::pant, pant:: Oh god, louder! LOUDER!
All right. I’ve now read both the Inside and Salon articles. One thing though–where did this meeting/demonstration w/ Jobs et al. take place? I had the feeling that it was indoors, b/c that’s where most business meetings take place. But if we’re talking about a personal flying machine, shouldn’t a demo. like that take place outside?
In other words, if the demo. DID take place indoors, that’s a point against it being a flying machine, IMO.
Don’t get me wrong. I think such things would be insanely cool and fun but the technological hurdles are HUGE. Not so much the machine itself but the infrastructure that would have to surround it.
One person flying a personal helicopter or jet pack around is one thing. However, this invention is supposed to be widely available and accepted and presumably safe.
Imagine 2,000,000 people commuting to work in a city like Chicago. They all converge on a 4 square mile area with very big buildings. It would be total chaos.
Now add in Chicago’s notoriously bad weather and add to that the weird wind currents caused by so many large buildings (it snows “up” outside my office window). More chaos.
Add to that people dodging O’Hare airport and the jet traffic lanes coming into the city. The air traffic controllers would have fits looking through the clutter of hundreds of thousands of flying machines in the air.
Now add people doing things they shouldn’t at altitude like throwing their empty Pepsi can out the window or people crashing up their and coming down as a fireball through the roof of a house. How about the guy who isn’t paying attention and smacks a high tension power line?
In order for flying machines as a practical mode of personal transportation you’d have to come up with a way to avoid all of these pitfalls. Most likely you’d have to take it 100% out of the hands of the fliers and let computers do everything and then setup air lanes (ala The Jetsons) to keep everything working properly (via GPS probably). You’d also need engines powerful enough to overcome somewhat strong wind currents and some kind of anti-collision system.
All-in-all a difficult prospect. It may come to pass someday but I don’t see a $2,000 item in a few duffel bags fitting the bill.
Which is why it would be so revolutionary that such a thing exists…
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Which is why Jobs said people would have to redesign cities to accommodate IT.
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Which is why Bezos questioned if people would even be allowed to use it, and Kemper said it was “likely to run afoul of existing regulations and or inspire new ones.”
Difficult, yes, which is why it would be so unexpected. Not impossible, though. If someone were to propose that IT stood for Instant Teleporter and involved matter transmission…well I’d have more trouble buying that. But a cheap personal flying vehicle doesn’t violate any known laws of physics. It’s just a difficult package to put together.
Also–has anyone considered trying to figure out what the code name (Ginger) refers to? Or is it just a stupid meaningless corporate code name like Apple’s Copland and Aqua and Charcoal et al?
[Homer]Da Ace on this board we obey the laws of termo-dynamics[/Homer] 
Well, his patent for the Stirling Engine is there, (see the link in my earlier post), but the flying machine seems more likely as I read this thread, and posters point out their interpretations of the ‘clues’ in the press release.
Hmmm… Well, the article did say that he put together two of them during the meeting. A transmitter and a receiver? Hmmm…
I hear what you’re saying Toadspittle and I must admit that it ‘feels’ like some kind of transportation.
Still, personal flying machines would be DOA in a large city and they specifically mentioned that this would be especially useful in a large city. There is NO way that Chicago would let several hundred thousand fliers cruise around the skies and interfere with air traffic going into O’Hare and Midway.
If Kamen has managed to put all of the things I listed in my previous post to rest easily and simply then that would be the real genius of this invention. You can already go out and by a personal ultralight plane or helicopter.
That’s another thing. What about pilot’s licenses? Unless IT flies itself.
Maybe Kamen has solved all of these problems. Maybe the solution is simple. But unless he developed a personal flying machine that flies itself through any weather condition 100% (or at least 99.9999%) safely and does not interfere with existing airports and does all of this for $2,000 then I don’t think he’ll be richer than Bill Gates in 5 years since the only people who could have one would have to live in the country and nowhere near a city and are willing to obtain a pilot’s license.
The expectations of TONS of money coming at them fast leads me to believe it has to be something that likely can get by city governments without too much trouble and something that the masses can adopt easily (and taking flying lessons doesn’t count as easy).
