Not really. He's got a PhD in physics but hasn't published anything since 2008. From his CV it looks like he got his PhD, did some postdoc, then got an education degree. Forbes says he's a professor, but it looks like a teaching position at a college.

He does write a blog with a very irritating style.

Currently the only way we know to bend space is through gravity, which is inconvenient because, as far as we know, you need a LOT of mass to do anything significant. If you really can bend space with a few hundred watts worth of microwaves, that's a really giant step towards actually building a warp drive. The tin can they're testing might not go flying away faster than light, but if the effect is real it brings a warp drive out of the realm of mathematical possibility into the arena of engineering possibility.

The inventor of the EM drive, Sawyer, says he got about 0.1 N, and the Chinese say they got about 3/4 of a N. The NASA group was testing a very similar device invented by a different guy that Sawyer says is nothing but an inefficient EM drive.

It would be nice if NASA built something to Sawyer's specifications to test. 1 N of thrust is pretty easy to measure. 1 N / kW is pretty hard to get by experimental error.

If the EM drive really is warping space, then that's the mechanism you use to warp space.

You have to read the articles all the way to the end.

The NASA group shot the beam of an interferometer through the device while it was running and says they got readings that look like spatial distortion. If it's true, it would be a giant step towards building a warp drive.

There are two factors. A propellantless drive (regardless of whether it is actually reactionless or not) gives you the ability to make a ship with enormous delta-V. That lets you go really fast if you want to.

Secondly, the NASA group is reporting the possibility of some distortion of space. If you can distort space in the right way you can make the distance you have to travel shorter. While you don't technically go faster than light, because you're travelling a shorter distance the overall effect is that you could make a trip to another star faster than light could do it.

That's not correct. Their original test involved three models - (1) one that was designed to provide no thrust, (2) one that was missing a particular feature a particular person claimed was necessary to produce thrust, and (3) one that had all the design features recommended.

(1) produced no thrust, as expected. (2) and (3) both produced equivalent thrust, showing that one particular theory was incorrect.

The NASA group has created a model that assumes the EM drive is a magnetohydrodynamic drive using virtual particles as propellant. Their model makes predictions about the thrust to power curve, including that it has a peak efficiency. They're building a variable power prototype to test it.

It was almost a postscript in the NASA article, but they fired the laser beam of an interferometer through it and got some anomalous readings, as if it were warping space. Being able to warp space is required for the best current idea for how to travel faster than light.

Just read the rest of the comments. Slashdot is a hotbed of programmers who think they're god and everyone else sucks. They also argue that programming is some kind of talent you're born with.

I teach programming mostly to people you wouldn't expect. Anybody can learn and, just like any other skill, their ability is mostly determined by the time and motivation they put in. Learning programming is even easier than a lot of academic subjects because there's instant, fairly unambiguous feedback.

Are you saying Americans would be happier if you broke up the country?

As a whole, the EU is similar to the US in population and geographical size but is older and more socialist. Canada is also on the happiest list. It's also a nation of immigrants, quite a bit younger than the US, and similar in geographic size, although about 1/10th the population. Also much more socialist than the US.

The OP is correct, the common factor seems to be the type of economic system.

Debt is okay if you use it to invest in things that will make you more money than the interest payments. Since the US also has a large deficit, and the debt to GDP ratio has been rising for the last thirty years, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Many modern AI methods take advantage of unsupervised learning. Not only do they not need to know what the rules are, they don't even need to know the right answer most of the time. There are successful demonstrations of such algorithms learning to play Nintendo from watching people play, and Google's deep learning network learning the concept of "cat" from watching YouTube videos. I also remember a paper looking at recognizing melodies played in different keys.

Your knowledge of AI is a couple of decades out of date.

Possibly momentum imparted to virtual particles can be transmitted through the EM quantum field, eventually being imparted to any real matter along the way.

The article talks about a model made by the NASA group assuming acceleration of virtual particles. It suggests greater than linear thrust to power ratios with increasing power, up to an optimum. Presumably the details would also depend on the type of device, frequency of microwave, etc.