You deserve a +3 insightful for that group of observations. What sucks is that consumers are buying things that claim to be standardized, and they don't work together even though they all list compliance with the same standard. That's an awesome way to piss off customers and destroy any trust anyone might ever have in the technology.
You should still try it. It's *neat*. It's often muddy and cold, but a lot of the time you're in fairly large rooms or passages and then there's no headroom issue, or in pretty tight conditions, where you just can't move enough to really clock yourself. The problem is when you're crawling through breakdown or in a small, crouch-sized tunnel. Once I stopped using caving helmets, which are basically just fancy construction hardhats, and started using older hard-shell bike helmets, that have lots of padding and styrofoam, I was much happier. I don't know that I'd recommend them in really vertical situations, like rappelling down a pit, (because I don't think they'd provide adequate protection against a falling rock) but I rarely do that.
I work for a company that designs and supplies PoE driver chips, so when I say "it hasn't yet taken off" I'm talking about what people were forecasting for sales three years ago, what we're actually selling, and the problems we're seeing with consumer acceptance of our parts, particularly when a particular very large company who has a dominant position in the industry and has packed all the standards committees with its representatives is selling large quantities of equipment that claims to meet industry PoE standards but actually only works with other members of its own equipment.
I spend a lot of time in caves. Ya wear a helmet. Despite that, you hit your head. *Astoundingly* hard, even with a helmet. All the time. Because you forget there's a huge irregular rock right beside your head, and you turn, and *whang* you hit your head so hard your olfactory nerves distort and you smell/taste copper the way you do when you've been punched.
Or, even, when exploring steam tunnels in the dark and there are cross-pipes in the way. And you have to run through the tunnels in darkness, with your flashlights off, because the campus security dudes are chasing you. Or so I've heard.
A bunch of other people have chimed in with parts of the answer already, and I thought I'd add some more. Obviously each manufacturer wants you to use their standard and buy their hardware. Different implementations came through at different times, and have different amounts of software/hardware overheads, and try to do different things. RS232 has almost no necessary software overhead -- you do any and all the work with code you write. USB has *quite* a bit of software overhead to deal with device identification, and Ethernet has *enormous* amounts of overhead. In most small systems you have to buy an Ethernet software stack separately from the OS you're using. USB tries to provide power. People are trying to glue power into Ethernet although it hasn't yet taken off. People keep going off in odd wireless directions. The fundamental problem, I think, is that there are several different connectivity needs and manufacturers are trying to get you to buy their solution to what they think are the most important needs. What you're asking for is something good for the industry in the long term, and that's not really in the direct interest of any particular company, so nobody's building anything for it. The military embedded market seems to be moving towards gigabit or 10-gig fiber ethernet for all their interboard communications, but fiber has its own problems, and I'm not sure it's the right thing for a USB key you're carrying in your pocket all the time. I believe that the SCSI module in linux handles firewire and USB, so from that standpoint it looks like it's a start towards universal communications, except for Ethernet. (Even though old SCSI is nothing like serial: it's the the ultimate expression of parallel communications, with some similarities to the old HP/GPIB parallel communication standard that's still used in for test communication but used to be a hard drive standard.) I have no idea what Windows does.
Aside from that, I entirely agree with you. This is completely self-serving on the part of symantec. It's the corporate marketing equivalent of a strawman: invent a problem that doesn't exist, solve it, charge lots to those who buy into your fearmongering.
The New Yorker has become my favorite magazine in the last couple of years -- while I learn more from New Scientist and the like, it's mostly party knowledge ("Did you know that only four complete mastodons have ever been found?" yeah, I'm a riot at parties) while reading the NY is like reading Slashdot at +6. They consistently write interesting, introspective, and sometimes even funny things about economics, medicine, and quite often about copyright/trademark stuff. And the cartoons are *brilliant*.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of cases where a pilot has been medically incapacitated and a passenger has, with radio instruction, managed to land the plane. *Flying* a plane is not hard. They mostly fly themselves. It's the organizational and emergency stuff -- what to do when the engine catches on fire or you fly into a cloud or you get lost, how to talk on the radio, how to navigate, how to calculate whether the plane's too heavy to take off from a short runway at high altitude on a hot day, and if so how much fuel you can drain out while still making it to a lower, cooler airport to refuel -- that distinguishes a pilot from someone who can fly a plane once in an emergency situation and land it without bending it too badly. I first "flew" an airplane when I was 8 and at that time I could make it turn gracefully and line it up with the runway.