Perhaps it’s a giant vacuum that’ll suck the money right out of our pockets and put it into failing .com businesses.
Frankly, having Bezos impressed with something doesn’t do much for me. He runs a bookstore that sells hammers and patio furniture. I suspect it’s either a complete hoax or just to be clever, they’re making it out to be something a great deal more than it is. The cynic in me refuses to be taken in. If I learned anything from Flava Flav, it’s “Don’t believe the hype.”
Besides, we all saw what happened to Mike TV when he went through Willie Wonka’s transport device. I don’t want to end up in my mother’s pocketbook. It’s full of dirty tissues.
Has no-one a response to the Stirling Engine suggestion or a clue-in for us non-engineers on what a Stirling Engine does?
Lumpy and IJGrieve asked what a Stirling Engine is. It’s a very high efficiency, external combustion heat engine that will work on just about any heat source. I had a surprising amount of difficulty tracking down any information on the web (lots of links lead to 404s) but I finally tracked this site down which seems to do a fairly good job of explaining things. Check:
I heard that ‘it’ was a new type of fuel cell. It supposedly runs off propane and it’s so small it will eliminate the need to have power plants, engines, and the like.
It’s revolutionary because it’s self-contained and runs off renewable fuel. Something like a personal power pack you carry around like a suitcase.
Apparently, from the guy I heard it from, larger power plants have used a similar technology for a while now. This guy just happened to stream-line the technology and reduce the size considerably.
Hmmm. Didn’t see the sterling engine posts. I guess the guy I talked to was talking about that. I don’t know. All I know is the guy was getting pretty worked up about the idea.
I posted a link to a patent for a Stirling Engine. It’s on Page 1.
If it was a flying machine that didn’t fly very high that would eliminate a lot of the problems that Jeff pointed out.
- It wouldn’t get in the way of commercial air traffic.
- People wouldn’t plummet thousands of feet to their death when they ran out of gas.
- About a million safety issues would be fixed if it never got more than 10 feet of the ground.
- Some sort of hovering personal transport device would be able to be demonstrated indoors.
Also, it wouldn’t need to go 60 mph to be of use to people, especially city dwellers. Plenty of my friends who live in Chicago don’t averge more than 30 mph on their commute to work. (e.g. walk 4 blocks to the El station, wait 5 minutes, get on the El. Go two miles while with 4 or 5 stops. Get off. Walk 5 more blocks to work. Cruising to work at a steady 30 mph using your hover jet pack would beat the shit out that.)
So it could be some sort of flying device that depends on ground effect or something.
However, my money is still on IT being some sort of high tech, souped up, merkin.
I’m also wondering why everyone is assuming that a personal flying device would be cruising along with the jumbo jets…Maybe its not so much of a flying device but more like a levitation device. Maglev anyone? My money is still on Orgazmorator though.
Actually I know that they (don’t ask me who) have already made a “small” fuel cell that runs on natural gas that makes electricity. I saw it on the news the other day. A small unit is supposed to easily power a good sized house, and it was quite small.
I doubt thats “IT” since this has been in the “relative” open for quite a while now, and “IT” is still so secret.
They just did a few minutes on IT on CNBC - this feels like a media-hype-o-rama a la “cold-fusion-at-room-temperature.” Whatever IT is, how revolutionary could it be? What I would consider the biggest inventions affecting Life As We Know It (reliable electricity, clean water, various means of transportation) took years to change the landscape of cities/quality of life. IIRC, Henry Ford didn’t grow exorbinantly wealthy on his car business. I doubt anything in the earth-changing category (perpetual motion machine, infinite clean energy, etc.) could be had for 2k a pop in 2 duffel bags.
I doubt that a levitation device/flying machine would sell so well…we’re fat enough, and need some exercise.
And one other nitpick - if the price is $2k and they’ll sell out so fast as to make him richer than Bill Gates in 5 years, they will simply raise the price…open market rules.
Cynically yours,
S
Hmm…
How about a personal magnetic levitation vehicle? That would explain all the talk about “retrofitting” to accomodate the device. You’d need to lay down magnetic track or a magnetic bed, right?