It can work if you do it right (the gravitational attraction of the shell drags the star along). But you don't need a high-temp shell for that, you need a whacking great mirror.

Refusing to allow a specific speaker is pure content-based censorship. You could argue that allowing a wanted fugitive to appear in person was a public safety issue, not content-based, but of course that's not what happened here.

Remember, the government usually has some wonderful-sounding reason for censorship - their stated intentions count for nothing, it's the result of the action that matters.

People actually believe this? Really? Game companies just want money. Gamers just want fun games. The only corner of "gaming" where misogyny can be found is Call of Duty and a handful of similar games where the player base is predominately teenage boys. That's a very small part of gaming these days.

"Gaming" is not the small "first person shooters played on consoles" games market: it's Plants v Zombies, and Candy Crush, and Angry Birds, and MMOs, and Necrodancer, and a million rogue-lite single-player games (and far too many shitty Unity-engine games and visual novels). Last time I saw the stats, the median gamer was around 30, and most game-buyers were female, and the game companies certainly know the stats.

1. RC Planes are actually quite rare, but I've nearly hit them before.

They generally fly from known airfields however, so you do learn where they operate from. From time to time, people do stupid stuff and fly them where they shouldn't.

2. Model rockets are even more rare than RC Planes are, and they tend to go a LOT higher than 500ft. They are normally only launched from specific known locations and ATC is made aware of this before hand.

3. A golf ball is unlikely to bring down a helicopter, it would be a one in a billion shot. Even if it hit it, it lacks the mass to do real damage. The drones that Amazon is talking about will be big enough and heavy enough to bring down some helicopters.

Baseballs and Skeet-shooting generally don't happen over 200ft either, and only a complete idiot shoots a gun into the air when helicopters are near, and helicopters are NOT quiet. There are also only a few outdoor gun ranges around here, I know where they are and wouldn't fly over one anyway.

That all sounds great, except that helicopter often operate at less than 500 feet above the ground.

What happens when EMS is flying at 300ft and crashes into their delivery drone?

What about law enforcement? Powerline and pipeline patrol? Aerial photography?

All of these things can and do happen at less than 500ft above the ground.

In the North East, they even harvest Christmas Trees off the side of the mountain using helicopters, and that is well under 500ft.

I've been a software dev for that long, and I've never seen an idea rejected because a woman proposed it (and I've worked in some extremely shitty places with overt racial discrimination).

You say you work "in tech"? Where? IT? Dev? Ops? Is it a regional thing?

I hear terrible things about misogyny in Ruby on Rails dev jobs, but not yet a firsthand account.

Can you share some examples or details to make your point? At least what industry and region?

So was slavery, once... does that make it "right" at the time?

Would you hang all those who helped slaves escape?

If it is wrong, then it is wrong, and no law makes it right.

If such a thing has actually been discovered, the very likely result is that it's neither "zero propellent" nor over unity, but instead has something being emitted that we don't understand.

For example, one could imagine an engine that seemed to have no propellant, but was in fact creating and emitting dark matter. On the lab bench it would be consuming energy that would be going somewhere mysterious (e.g., not heating up enough for the energy inputs), generating measurable thrust, and having no measurable propellent. Obviously that's not what's going on here, but something like that (emitting a propellent we don't know how to measure) would be the only rational explanation for any such device.

It's also theoretically possible to have a "warp" drive that produced thrust without propellent by altering the local spacetime metric. But this would not be "over unity", would be quite obvious as it would be turning local space into a lens, and likely isn't actually possible, for all that the math allows it, as you'd think we'd have seen evidence of it by now.

I guess "negative mass" drives also aren't ruled out yet, which also would have no propellent and while they are perpetual motion machines, they aren't "over unity" due to a technicality. Negative mass seems even less likely to be actually possible, despite the math allowing it, given the lack of evidence of its existence.

Particles with mass move slower than the speed of light, experience the passage of time, and can thus change state (e.g. decay). Mass-less particles move at the speed of light (when in a vacuum), do not experience the passage of time, and thus cannot change state. Photons are clearly the latter.