1. I think a lot of people have their entire system of beliefs based on a relatively unproven and even unexamined set of prejudices and assumptions, simply because we don't have the time to go about carefully examining every belief they have. I don't have a *good* reason to believe the sun's coming up tomorrow. I have orbital mechanics and lots of past experience to make me think it'll happen. The thing is: if people believe in something and change their lives or make major decisions based on that thing, they're very *very* reluctant to abandon the idea because they have an investment in it, essentially, and they're making choices based on sunk costs. I think one of the reasons that many very religious people try so hard to censor and create/enforce morality laws is because if other people get away with what they see as sin, it casts doubt on how they've lived their lives. ("A Puritan is someone who is afraid that somewhere, someone else is having fun.") So it isn't as simple as just shrugging and saying "oh, okay, you're right: I'll change my life" because most people can't do that. Many scientists can, because being shown to be wrong is part of science. (although I think that's what attracts people who can do that to science, rather than science making people more able to change their minds.)
2. Great.sig. One of my girlfriend's favorite lines is "I like my women like I like my Scotch: 14 years old and full of Coke."
To be more precise, in 1866 the US officially designated the Metric System as a legal system for weights and measures in commerce -- the only system that Congress has ever approved (although it has tacitly approved the Imperal system) and the decision to base the Imperial system on the Metric System was made in 1893, known as the Mendenhall Order
I'd argue that's marketing, but I agree a case could be made for that. However, even then: if you don't know it exists, you probably don't need it. It's still a process of convincing people to buy something that they wouldn't otherwise.
>Why are these people so intent on advertising to people who are clearly not interested in it.
Because virtually *nobody* is interested in advertising. Salesmanship is precisely selling people things they don't need. If they needed it, they'd go buy it without advertising.
Superlightweight cars work great: fabulous gas mileage. My old Datsun 1200 weighed just about 1500 pounds and got better than 35 mpg even though it had late '60's engine and electronics. Currently, the Honda Insight is getting like 80 mpg, in large part because it weighs 1800 pounds. Here's the problem: nobody buys those cars. People have a strong herd mentality, and think, first off, that heavy cars are safer, and secondly, that if you have a range of options you choose something in the middle, not something at the very end. Thirdly, as people get older, they buy larger, heavier, more options-rich cars (which is why individual car models bloat over their lifetime, by the way: they're selling to the same people, over and over, only the people are demanding bigger and bigger cars.)
MPG is not really a super-relevant metric for cargo-hauling vehicles. A 747 gets a few feet per gallon, but it can transport about 10x as many people a given distance for a given amount of fuel burnt than a Cessna 152, getting about 17 miles per gallon. Gallon burnt, per pound moved a mile, or something like it, is much more useful. Airplanes are rated in gallons-per-seat-per-mile, basically, and it gives you a much better idea of what the machine's efficiency can be if fully loaded.
Thompson is a raving nut. I think he needs to lower the stress in his life, do something to relax, like play video games. I've heard those are great for calming people down and making them act more rationally.
This is less likely in a B-52 that has a fairly large crew, but sometimes military pilots fly off and purposely crash into a mountain. In that case, they never recovered any of the 4 500 pound conventional bombs the airplane was carrying: how much more exciting would it be if there were six lost nukes somewhere on land? (There are a half-dozen missing nuclear weapons in the sea, but very few have been lost on land, and they've all been mostly recovered, from what I know.)
So the contention is: reports filed with NASA are not used for FAA enforcement. However, if there is evidence that a FAR has been violated, the FAA then goes and does its own investigation, not based on the NASA ASRS but started because of the report in the ASRS, and on finding the violation of the FAR, goes after the airman. How the FAA gets the data, I don't know, but I've read several reports and talked to people who have seen this happen.
