I was primarily reacting to rubycodez post being the 4th or 5th time he said exactly the same thing in this article.

As for Tajmar, he is not the first or the last experimenter who has been in error, it's the nature of science. Remember the FTL neutrinos? As for warp drive, I can find no reference to him making such a claim. I can't even find a wild media claim of that for him.

Agreed.

That OP is silly to call out the use of the term 'learn' for a non-sentient thing.

If it is a parlor trick, it will be more accidental than clever I suspect. Even that would teach us something new.

It's one thing to question the very preliminary theory of operation for the thing, it's quite another to demand that it is doing nothing just because it would be inconvenient.

My gut feeling is that whatever it is, it won't violate conservation of momentum.

There are, but drones are only a small part of the armed forces easily reached by radio requiring powerful jammers that would be easy targets and they're usually support for people on the ground - not necessarily your people but affiliated forces. If you want to do a door-to-door search it would be extremely hard to do that by droid remote control, no matter how many operators you have. The goal of autonomous robots is genuine remote warfare, where you have the ability to run an occupation without having boots on the ground. Apart from AI sci-fi stories we do expect somebody to give the robots commands and accept their behavior even though the robot is working out the details of who to shoot itself.

Uh-huh. Right.

You know what would be even better news for US tech hardware exporters?

If they didn't have a huge boat anchor attached in the form of NSA built-in backdoors and vulnerabilities.

Really, if you're a foreign corporation that competes in any way with US corporations/interests/research, or any government/organization/individual that US TLAs could possibly even tangentially term "of interest", would you buy stuff from US makers/manufacturers despite what's been revealed publicly over the last 20 years to present concerning US TLA activity within the US tech manufacturing/exporting industries?

Particularly in light of the recent revelations of so many unlawful and/or unconstitutional programs and activities engaged in by US intelligence organizations courtesy of the courageous whistle-blower Edward Snowden, which keep revealing new programs that violate constitutional principles and prohibitions with every new dump from the trove.

US tech companies have to overcome all that (quite understandable and logical) mistrust (good luck!), and *then* compete against other corporations that don't have that perceived millstone around their necks.

This will not turn out well for the US tech industries that need/rely on exporting their goods, and with cheap imports flowing into the US, even those who were national/regional in nature will find themselves priced out of the market.

1. Mining/Drilling - Offshored

2. Steel mfg - Offshored

3. Heavy Industries/Factories - Offshored

4. Artificial politically-motivated limits on energy production and artificially-created increases in cost.

5. ...?

I'm not liking the direction this is trending.

If it roughly parallels past similar historical scenarios, it doesn't end well for anyone in the US (well, except those 'too big to starve'), neither Left nor Right, nor atheists, Christians, Muslims, or whatever "ism" or party you favor.

Strat

Machines are said to learn, but are not sentient and do not think. Memory plastic isn't sentient either.

They push against the propellant they throw away. You should spend more time understanding what was said and less figuring out a lame excuse to say someone is wrong.

Pathogens don't "learn". They evolve, ok. They adapt, ok. But they aren't sentient. They are not thinking. And especially they aren't thinking "hey, if they vaccinate, they won't die anyway, at least not as fast, so let's get more deadly!" This isn't the fucking Pandemic flash game for crying out loud!

There is no interest of killing a host for a parasite. It's an side effect. Unintended, and actually harmful for the parasite in the long run. Just like poisoning the seas is harmful for us. We ain't some comic book villain who does it for ... well, for being evil. We do it 'cause it cuts costs. The oil spill is only the side effect, not the reason we do it.

So yes, they COULD get more deadly because we don't die as fast and a more deadly mutated strain would kill itself off with the host if there was no vaccination. But that is hardly an argument against vaccination. It only means that at worst we're with vaccination where we are now without. AT WORST. If, and only if, the pathogens mutate in such a way that they get more deadly. Which is neither in their interest nor anything they would (evolutionary) strive for.

What's the benefit for a pathogen to be more deadly? Killing the host is actually bad for it, since that ends spreading (with this host at least).

We get it, we get it. You're the god of science and he's a doodie head.

No, healthy skepticism allowed us to realize that the mass of an object won't affect it's acceleration due to gravity in a vacuum and yet not be on repeated expeditions looking for a unicorn nest. Cynicism would have us still believing that an object set into motion remains in motion until it gets tired, then it falls.

Not necessarily. Leading WAGs include that it is thrusting against dark matter or space itself. In those scenarios, momentum is still conserved.

But it's not generating thrust by microwave emission. If the thrust is of the form of action-reaction, we have yet to detect what it is pushing against. Hence the wild speculation about virtual particles or the fabric of space. Even those seem more likely than it being truly reactionless but it wouldn't be any less useful if one of those proves to be the case.

So the reproduction of the reproduction of the reproduction of the experiment still leaves you disbelieving?

I agree, a scale-up is in order so we can get a better look, but surely by now, it's clear we are looking at something new even if it's not what we think it is.