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Practical Jetpack Available "Soon"
Ifandbut was one of several readers to point out the arrival in Oshkosh of the first practical jetpack. It was invented by a New Zealander Glenn Martin, who has been working on the idea for 27 years. He plans to sell the gizmos for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100K. While previous attempts at jetpacks have flown for at most a couple of minutes, Mr. Martin's invention can stay aloft for half an hour. Both "practical" and "jetpack" may need quotation marks, however: The device is huge and it's incredibly noisy. And, "It is also not, to put it bluntly, a jet. 'If you're very pedantic,' Mr. Martin acknowledged, a gasoline-powered piston engine runs the large rotors. Jet Skis, he pointed out, are not jets, and the atmospheric jet stream is not created by engines. 'This thing flies on a jet of air,' he said. Or, more simply, it flies."
Excellent, now my mechanic will be available to get to my flying car (which is also coming "soon") no matter where it is.
Yeah, but "Impractical Not-Really-A-Jetpack Maybe Available Sometime" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?
I'm so excited I just made water in my pantaloons!
... welcome our hearing-impaired jetpack flying overlords.
Okay, so it's not so much an android as a small two foot tall robot.
And by 'robot'.. I mean a cat wearing a cardboard box.
------------------ See! I can make my inventions sound grandiose by making things up, too!
In June 1997, seven weeks after the birth of his second child, Mr. Martin figured his prototype was now powerful enough to lift its first flier, so long as that person weighed less than 130 pounds. So he turned to his wife. "I said, 'Hey, Vanessa, what are you doing tonight?"
Mrs. Martin agreed to be her husband's levitating guinea pig.
She said she felt, in a way, that she had conquered it - "the taming of it, that's so exciting." It was, she said, "probably the best experience of my life."
Doesn't say a lot about being married to Mr. Martin or Mr. Martin's prowess in the sack, does it?
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
"It is also not, to put it bluntly, a jet. 'If you're very pedantic,"' Mr. Martin acknowledged, a gasoline-powered piston engine runs the large rotors. Jet Skis, he pointed out, are not jets, and the atmospheric jet stream is not created by engines.
Certainly one is permitted a bit of license in terminology. In fact, if you really get down to it, Jet Li is not actually a jet either.
My neighbors can't even handle driving SUVs, but the roads are full of them (and the hell they've made of driving among them).
Turning these people into missiles with jetpacks is a great argument for prioritizing personal force field research.
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make install -not war
Are you kidding?
First, I'd love to ahve one of these, assuming it worked as promised.
Second,... ah crap, I don't know, I just want one.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No, thanks. I'm waiting for a hybrid or electric jet pack before I buy. One has to be practical about buying a jet pack, given today's gas prices.
A "Jitpeck"?
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
It's an editing error. The original submission was "practical" "jet" "pack" "available" "soon".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I'd feel sufficiently menaced by villains flying in on those things as to call them "practical" in the super-villainy market.
Of course they'd have to come in black... and a laser beam would be a nice option.
IMHO it's "very practical", in the sense that how practical can strapping your ass to a 200-hp gas engine with two washing machine-sized rotors really be?
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I for one would like to heartily welcome our soon to be, yet oh so impractical and semi over priced jetpack wearing overlords.
~DF
Are the 3 people moving him around the field in the video included in the $100K price tag, or are they sold separately?
Flying Kiwi with lasers.
He's from NZ after all.
Anyway it doesn't look very practical at all - the two guys hardly ever let go of the thing.
This baby is a fully loaded supercomputing* monster!
* term may only apply to regions trapped between the years 1950 to 1980.
They're there affecting their effect.