Just like how the cost of police cars makes it far too expensive to consider traffic cops, right? *Every* pilot already knows that the no-fly and ADIZ zones have 100% enforcement because of radar tracking, transponder identification, and quick response. That's why the enforcement people only need the threat of responding: as far as I know, there are currently about a dozen intercepts per year. I'm betting the US can afford 100x that much without even noticing, and if they did, they have a lot of much cheaper aircraft and helicopters they use for interception. The DEA uses armed Gulfstream jets in South America, and even an cheap Eclipse or Cessna Mustang could catch any powered lift vehicle on the drawing boards.
I don't. It's something I've read repeatedly in experimental discussions and magazines, as being a primary reason that incident reporting is hogwash: if you report that something went wrong and you made an emergency landing, the FAA will (as in has) deny you the reporting safe haven on the basis that you violated 91.119A and come after you.
I was looking while posting and found it after I'd mostly given up. Here is FAR 91.119: "(a) Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.
(b) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.
(c) Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface, except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In those cases, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure. "
So I was double the actual requirement for both remote and congested areas.
Note if you have engine failure that requires a landing on or within 1000 feet of a building, you are automatically in violation of FAR 91.119 part A and will get busted. This has been interpreted to mean that it's functionally illegal to fly small airplanes over large cities, since you can't fly high enough to glide to a safe, legal landing.
The FAA regulations are: planes have to stay 1000 feet from any person, vehicle, or man-made obstruction in 'remote areas' and 2000 feet in 'congested areas' (meaning over towns.) If you're in controlled airspace under ATC control they'll assign you an elevation, that you have to maintain. However, if you're in controlled airspace (class C or lower) and you're not under ATC control, you're still allowed 1000ft/2000ft if you should wish. You can land anywhere you want if you have landowner permission, as long as you maintain those separations; lesser separations are allowed at airports.
I have a pilot certificate but it's been seven years since I've last flown, so it's possible I'm misremembering numbers or that the FAA has changed the regs, but that's what I recall.
With F-16's. That's what they're doing currently in the no-fly zones over Washington DC and other parts of the country: you fly into one and you have a couple fighter jets, one on either side of you, within about two minutes. They then escort you to a local military airfield where you land. Nobody yet has decided to find out what happens if you try to run from the supersonic jet with the enormous guns in your little 120 knot Cessna.
Do it as an experimental. Sell kits that have 45% of the work finished, and detailed instructions, and let the new owner finish it, register it as an experimental, and go. The FAA still has to issue an airworthiness certificate, but the threshold for getting an AC is far, far lower than for getting FAA type approval. Plus people feel like they're getting a deal, so they're more likely to buy.
I think the problem is: where do you go to get instruction? You're not legally allowed to fly these things without a pilot certificate coz they weigh too much to fit into ultralight categories, and more critically, they're a different type of certificate. To fly a Moeller or the like, you need instruction in 'powered lift' not 'fixed wing' or 'helicopter' or even 'autogyro' -- and there are precisely two 'powered lift' vehicles in existence, the Moeller and the Osprey V-22. Nobody has flown a Moeller, and the only Ospreys are being flown by US military and Boeing/Vertol research/design people. There are no instructors and as such there is no way to get instruction, so the market for an aircraft you're not legally allowed to fly is pretty slim. Moeller has to get a dozen of these things built and four dozen certified flight instructors trained up -- when nobody has any idea of what constitutes a certified flight instructor for powered lift -- before there will be a market for his machines. IF they ever actually work.
When I got my private, I biked to lessons and locked my bike to the inside of the chainlink security perimeter fence. A standard bike fits fine in the back seat of a 172 and if you pull both wheels fits fine in the back of a 152. My then-gf (also a pilot) and I always planned to stick two mountain bikes in the back and fly to Moab and go ride Slickrock, but never got around to it. There are plenty of very nice, fast, full-size bikes that break down, like the collapsible Slingshot (which is one of the fastest bikes I've ever ridden) and the beautiful Ritchey Breakaway (in steel and titanium framesets) or if you insist on smaller bikes, the Friday is reminiscent of a real roadbike. The Slingshot is no-compromise, though: I'd take that to a race.
