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Comment To answer my own questions. (Score 2) 480

I followed the "thread 2" forum for a while. It appears that the effect they are seeing is approximately 2 micronewtons. That's a pretty small effect. This comment was interesting:

I can attest that it is not thermal. It works in a vacuum. It works in a Faraday cage and it works when you reverse the device (the thrust reverses).

Comment Re:I want this to be true, but... (Score 1) 480

from what i recall , it does not defy the laws of physics , it uses a traveling em wave to crate "grip" to the static universal em background field , this method provides thrust from input power by creating a traveling wave that is out of phase to the external one causing motion , like swimming through the background field using the background field to displace it like a phase drive motor , just that its too easy to miss in the maths

The problem is that theoretically, there is no "background field" to "grip". You appear to be proposing a "universal aether" or maybe "phlogiston". Those aren't exactly groundbreaking ideas.

According to theory the quantum vacuum has virtual particles in it, but that doesn't make it a "fabric" to grip or push against.

I am interested to see what kind of thrust they DO claim to have gotten this time. And I am also curious why they chose to use a lower-power source, rather than trying to replicate the original experiments.

Comment Re:Won't work for long... (Score 1) 65

a mouse driver can be modified to filter through the cheat software before moving onto the anti-cheat device, then the game, etc... the time-shift wouldn't be really large enough to alert anyone (and might even help emulate a 'human' factor into the cheat, thereby saving you from writing in a few random delays). Same w/ the keyboard, come to think of it...

Comment Re:I don't understand (Score 2) 65

...shouldn't tournament organizers provide and lock-down the machines that people play on?

This, right here. Wanna play for money? Use our computers - each one is normalized, matched, patched, and clean of everything but the game... hell, fill the USB and other ports with epoxy if you're worried about someone sneaking in a geek stick with cheats, and proxy the hell out of it to prevent Internet access. Allow players to configure the game through the UI if they want, but otherwise no other action allowed outside of the game itself, and seal the cases with tamper-evident tape.

The only possible obstacle is from players who demand to use customized config files for their game of choice. Example: the Quake 2/3 WeaponsFactory** MOD relied *very* heavily on players using fairly heavily modified key/mouse mapping configs, because otherwise you'd never be able to do much in the game - it was that complex when using some of its team characters for best effect.

Of course, the tournament could audit the config files to insure no cheating, but there's a lot of gray area in there (e.g. having a specific combination of player events tied to one key or click that can perform fairly incredible stunts, etc).

** WeaponsFactory was the Quake2 answer to the lack of Team Fortress in that game version.

Comment Won't work for long... (Score 2) 65

Sorry, but a hardware-based solution isn't going to be much different.

I say this because for years, software applications like 3DS Max/Viz required a hardware dongle latched onto the back of one's workstation before the app would even launch (it was replaced by a software version of C_DILLA eventually). Before and after, it was almost trivial to emulate the hardware, its responses, and 'plug' the emulated hardware into a virtual port. Today, most mobos don't have as much variety of hardware I/O (you're lucky to find a serial port nowadays), which probably means USB, HDMI, or Thunderbolt... and the original 3DS dongle required a parallel port, FFS.

Even comparisons of input-to-screen don't mean much, because the eventual circumvention/cheat will emulate one, the other, or both, and send the 'results' to who/whatever is monitoring the user's gameplay.

Furthermore, I daresay that once money gets involved (via eSports), the incentive to built/implement a seamless means of circumventing the cheat-detector will be far greater than the motivation of some asshat griefer who wants to punk on a few pub server players.

Comment Re:Never a good idea (Score 2) 105

You mean how scientists don't fully understand the brain, but yet we have brain surgery right?

If a brain surgery fails, one person either has his life screwed-up, he gets killed, he becomes crippled, or nothing happens but at great expense to find out. Either way, it only affects one person.

If geoengineering fails, every human being in current existence has their lives screwed-up, get killed, becomes inhabitants of a crippled ecosystem, or nothing happens but at incredibly greater expense to find out. Either way, it affects everyone.

The greater the potential/actual impact, the greater the caution required. A brain surgeon can try a failed experimental procedure again on some other person. No one among the budding geoengineers seem to have a spare Earth on hand for some odd reason.

Comment Re:This again? (Score 5, Insightful) 480

Let's see: we can violate conservation of momentum by invoking some sort of vaguely defined quantum woo. Riiiight. Where do I send my check?

The practical result says that it works anyway.

I suspect that there is a balance in physics somewhere... just that no one knows where or what that is yet.

I am kind of curious though - does it have the acceleration curve of a VASMIR/Ion engine, or can we build something with it that will give greater speed in less time?

(...also, is the acceleration graph linear, curved sharply in either direction, hits a curve at a certain point... what?)

Comment Re:What They Don't Say (Score 3, Funny) 174

Think of it this way... psychology is the 1960-70's equivalent of today's MBA, and have many similarities:

* neither has an objective means of measuring success or failure, in spite of claiming to have a wide array of methods by which to do so.
* neither the psychologist or the MBA is held accountable for incompetence or non-criminal malice.
* sometimes either one can take on the semblance of religion, minus a deity.
* the big 'do-nothing-but-are-promised-great-riches' degree of the 60's-80's was psychology, as hordes of students took that class thinking just that. In the 90's through today it's the MBA program.
* both can stretch logic and credulity in their work to attempt things that would get an engineer either incarcerated or killed.

(...add your own here...)

(Trigger warning for the MBAs and Psych majors: this is what is known as a joke.)

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