Be glad that you've never been in the corporate world at a level to watch the incompetent sychophants rise despite clear reasoning why they should be let go (much less 'not promoted.')

I've seen mid-level executives receive promotions for 'not being in the red' because for the three years they ran a division they re-org'd every year because the years you perform a re-org your numbers were given HUGE discrepancy allowances. One guy lost more than 10 million (on a budget of 7 million) a year for 3 years in a row and was promoted - through this trick.

Worse, I've known people who were CTOs of actual Silicon Valley tech companies (not huge ones, but worth a couple of hundred millions dollars) who DID NOT KNOW WHAT TCP/IP WAS OR WHAT A SOCKET WAS. Not CIOs, or CISO - CTO. It's okay though, he looked the part, and he said yes all the time.

Crazy man. Crazy.

Jesus H you're dishonest. They HOPE to use it to propel objects from LEO to GEO. The reason that NASA is looking into this is in the HOPE that it bears fruit. NOBODY said they WILL be able to make a starship with it.

Some of the statements get rather ambitious, but they aren't statements of fact they're suggestions about what COULD be possible if this pans out.

Why do you keep saying this? They aren't giving an answer. They don't understand why it works, they clearly suggest that we should figure out why it does...

You seem to be building a straw man argument so you can rant about the COM.

That's just silly. The people reporting this observable phenomenon do not claim to understand why this happens - in fact the point of the article is that we should strive to understand why this works.

Just because YOU don't understand why this works doesn't mean that they are claiming to be violating the conservation of momentum - especially since they are not. Most especially because there's a clear expenditure of input energy - a grossly inefficient (it would seem) one.

So... You're now arguing that you can violate the conservation of momentum. Interesting.

...what they want.

If you're a company producing "division" size software and you don't know what you want - Agile isn't going to save you - it's going to obscure your problems.

IBM - stop hiring PROJECT managers as PRODUCT managers and get some domain experts for the software you wish to build and have them be your product managers. You might, just might, get a clue as to what your software should be doing.

Not at all, because Jumbo jets don't automatically talk to each other and make autonomous decisions on that data. You can, at certain times during the flight, engage aspects of such systems but they require human interaction.

...is that people like this don't realize the implications of technology on his 'fantasy' of how things could be.

I don't want my autonomous car talking to ANYTHING that I don't control/manage/filter. I don't care what some unknown car reported, I don't trust that car. I'm no member of the tinfoil hat brigade, but I do work in software security and I assure you - IT IS INSANE to presume that ANY automaker is going to produce software that isn't trivially easy to pwn in the next decade. They all roll their own solutions (or have someone produce a custom solution) and using cryptography as an example - don't roll your own, even if you *really* know what you're doing, you're likely to regret it.

- Boy are YOU an optimist...

Okay children, I'm going to teach you this command explicitly so that you know what you never, ever, EVER - wake up little Johnny - what was I saying? Oh yeah, ever, ever use it.

Seriously. Don't use it.