I just read a superb book called "Survival Of The Sickest" that went on at *length* about parasite control of parasitized animals, from wasps that sting spiders and implant eggs, that during their development cause the spiders to weave cocoons for the hatching wasps, through the effects of toxoplasmosis on altering how mice behave so they get eaten by the toxoplasmosis host, to other things I'd never even considered. Guinea worm is this horrible disease where a worm bores through your skin with acid. It hurts, a lot, so people go find rivers and pools because the water makes it hurt less -- and the guinea worm dumps eggs as soon as it's in water, to get the next person who drinks from that water. Rabies infects brains, making animals aggressive, and also concentrates in saliva, so the aggressive animals are more likely to bite and transfer the disease. The book even went over some guidelines for predicting how lethal a disease would be, based on its mode of transmission: typically, we've thought that diseases get less lethal over time because that increases their ability to spread, but the book says it depends on the transmission path. Malaria wants -- inasmuch as a disease can want anything -- people to be very ill indeed, so that they spend lots of time not moving, giving mosquitoes a better chance of finding the people, while colds do want people to be as mildly sick as possible so they can maximize their distribution. A particularly neat case is cholera, which can be spread by human-human contact, or more usually by contamination of drinking water. In the latter case, the sicker the person, the better, because more bacteria will be voided by the person through diarrhea, while in the former case, milder infections spread more because there's longer-term contact with heath care personnel, meaning more chances to spread. Watching cholera epidemics in South America, that's exactly what they observed: in countries that were poor, where there wasn't really any official health care, the disease became progressively more lethal over time, while in countries where infected people got immediate health care, the disease got less lethal over time. It's not a bad read, although the doctor who wrote it, Sharon Morel (I believe) should've just written it, instead of hiring a ghost writer who turned it into a succession of USAToday-feeling articles.
Slashdot Mirror
You deserve a +3 insightful for that group of observations.
What sucks is that consumers are buying things that claim to be standardized, and they don't work together even though they all list compliance with the same standard. That's an awesome way to piss off customers and destroy any trust anyone might ever have in the technology.
You should still try it. It's *neat*. It's often muddy and cold, but a lot of the time you're in fairly large rooms or passages and then there's no headroom issue, or in pretty tight conditions, where you just can't move enough to really clock yourself. The problem is when you're crawling through breakdown or in a small, crouch-sized tunnel. Once I stopped using caving helmets, which are basically just fancy construction hardhats, and started using older hard-shell bike helmets, that have lots of padding and styrofoam, I was much happier. I don't know that I'd recommend them in really vertical situations, like rappelling down a pit, (because I don't think they'd provide adequate protection against a falling rock) but I rarely do that.
I work for a company that designs and supplies PoE driver chips, so when I say "it hasn't yet taken off" I'm talking about what people were forecasting for sales three years ago, what we're actually selling, and the problems we're seeing with consumer acceptance of our parts, particularly when a particular very large company who has a dominant position in the industry and has packed all the standards committees with its representatives is selling large quantities of equipment that claims to meet industry PoE standards but actually only works with other members of its own equipment.
I spend a lot of time in caves. Ya wear a helmet. Despite that, you hit your head. *Astoundingly* hard, even with a helmet. All the time. Because you forget there's a huge irregular rock right beside your head, and you turn, and *whang* you hit your head so hard your olfactory nerves distort and you smell/taste copper the way you do when you've been punched.
Or, even, when exploring steam tunnels in the dark and there are cross-pipes in the way. And you have to run through the tunnels in darkness, with your flashlights off, because the campus security dudes are chasing you.
Or so I've heard.
A bunch of other people have chimed in with parts of the answer already, and I thought I'd add some more.
Obviously each manufacturer wants you to use their standard and buy their hardware.
Different implementations came through at different times, and have different amounts of software/hardware overheads, and try to do different things.
RS232 has almost no necessary software overhead -- you do any and all the work with code you write. USB has *quite* a bit of software overhead to deal with device identification, and Ethernet has *enormous* amounts of overhead. In most small systems you have to buy an Ethernet software stack separately from the OS you're using.
