"What happened to my jet pack?"

CNN.COm had an article today about science-fiction technology. It asked why we never got what was predicted, and outlined the view by author Daniel Wilson that, in many case, the overall prediction was correct, but that those predictions tend not to take into account the practicality of usage of that technology within society.

The funniest comment within the article, however, was in Wilson's example of this:

"The jet pack is a perfect example of predicting the future, Wilson says. He says the jet pack first appeared in 1928 in an Amazing Stories comic book, which featured the hero Buck Rogers zooming though the sky in a jet pack.
The jet pack was actually developed by 1961, Wilson says. An inventor mounted a rocket onto a backpack and called it a rocket belt. A variation of the rocket belt even appeared in the 1965 James Bond movie, "Thunderball."
Today, the jet pack continues to grab inventors' imaginations.
A daredevil wearing a jet pack flew across a 1,500-foot-wide canyon in Colorado in November. A Swiss pilot, dubbed "Fusion Man," flew across the English Channel last year using a single jet-propelled wing. And a New Zealand inventor recently invented a jet pack, which weighs about 250 pounds, that reportedly can run for 30 minutes.
The jet pack, though, has never really taken off, Wilson says.
The problem is its practical application.
While a rocket belt could propel a screaming human to 60 mph in seconds, its fuel lasted for only about half a minute, "which led to more screaming," Wilson says.

Hee. An hysterical mental image, there....