Not true. It's true that there are some people who cannot be vaccinated, and those people are helped by other people being vaccinated. Aside from those people, vaccines are not 100% effective. Some portion of the people who are vaccinated may still get sick if exposed to the virus, and those people are also protected by other people getting vaccinated.

In both of these cases, you can say, "it's a small percentage of the population." Small percentages of the population, however, can still represent a lot of people. If something kills 1% of the US population, that's still about 3 million people.

It's worth noting that there's a big difference between those theories and this engine. With this engine, they're putting forward a piece of technology and saying, "We don't know how this works, but we're claiming it does." In the case of Newton and Einstein, they put forward a mathematical model that was internally consistent, and the question was whether it applied to reality.

So in one case, they're putting forward a technology without a real explanation as to how it works, and in the other case, they're putting forward a coherent theory that seems to explain phenomena that we have witnessed. Also, both Newton and Einstein's theories had the benefit of providing a clean explanation to phenomena that we were having a lot of trouble explaining.

I had to look deeper to see that you are correct. There _have_ been several NASA published designs using microwaves or other EM for ordinary thrust, I'm afraid I thought the original article concerned one of those.

On review, as I mentioned elsewhere, I'll bet that this is really a "Dean Drive". The Dean Drive never worked well outside the designer's workshop, was never tested properly with a basic "pendulum" test, and seems to have been a basic "oscillation thruster": it interacted with the floor under it to provide net thrust. That would mean the system is not really "sealed", it's interacting with its environment in some subtle way.

From the description at http://motherboard.vice.com/re..., I'd guess EM interaction with the walls of the stainless steel vacuum chamber. And one of hte people I'd want to review the experiment would be James Randi, who's been helping debunk "mysterious mental force" claims for decades, and has a professional magician's eye for misdirection and sleight of hand.

> evolution does not consider risks and benefits, changes are random

Interestingly, not all changes are random. There are some fascinating changes in DNA triggered by environment, many of them studied as "epigenetics". And there are certainly changes in organisms that are defensive responses to environment. The darkening of skin under sunlight is a classic example. Evolution occurs at _many_ levels. These include environmental, biological, behavioral, cultural.

> The only group that is really helped by other people's vaccinations is a small percentage of the population that cannot get vaccinated.

You obviously don't remember polio. I do. You apparently also don't remember when the flu killed so many people in winter, and fail to understand how modern cities and especially air traffic make pandemics far more likely and far more dangerous.

Correct. Only a government entity (such as the city) must allow you equal access to their public resources (such as this park) without using forceful intervention (such as sending in police) to suppress it.

Free speech is about the speech, not the person speaking. Otherwise we should not have any problem, e.g., banning Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. After all, Marx is dead -- and was never a citizen -- so surely his right to free speech would not be infringed by the ban.

There was a similar set of claims roughly 60 years ago for the "Dean Drive" a "reactionless drive" that did not seem to use propellant. To casual review, and letting it push your hand, it seemed to work, and a great campaign for research and to ignore the sceptics of the time was headed by John W. Campbell, the editor of Analog magazine. Analog was, and remains, a science fiction magazine specializing in hard science and science fiction based on it, and it had many real scientists as readers and contributors, so the Dean Drive received quite a lot of attention.

The Dean Drive has since been pretty thoroughly debunked as an "oscillation thruster", a device that relies on tuned "slipping" on the floor it rests on to creep forward and even to provide a modest thrust, _pushing against the floor_. The designer was never willing to allow a full "pendulum" test, or careful testing outside of his own workshop, and there seem to be dozens more of similarly patented "reactonless drives". The ones that work at all also seem to be "isicllation thrusters", pushing against the floor or the mehanism in which they are mounted.

> As an added added bonus, such a drive would accelerate faster at a given thrust, because of the absence of reaction mass.

If only they didn't require an actual motor, or storage system for the energy for the microwaves. Since the maximum _chemical_ energy available in batteries is quite close to that of a good chemical propellant, it's only a big benefit if the energy for it comes from elsewhere, such as solar cells or a quite large nuclear power source. And if you have low mass space based solar cells, you can use either a solar _sail_ based system, or a transmission base to propel target spacecraft with a larger, more stable microwave source.

The "propellant" is the microwaves, which carry momentum. They don't have to have _rest_ mess, but they still are a measurable propellant.

That actually seems quite reasonable. Just about everybody's got a cell phone. Why send out a fob for every site that needs protection? Sounds like two-factor to me.

The Founding Fathers explicitly made the Senate a "house of the States", where Senators, essentially acting as agents of the state legislatures, had the power to amend or veto bills produced in the House of Representatives. However, being unelected, Senators while enjoying greater prestige than Representatives, were also in a position where their powers were not democratically derived. The "check" as it were on the Senate was that any significant interference in bills would inevitably be viewed somewhat more dimly, which is how it has worked out in most Westminster parliaments.

With the 17th Amendment, the Senate gained the democratic legitimacy which in facts leads to the greater possibility of this seeming end-run around the requirement that money bills originate in the House. You don't really find this happening overly much in Canada, where the lack of democratic legitimacy means that Senators usually do not feel they have the right to alter taxation or spending bills. In the UK, of course, explicit measures were put in place in the 1911 and 1949 Parliament Acts that heavily restrict the House of Lords' ability to tamper with such bills.

I think some of the skepticism is not as to whether this might be an engine that produces some small amount of thrust. I mean, a little skepticism is a healthy response for any new scientific discovery, and it's not inappropriate to ask for proof. Since the thrust we're talking about is so small, the margin of error is large, and proving that it really works takes a bit of doing. I don't assume that it works, but I also don't really disbelieve it if NASA scientists say it does.

However, when this was reported, it was reported in many places as "OMG! NASA has created a warp drive. We can go faster than light now!" I'm skeptical about those claims.

It's similar to the situation at the end of WWI. Versailles called for wide-ranging disarmament among all the belligerents, which was all well and good in theory. In reality, of course, a great deal of the R&D that had gone into new weaponry; tanks, planes, ship designs, and so forth, still existed. In fact, the most valuable commodity of all, the German plans for the 1919 campaign that never was, still sat in archives, just waiting for someone to come along and dust them off.

The cat is out of the bag, has been out of the bag for a few decades now. When most of us look at devices like Mars Rovers, we're impressed by the technology and science, and yet that very same technology is easily adaptable to building autonomous weapons. Even if the Great Powers agreed, you can be darned sure they would still have labs building prototypes, and if the need arose, manufacturing could begin quickly.