USB tries to provide power. People are trying to glue power into Ethernet although it hasn't yet taken off.
People keep going off in odd wireless directions.
The fundamental problem, I think, is that there are several different connectivity needs and manufacturers are trying to get you to buy their solution to what they think are the most important needs. What you're asking for is something good for the industry in the long term, and that's not really in the direct interest of any particular company, so nobody's building anything for it.
The military embedded market seems to be moving towards gigabit or 10-gig fiber ethernet for all their interboard communications, but fiber has its own problems, and I'm not sure it's the right thing for a USB key you're carrying in your pocket all the time.
I believe that the SCSI module in linux handles firewire and USB, so from that standpoint it looks like it's a start towards universal communications, except for Ethernet. (Even though old SCSI is nothing like serial: it's the the ultimate expression of parallel communications, with some similarities to the old HP/GPIB parallel communication standard that's still used in for test communication but used to be a hard drive standard.) I have no idea what Windows does.
For the record, Fred Allen was saying the frontal lobotomy quote before Tom Waits was even born. I think it might be older than that, even.
Aside from that, I entirely agree with you. This is completely self-serving on the part of symantec. It's the corporate marketing equivalent of a strawman: invent a problem that doesn't exist, solve it, charge lots to those who buy into your fearmongering.
The New Yorker has become my favorite magazine in the last couple of years -- while I learn more from New Scientist and the like, it's mostly party knowledge ("Did you know that only four complete mastodons have ever been found?" yeah, I'm a riot at parties) while reading the NY is like reading Slashdot at +6. They consistently write interesting, introspective, and sometimes even funny things about economics, medicine, and quite often about copyright/trademark stuff. And the cartoons are *brilliant*.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of cases where a pilot has been medically incapacitated and a passenger has, with radio instruction, managed to land the plane. *Flying* a plane is not hard. They mostly fly themselves. It's the organizational and emergency stuff -- what to do when the engine catches on fire or you fly into a cloud or you get lost, how to talk on the radio, how to navigate, how to calculate whether the plane's too heavy to take off from a short runway at high altitude on a hot day, and if so how much fuel you can drain out while still making it to a lower, cooler airport to refuel -- that distinguishes a pilot from someone who can fly a plane once in an emergency situation and land it without bending it too badly. I first "flew" an airplane when I was 8 and at that time I could make it turn gracefully and line it up with the runway.
1. I think a lot of people have their entire system of beliefs based on a relatively unproven and even unexamined set of prejudices and assumptions, simply because we don't have the time to go about carefully examining every belief they have. I don't have a *good* reason to believe the sun's coming up tomorrow. I have orbital mechanics and lots of past experience to make me think it'll happen. The thing is: if people believe in something and change their lives or make major decisions based on that thing, they're very *very* reluctant to abandon the idea because they have an investment in it, essentially, and they're making choices based on sunk costs. I think one of the reasons that many very religious people try so hard to censor and create/enforce morality laws is because if other people get away with what they see as sin, it casts doubt on how they've lived their lives. ("A Puritan is someone who is afraid that somewhere, someone else is having fun.") So it isn't as simple as just shrugging and saying "oh, okay, you're right: I'll change my life" because most people can't do that. Many scientists can, because being shown to be wrong is part of science. (although I think that's what attracts people who can do that to science, rather than science making people more able to change their minds.)
.sig. One of my girlfriend's favorite lines is "I like my women like I like my Scotch: 14 years old and full of Coke."
2. Great
To be more precise, in 1866 the US officially designated the Metric System as a legal system for weights and measures in commerce -- the only system that Congress has ever approved (although it has tacitly approved the Imperal system) and the decision to base the Imperial system on the Metric System was made in 1893, known as the Mendenhall Order
I'd argue that's marketing, but I agree a case could be made for that. However, even then: if you don't know it exists, you probably don't need it. It's still a process of convincing people to buy something that they wouldn't otherwise.
>Why are these people so intent on advertising to people who are clearly not interested in it.
Because virtually *nobody* is interested in advertising. Salesmanship is precisely selling people things they don't need. If they needed it, they'd go buy it without advertising.
