How far had Apple expected it to fall?

To be fair, an athlete is more likely to experience a career-ruining injury than the average worker and then be unable to continue in that career. I'm not trying to justify the insane salaries many seem to get, but can understand why they'd want to earn while they can. Of course, being responsible with those earnings would go a long way toward future financial security. (Good advice for everyone.)

Why would those insulating plates isolate the electric fields? Insulators do not stop electric fields, they stop electric current.

If you look closely you see that the aluminum 80/20 frame is sitting inside a metal chamber, which is presumably the vacuum chamber.

Agreed and this point is exactly my problem with one statement in the article:

"The magnitude [10 mN] is not important, really, since anything above zero would work in space!"

Actually it is important because it's easy to get fooled by external influences when the effect is tiny. If he was measuring 50 N of force it's easy to eliminate subtle testing artifacts, e.g., interactions with Earth's magnetic field. So in this case either scaling up to larger forces or getting into space seem like the only options.

Apologies, I said "per unit energy" there and I meant "per unit power". Point still stands, if that's what they're claiming, no more evidence needed.

I generally agree with you, but the issue I'm having with your example is that it starts with something producing a certain amount of force per watt (e.g., 1 N per W). Any example starting with that will run into the paradox that you're referring to. So the more general claim is that it's impossible to create a machine that produces a constant force per unit energy expended, correct? Are the inventors claiming their "drive" can do that? If so, I don't need any more evidence to decide that it's total nonsense.

That might be the most myopic description I've ever heard of thermodynamics. That's like saying the field of electronics is all about how electrons move through copper.

Thermodynamics is an enormous field of which gas dynamics is a very tiny fraction. More generally, thermodynamics describes how energy moves between its various forms, what factors affect those changes in form, and the fundamental laws that govern those transformations. I would even hazard to say that description itself may be too narrow.

From the scant details given, it seems the technology discussed here is about converting the energy stored in electrical fields to kinetic energy. That very much involves thermodynamics, and at least the very first law of thermodynamics, that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but only change forms.

Except for the theory parts, which can come in handy if you want to get past being just a code monkey. There's also plenty of coding done during a 4-year degree program -- at least there was in mine. And I was a grader. My OS class had us simulate an interactive operating system and another class had us write a functional linking loader, both in C. (my concentration, back in the mid '80s, was operating systems design) I also took classes using LISP, Pascal and x86 assembly (on new PCs as the printer for the IBM 370 caught fire and destroyed everything in the room the previous summer) I was also a research assistant doing programming in LISP (on a Xerox 1108) and Prolog for a NASA grant on automated programming techniques -- they wanted a grad student, but couldn't find one with LISP experience. I also ported programs, like the Franz LISP interpreter/compiler, from 4.3BSD on a VAX 11/785 to SunOS on a Sun4 and debugged lpd -- we had BSD source code. I also had a jerk system administrator on those BSD/Sun systems who made us RTFM *and* the BSD source code before he would answer even the simplest question -- and I have to thank him for that very much.

Pretty sure you're not going to get all that at a six-month coding boot camp. People keep dismissing the value of a 4-year CS degree, but a lot of you get out of it is what you're willing to put into it.

Con or not, some of this is on the students. I mean, those companies aren't really known for hiring people with only a few months of coding training and a half-year Web/VoTech degree. That said, taking advantage of their gullibility and/or desperation isn't cool.

[insert Trump jokes here]

Predicting companies/contractors will buy data and *donate* it to the Government, or let them access it for free. Problem solved.

Noting that Trump didn't actually buy his stock so no matter how low it goes he won't lose any money. Other shareholders, on the other hand ...

Small-time investors in Trump’s Truth Social reckon with stock collapse.

Several people have a majority of their money invested in this stock and one guy has invested his whole "nest egg" -- $25,000 -- and wants to buy more. He believes the stock could "go to $1,000 a share, easy." I wish him luck.

President Biden remarked in his hometown of Scranton, Pa on April 16: