be to do that?

Sheesh!