This implies that communists would be against worker cooperatives, which isn't true in general. Marxist-Leninists are, but there are other kinds of communists, including anarcho-communists and Luxembourgists who like cooperatives just fine.

The real difference is in the ultimate goal. Communists are a subset of socialists who believe that it is possible to create a classless society, thereby resolving the class conflict once and for all, and removing the need for any form of state and societal oppression (and hence the state itself - communism is supposedly a classless and stateless socioeconomic system). They typically believe that this is only possible by undergoing through a transitional socialist period, but how that period looks varies depending on the brand of communist, and pretty much any socialist form of organization is claimed as the best by some group somewhere.

Socialists who aren't communists don't generally believe in that future perfect society, and for them socialism is a way to achieve socioeconomic justice and fairness (as they see it) here and now more so than just a means to advance to the point where said justice and fairness is inherent and self-sustaining.

I'm a liberal here in US on an H1B visa, and I'd support Sanders if I could (obviously I cannot vote, and I cannot legally contribute to his campaign). I disagree with his position on the visas, but it's one thing out of many, and there is way more important fish to fry short term.

A big part of it is support for electoral reform. I may disagree with a candidate on 99% of his platform, but if his 1% includes making it easier for me to get the candidate that I actually like into office in the future, that's the 1% I'll care about most. And this usually comes from the fringes of both left and right, from people like Pauls or Sanders.

I think that the people who are actually doing the real work here (i.e. the scientists) all have fairly realistic expectations. The rest of us can party if it makes us feel better, and it won't hurt if the end result is increased funding for science in general. And if nothing happens in the end, well, there won't be any more articles, and in a month everyone except for those genuinely interested will forget it was even there (well, there will also be the occasional science freak posting about it on Slashdot in every future story on space propulsion, but that's what Slashdot is for).

Well, except for all these.

Yes, of course. I don't support this ridiculous notion that we shouldn't try to get something useful out of the experiment just because we can't explain the theory.

Let me guess, you're still bitter from WinME?

Look at what's actually making money. Hint: it's mostly Office, not Windows, and it has been that way for many years now. Why would Office for iOS or Android, say, make any less money than Office for Windows?

Or, say, Azure. It's a money maker, despite playing catch-up with AWS.

Yeah, that's why Code runs on Linux: to let people who use Linux make apps that only run on Windows. Makes perfect sense.

If Microsoft ends up making money doing applications for Linux, it means that Microsoft has won, as well.

The nice thing about this is that there doesn't have to be a losing party.

Are you saying that you would completely ignore the repeatedly reproducible result of an experiment if there were no good theoretical physical explanation for said result?

I mean, it's your choice, but it sounds extremely stupid. If the thing works, figuring out why it works is definitely a very interesting question well worth devoting resources to, but making it useful doesn't require fully understanding the theory.

Note that this is the fifth experiment so far that has reproduced the effect (and every new experiment tries to account for some explanation that could possibly invalidate the previous one; e.g. for the last one, they ran it in vacuum).

A few physicists have already ripped it apart (and the fact that the physics is unsound is why it took so long for anyone to actually try to properly reproduce it). Basically, the thing may well work, but if it does work, it's very unlikely that the explanation that its inventor has provided is legitimate.

Of course energy has momentum. Photons, in particular, have momentum. That's why there's nothing strange about the experiment as you describe it - you increase the momentum of your rocket, but that increase is exactly counterbalanced by the momentum of the emitted photon. And when that photon hits something eventually, it will transmit its momentum to that thing etc. Overall, momentum is conserved, not just "right now", but at any future point. This doesn't seem to be the case with this engine.

I assume the question was rather whether acceleration (i.e. force) scales linearly with power input. In the experiment, it did not.

The acceleration graph is definitely not linear. They have tried to model the relation so far, and if it holds, then it will peak at about 1 newton per watt, which is insane if it really works that way - forget ion thrusters, we could throw away the car engines!

The "intended environment" is not necessarily space. If it produces thrust (which it does, since that's what they are measuring), it doesn't matter where it does that, it's still useful work that can be tapped.