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.

It sure sounds like the outcome could be cheaper, faster, more reliable and possibly even denser storage. How about a 10 TB drive that can saturate a SAS link for the price of a consumer 1 TB SSD now? It sounds appealing to have 40 TB of home storage at performance levels that would make a $200k enterprise storage buyer jealous.

Or that makes for 240 TB enterprise san shelf for the price of an existing 10 TB flash/rust hybrid shelf at speeds that will melt 16 gig fiber channel?

And who knows what value fast/cheap storage would have in terms of software applications. Maybe it would enable machine learning in more of a real-time basis by enabling analysis of vast datasets on demand.

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.

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?

Now THIS would be interesting.

Think about it, complete a Dyson's Sphere of this stuff around the sun, in time it is likely to melt a hole in it or blow out a side. When the side blows out the sun is doing what? Creating pressure in the remainder of the cylinder. Assuming we have the technology to pull this off I'm going to assume we have the technology to position the hole as we desire - a rocket propelled steerable solar system. Sure there would be planets freezing during the covered times, until they're cooked in the jet's exhaust wake during that part of their orbit, assuming they could remain in orbit, but it would be cool none the less.

> Yay! It will either get better, or finally die.

That is NOT the only option. It could get worse AND stick around for a very long time.

I want to make a boiling chamber out of this stuff for electrical generation.....

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).

Cheap ones, yes. They are especially vulnerable to tampering, just like cheap keyed locks and cheap electronic locks. Sometimes these locks can simply be opened by bouncing or hitting the safe just the right way. The more expensive locks can be defeated but it takes more time, patience and skill. You get what you pay for, and high security dial locks go from $100 to over $1000 (just for the lock).

It really depends on what you are keeping in there. Mechanical spin locks take time to open and have an extremely low Wife Acceptance Factor. Good for cash and valuables but not so good for jewelry or shared stuff, or for guns you keep for home security. Keyed locks have the disadvantage of requiring you to carry the key, and like spin locks they are not so good for stuff you may have to get out of there in a hurry, but good for cash, jewels and documents. Electronic locks are great if you need your safe open in a hurry, or where you want convenience: good for guns & car keys you want to keep safe from your kids or an amateur burglar.

It's almost like Slashdot, after helping to fight them off initially, is helping to sneak SOPA and PIPA in the back door....

Conservation of momentum is more than "new physics". It's quite fundamental, thanks to Noether's Theorem: conservation of momentum is mathematically equivalent to "the laws of physics don't vary with spatial coordinates", that is, the X, Y, and Z axes can be "zeroed" anywhere, the choice of coordinates are arbitrary as long as their consistent. The universe would be a very strange place indeed if this weren't true, and furthermore we'd have noticed by now.

So, whatever's going on here, momentum is being conserved. Just how that's happening is the curious bit. It wasn't obvious until the early 1900s that light had momentum - maybe there's something else we're missing, or maybe this really is an actual "warp" drive that locally changes the metric of space (in a way different from GR) and momentum really isn't conserved. Somehow I doubt the latter is true.

Photons have momentum, but they don't have mass. You don't technically need mass, just conservation of momentum. The key is that the thrust produced that way is very small indeed, and that's apparently not the mechanism of this drive.