Don't be put off by the clueless submitter. This is actually a really cool project that goes way beyond existing types of automation. This quote, for example, gives a sense of the kinds of things they're trying to enable:

Here's one they don't include: totallyweirdsounds.com (all Tuvan throat singing, all the time!) Never heard of it? Of course not, I just made it up. But suppose I wanted to start that site. Millions of T-Mobile users would say, "If I use your service, it'll eat through my data cap, but if I get my Tuvan throat singing from Spotify it doesn't." I'd be at a huge disadvantage.

Net neutrality is about providing a level playing field. Not just for established companies, but for everyone. Maybe T-Mobile is doing this with good intentions, but they're creating a barrier to any new music streaming service that comes along. Besides, if they want to raise their customers' data caps (which is effectively what they're doing), why not let customers use that data however they want?

And it's not like they even have all the major services. Google Play Music? Nope. TuneIn? Nope. SoundCloud? Nope. Those, perhaps by coincidence, are precisely the services I stream music from most often.

Congratulations, you're being a troll. They managed to take their existing app written for a completely different platform, and port it to the web in a way that runs flawlessly on my four year old laptop. Without having to rewrite the whole thing by hand in Javascript. I'd call that a big win, and a really cool achievement.

Exactly! Computer Science != Software Engineering. Yes, a software engineer needs a solid knowledge of computer science, just as an electrical engineer needs a solid knowledge of physics. But a degree in CS doesn't prepare you to be a software engineer any more than a degree in physics prepares you to be an electrical engineer.

In my experience, people who get to college and decide, "Computer science seems like a good career, so I guess I'll major in that," tend to become bad programmers. People who major in CS because they love computers and have been programming for fun since they were 12 tend to become good programmers. They're motivated to learn on their own all the things their CS classes don't cover, and likely have already learned a lot of them before they even get to college.

There are some schools that actually offer degrees in Software Engineering. But I don't think I've ever known someone with one of those degrees, so I don't know whether they do a better job of training good programmers.

Everyone I've known from Singapore has been very clear about this: they did not "consciously choose" to surrender civil liberties. They were never given any choice in the matter. They were very unhappy about the lack of civil liberties there and wanted it to change.

Perhaps the people I've known were not representative of Singapore in general. But even so, it's manifestly absurd to claim they consciously chose something they have never been given any choice about and have no power to change.

That's doublespeak. No one who believes in it claims it's a free energy machine. Ok, you are free to announce, "It's a free energy machine, therefore it can't exist!". But since you don't have any evidence to support your claim, that's meaningless. Either it works or it doesn't. If it does work, it almost certainly is not a free energy machine. No one has presented any evidence to indicate it doesn't conserve energy. If you make that claim anyway, it just shows you're making claims that aren't based on evidence. It tells us nothing about whether this device actually works or not.

The only thing that's hard to get your head around is that you just made two assumptions that directly contradict each other. Conservation of momentum follows from Newton's laws of motion. If you assume momentum is not conserved, you aren't allowed to use Newton's laws anymore. But that's what you just did. You first assumed the existence of a phenomenon that violates Newton's laws, and then immediately started applying Newton's laws as if they were valid. If you make two assumptions that contradict each other, all your conclusions are invalid.

Same as above. Or to summarize:

Scientists: "Experiments indicate this device seems to work. We're not absolutely convinced yet, and we don't completely understand the mechanism. But if it really does work, we're pretty darn sure it must conserve energy and momentum."

You: "This device doesn't conserve energy or momentum. (Because, well, I just know it doesn't, even though I don't have any evidence to prove it.) Therefore it can't work."

Now you're just making things up. There is no difference between "virtual" particles and "real" particles. They obey exactly the same physics. If a particle/antiparticle pair is created out of the vacuum and then is annihilated without ever being observed, we call them "virtual" particles. But while they exist, they can interact with other particles, and they interact in precisely the same way other particles do. Furthermore, that interaction can sometimes prevent them from annihilating each other, in which case we say they have become "real" particles that were created out of the vacuum by the energy of the interaction.

Actually, the whole concept of "virtual particles" is just an artifact of the mathematics: we don't know how to describe the true vacuum state, so we use perturbation theory to write an infinite series describing how it differs from another state we do know how to describe. And we call the terms in that infinite series "particles".

All of which is really completely irrelevant to the question at hand. A particle/antiparticle pair initially has zero momentum, but they absolutely can interact with other particles, and that interaction can impart momentum to them.

Wow, that was wrong in so many ways.

1. There is no such thing as a "free energy machine".

2. No one is claiming this device is a "free energy machine". You have to put energy in as electricity, and you don't get more energy out than you put in.

3. No one is claiming this device is "reactionless". There's ongoing discussion about the exact mechanism (assuming it actually works). They suggest it may be pushing against space itself, somewhat analogously to how a swimmer pushes against the water they're swimming through. But if it actually does work, it almost certainly conserves momentum.

4. In any case, conservation of momentum and conservation of energy are independent conservation laws that come from different symmetries of the universe. If one turned out to be wrong, that wouldn't automatically mean the other was wrong too.

Only about 10% of drugs that enter clinical trials end up getting approved. "effective in monkeys" != "effective in humans".

The only novel thing is that they're bringing a highly contagious patient on an airplane half way around the world. If you think that's no more risky than bringing an inert, freeze dried sample in a tightly sealed container, well, trust me, it is.

Of course, I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong. Unless the plane crashes. Or experiences mechanical problems and has to make an unplanned landing. Or any of lots of other things that could go wrong, does.

Unfortunately, even though you wouldn't have to supply propellant, you would still need to supply the energy to accelerate it. After accelerating for one year, your potato's kinetic energy is 1.8e12 Joules. That's a lot of energy. Initially you can stick a solar panel on it to power the drive, but once you're out of the inner solar system that won't work any more.

No, we didn't.

Prior to the first gulf war (the one in the early 90s), Iraq had a chemical weapons program. After the war, that was shut down and most of their stocks destroyed. When the inspectors came through after the second gulf war (the one in the early 2000s), they came across old shells on which they found residue of chemical weapons, indicating that a decade earlier they had once contained chemical weapons. They found no evidence that Iraq had actually restarted its chemical weapons program, or had any significant stock of chemical weapons.

If you claim they found anything more than that, please provide a citation.

Is this supposed to be a bad thing? Why? This post seems to imply that your entire career should be determined by your major in college. Thank goodness that isn't true. How many people really know what they want to do at age 20? Lots of people change fields several times over their careers.

The mercury released into the atmosphere by using an incandescent is more than what's released by using a CFL. Incandescents don't contain mercury, but coal does, and a lot of the world's electricity comes from burning coal. Then of course, if you recycle your CFLs instead of putting them in the garbage, that means even less mercury in the environment.

It would at least prevent another American company from challenging them. Presumably the eventual goal would be to get other countries to sign on too. Since it's likely to be several years before any actual mining takes place, there's still time to deal with that.

Seriously. If there is one thing most smart people have in common, it's that they are not in Mensa.

I went to an Ivy League college. I work in an elite university. There are two Nobel laureates on my floor. I spend my days surrounded by certifiably Very Smart People.

I don't know a single person who belongs to Mensa. Most of the people I know would laugh at the idea of joining Mensa. They don't need to join an organization to show off how smart they are. Everyone already knows they're smart. They don't need to join an organization to find other smart people. They spend their days surrounded by smart people, because they work in fields that require intelligence.