Oddly enough, whether a kind of particle has mass can change over time, and it's thought that all particles were massless in the very early universe. The reason the Higgs Boson discovery was exciting was that it confirmed the idea of a particle changing from mass-less to massive in the early universe (the Higgs Boson itself is pretty dull).

Because that is what people do...

Besides, if you want it to do more, then you need more power. Computers have indeed gotten much faster than they used to be...

They really haven't moved much since Vista came out. It is the other stuff that people want out of a computer. Faster storage (SSD), USB 3 support, display port, etc. Those things can be added to an older computer, but people don't tend to modify their computers, they buy new ones, use them for awhile, then give them away or sell them and buy something new.

What makes you think that people do that so easily? Lots of people were perfectly happy on XP, but at some point it was time to move on.

My Mother uses Windows 7, she doesn't see a reason to move to Windows 10 any more than she sees a reason to move to Linux. Windows 7 works just fine. Of course, since Windows 10 is now free for her, she asked me if she should make the move, to which I replied, "give it three months, let everyone else work the kinks out first".

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It is worth noting that Windows 10 actually runs quite well on a 8 year old computer. Stick a SSD in a Core2Quad and it is amazingly responsive to basic computing tasks. I have such a machine running as a test bed and frankly for what most people use their computer for, it is just fine. 4GB of RAM and a 180GB Intel SSD and it is a great machine for Windows 10.

I'm sure you do... but your circle of friends and contacts is not representative of the general public.

How do I know that? Because the desktop usage of Linux hasn't budged in a decade.

And for what it is worth, Windows is just as free, from the point of view of the average consumer. Most people get Windows with their computer and few upgrade, which is one of the reasons MS went ahead and started giving Windows away. They want to be paid when the computer is sold, but for most people, it will now be a free upgrade. You just pay again when you buy your next computer.

Linux lacks a single release, it is confusing, there are many versions, there is no one company for support, some things work better on one release or another, etc.

To the average consumer, it is just a big mess. Windows 7 is Windows 7 is Windows 7. Linux doesn't offer that.

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Look, I don't want to get into a fanboy argument, rest assured MS has done some really dumb things over the years, I'll be the first to point out that Vista was a mess at launch, they overreached and backed off to that. 8 had its own problems, partly fixed with 8.1, completely (more or less) fixed with 10.

Balmer is gone, real change is happening, these are good things. Did Linux cause them? Meh, I suspect Apple is a bigger concern for MS, but they aren't fools, they don't want anything getting in the way of Windows being on the vast majority of computers.

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To put this another way... Linux can't win by "not being Windows". It has to offer something compelling that Windows does not. To most consumers, it does not offer anything compelling and it in fact has tons of draw backs. You don't mind, you can work past them, but most people don't WANT to do that.

Also, consider that asking people to change their OS then brings up another question... "Why?"

Oh sure, YOU understand the benefits, but they don't see any. It is like saying "change the engine in your car for this other engine, it doesn't have DRM or auto-updates".

Um... so? Does the average driver care?

The vast majority of consumer electronic users just don't care, they want something that works, and the reality is that Windows works better than it really ever has.

It isn't perfect, but perfection is the enemy of "good enough", and Windows long ago passed "good enough".

Linux doesn't offer a compelling reason to change, it didn't 20 years ago, it didn't 10 years ago, and it doesn't today. Not to more than about 1.5% of desktop users anyway.

Meh, "for the most part" isn't good enough, and no, they don't really...

TurboTax doesn't run on Wine, not without some effort...

Look, I get the benefits of Linux, I really do... but they don't matter to most people, which is why "The year of the Linux desktop" remains a 20 year old joke at this point, and it is likely to remain so for a very long time.

Something might replace Windows at some point, but I doubt it will be Linux. Frankly OS X has more of a chance of that happening than Linux does.

That is sad... why do you bother to wake up in the morning then? Why not just kill yourself and leave more room for the rest of us?