Advertising must, by its nature, be intrusive.
Clearly, someone should get busy and make a list of the other 1% of windows passwords it can't crack and start selling them.
(Seriously, I do wonder what the general characteristics are of passwords it can't handle: longer? fewer alpha?)
Superlightweight cars work great: fabulous gas mileage. My old Datsun 1200 weighed just about 1500 pounds and got better than 35 mpg even though it had late '60's engine and electronics. Currently, the Honda Insight is getting like 80 mpg, in large part because it weighs 1800 pounds. Here's the problem: nobody buys those cars. People have a strong herd mentality, and think, first off, that heavy cars are safer, and secondly, that if you have a range of options you choose something in the middle, not something at the very end. Thirdly, as people get older, they buy larger, heavier, more options-rich cars (which is why individual car models bloat over their lifetime, by the way: they're selling to the same people, over and over, only the people are demanding bigger and bigger cars.)
MPG is not really a super-relevant metric for cargo-hauling vehicles. A 747 gets a few feet per gallon, but it can transport about 10x as many people a given distance for a given amount of fuel burnt than a Cessna 152, getting about 17 miles per gallon. Gallon burnt, per pound moved a mile, or something like it, is much more useful. Airplanes are rated in gallons-per-seat-per-mile, basically, and it gives you a much better idea of what the machine's efficiency can be if fully loaded.
Thompson is a raving nut. I think he needs to lower the stress in his life, do something to relax, like play video games. I've heard those are great for calming people down and making them act more rationally.
This is less likely in a B-52 that has a fairly large crew, but sometimes military pilots fly off and purposely crash into a mountain. In that case, they never recovered any of the 4 500 pound conventional bombs the airplane was carrying: how much more exciting would it be if there were six lost nukes somewhere on land? (There are a half-dozen missing nuclear weapons in the sea, but very few have been lost on land, and they've all been mostly recovered, from what I know.)
So the contention is: reports filed with NASA are not used for FAA enforcement. However, if there is evidence that a FAR has been violated, the FAA then goes and does its own investigation, not based on the NASA ASRS but started because of the report in the ASRS, and on finding the violation of the FAR, goes after the airman. How the FAA gets the data, I don't know, but I've read several reports and talked to people who have seen this happen.
Just like how the cost of police cars makes it far too expensive to consider traffic cops, right? *Every* pilot already knows that the no-fly and ADIZ zones have 100% enforcement because of radar tracking, transponder identification, and quick response. That's why the enforcement people only need the threat of responding: as far as I know, there are currently about a dozen intercepts per year. I'm betting the US can afford 100x that much without even noticing, and if they did, they have a lot of much cheaper aircraft and helicopters they use for interception. The DEA uses armed Gulfstream jets in South America, and even an cheap Eclipse or Cessna Mustang could catch any powered lift vehicle on the drawing boards.
I don't. It's something I've read repeatedly in experimental discussions and magazines, as being a primary reason that incident reporting is hogwash: if you report that something went wrong and you made an emergency landing, the FAA will (as in has) deny you the reporting safe haven on the basis that you violated 91.119A and come after you.
I was looking while posting and found it after I'd mostly given up. Here is FAR 91.119:
"(a) Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.
(b) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.
(c) Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface, except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In those cases, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure. "
So I was double the actual requirement for both remote and congested areas.
Note if you have engine failure that requires a landing on or within 1000 feet of a building, you are automatically in violation of FAR 91.119 part A and will get busted. This has been interpreted to mean that it's functionally illegal to fly small airplanes over large cities, since you can't fly high enough to glide to a safe, legal landing.
The FAA regulations are: planes have to stay 1000 feet from any person, vehicle, or man-made obstruction in 'remote areas' and 2000 feet in 'congested areas' (meaning over towns.) If you're in controlled airspace under ATC control they'll assign you an elevation, that you have to maintain. However, if you're in controlled airspace (class C or lower) and you're not under ATC control, you're still allowed 1000ft/2000ft if you should wish. You can land anywhere you want if you have landowner permission, as long as you maintain those separations; lesser separations are allowed at airports.
