The first thought I had was that I hope they don't do it because it'll only be used to invade our privacy.

LK

Wait, what's this slope I'm sliding down? Where did this come from? It sure is slippery!

Oddly enough, I've always been able to hear my SSDs (of various brands) when they were accessed, at least in a quiet room. I've always wondered why.

This is why there are different states! Intelligent people can disagree on such issues - go live in a state whose laws you agree with. Trying to force your personal idea of what's rght on everyone everywhere is totalitarianism (with a large dose of intellectual arrogance).

IR seekers are really easy to make and it's a fun robotics project. Simple to do with analog controls even (the principle is so easy it was highly classified for years). Launch your rocket into the Sun every time.

Tracking a specific target instead of the brightest heat source is much, much harder, but if the drone is the only dark spot in the field of view of the camera, that should be do-able. Fun to try, anyhow.

Are you thinking of a wormhole, not a warp drive? I'm not talking about a Star Trek FTL drive, but instead a device that warps space, just like gravity does, but asymmetrically. I don't believe it's possible either, but it's still allowed by accepted physics, and it wouldn't require lots of mass.

I don't think we'll know enough about this concept, or about negative mass, to rule them out until we finally understand how mass is quantized, or, rather, where rest mass comes from in the first place. Maybe when quantum gravity is finally understood there will finally be an explanation for rest mass, but maybe it's even further down the road.

Heck, we can't even measure the rest masses of quarks accurately -- not even one significant digit in some cases -- let along explain the values There's lots of physics left to be done there.

The math of modern physics has been shockingly predictive. All sorts of crazy shit has turned out to be true - so much so that people believed in String Theory for 20 years with no evidence whatsoever (and some still cling to that belief). Those people aren't stupid: "following the math" has a really good track record. It's best to keep an open mind until we get better theories.

You realize it was the church, not the unions, that prevented the 7-day workweek for most of Western history, right?

,,,the future we want.

I have a strong aversion to XOR hacks (and bithacks in general) because of the freaking crazy precedence the operator has in C/C++. Fine for well-reviewed library code, but I cringe when I see it used offhandedly for terseness.

// If foo is green, handle the green case
if (foo & COLOR_BITS == GREEN) { ... }

Eesh - that can be a frustrating bug at 3AM when you don't see the problem reading through the code, and it's working fine for some cases.

Of course, if you're only using ^ on Boolean values, then fine, I'm with you. I've never seen anyone do

if (GREEN == foo ^ RED == bar) { ... }

like that without parens, but at least it would do the expected thing.

Strangely enough, I do in fact have toilets and breaks at work, and I don't have mafia thugs stealing a portion of every paycheck. This isn't the 1800s, and a union has no place among professionals.

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.

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?

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.