I have a pilot certificate but it's been seven years since I've last flown, so it's possible I'm misremembering numbers or that the FAA has changed the regs, but that's what I recall.
>how do you set up a roadblock in the sky?
With F-16's. That's what they're doing currently in the no-fly zones over Washington DC and other parts of the country: you fly into one and you have a couple fighter jets, one on either side of you, within about two minutes. They then escort you to a local military airfield where you land. Nobody yet has decided to find out what happens if you try to run from the supersonic jet with the enormous guns in your little 120 knot Cessna.
Do it as an experimental. Sell kits that have 45% of the work finished, and detailed instructions, and let the new owner finish it, register it as an experimental, and go. The FAA still has to issue an airworthiness certificate, but the threshold for getting an AC is far, far lower than for getting FAA type approval. Plus people feel like they're getting a deal, so they're more likely to buy.
I think the problem is: where do you go to get instruction? You're not legally allowed to fly these things without a pilot certificate coz they weigh too much to fit into ultralight categories, and more critically, they're a different type of certificate. To fly a Moeller or the like, you need instruction in 'powered lift' not 'fixed wing' or 'helicopter' or even 'autogyro' -- and there are precisely two 'powered lift' vehicles in existence, the Moeller and the Osprey V-22. Nobody has flown a Moeller, and the only Ospreys are being flown by US military and Boeing/Vertol research/design people. There are no instructors and as such there is no way to get instruction, so the market for an aircraft you're not legally allowed to fly is pretty slim. Moeller has to get a dozen of these things built and four dozen certified flight instructors trained up -- when nobody has any idea of what constitutes a certified flight instructor for powered lift -- before there will be a market for his machines. IF they ever actually work.
When I got my private, I biked to lessons and locked my bike to the inside of the chainlink security perimeter fence. A standard bike fits fine in the back seat of a 172 and if you pull both wheels fits fine in the back of a 152. My then-gf (also a pilot) and I always planned to stick two mountain bikes in the back and fly to Moab and go ride Slickrock, but never got around to it.
There are plenty of very nice, fast, full-size bikes that break down, like the collapsible Slingshot (which is one of the fastest bikes I've ever ridden) and the beautiful Ritchey Breakaway (in steel and titanium framesets) or if you insist on smaller bikes, the Friday is reminiscent of a real roadbike. The Slingshot is no-compromise, though: I'd take that to a race.
I just read a superb book called "Survival Of The Sickest" that went on at *length* about parasite control of parasitized animals, from wasps that sting spiders and implant eggs, that during their development cause the spiders to weave cocoons for the hatching wasps, through the effects of toxoplasmosis on altering how mice behave so they get eaten by the toxoplasmosis host, to other things I'd never even considered. Guinea worm is this horrible disease where a worm bores through your skin with acid. It hurts, a lot, so people go find rivers and pools because the water makes it hurt less -- and the guinea worm dumps eggs as soon as it's in water, to get the next person who drinks from that water. Rabies infects brains, making animals aggressive, and also concentrates in saliva, so the aggressive animals are more likely to bite and transfer the disease. The book even went over some guidelines for predicting how lethal a disease would be, based on its mode of transmission: typically, we've thought that diseases get less lethal over time because that increases their ability to spread, but the book says it depends on the transmission path. Malaria wants -- inasmuch as a disease can want anything -- people to be very ill indeed, so that they spend lots of time not moving, giving mosquitoes a better chance of finding the people, while colds do want people to be as mildly sick as possible so they can maximize their distribution. A particularly neat case is cholera, which can be spread by human-human contact, or more usually by contamination of drinking water. In the latter case, the sicker the person, the better, because more bacteria will be voided by the person through diarrhea, while in the former case, milder infections spread more because there's longer-term contact with heath care personnel, meaning more chances to spread. Watching cholera epidemics in South America, that's exactly what they observed: in countries that were poor, where there wasn't really any official health care, the disease became progressively more lethal over time, while in countries where infected people got immediate health care, the disease got less lethal over time. It's not a bad read, although the doctor who wrote it, Sharon Morel (I believe) should've just written it, instead of hiring a ghost writer who turned it into a succession of USAToday-feeling articles.