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Submission + - NASA Confirms New EM Thruster Violates Laws Of Conservation

Crudely_Indecent writes: Mentioned here in a previous story ( http://slashdot.org/story/06/0... ), the EM thruster that generates thrust using no fuel, only electricity has been tested by NASA and confirmed to work!

Is this the Star Trek future tech we've been waiting for?

The NASA report titled "Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum" was published 3 days ago and can be found here: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.js... From the abstract:

This paper describes the eight-day August 2013 test campaign designed to investigate and demonstrate viability of using classical magnetoplasmadynamics to obtain a propulsive momentum transfer via the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.

Comment Re:bringing booze to a thirsty frontier (Score 1) 71

This is what I understood about the Johnny Appleseed story.

Apple seeds don't necessarily grow sweet apples. Some are sour. Modern eating apples are grafts from trees that product sweet fruit, while seedlings are a crap shoot.

Old and young alike consumed hard cider (children were given a watered down version) because of waterborne illness. You couldn't trust the water, but you could trust that your hard cider would be safe.

Comment Re:Resolution (Score 1) 316

eBay!

I got 2 Thinkpad T520 laptops (Resolution: 1920x1080) for less than $1000 (total). Granted, one had a broken keyboard + bios lock and the other a broken screen - but less than $300 in parts repaired the keyboard and screen and now I have the hardware to unlock the bios password of many thinkpad models. Still, I paid less than $1000 total for both after repairs. It can be done if you're a cheap enough bastard and are willing to put in a little effort.

Not all roses though - neither came with a hard drive or memory - so that added expense did put my total above $1000 - but I have 2 high-res laptops and I spent less than $2000 for both after adding to each a 1tb hdd and 8gb ram. It's good to have a spare.

Comment Re:Excersise for the reader: (Score -1) 409

Let the previous post serve as an example of how NOT to attempt comedy on slashdot (or anywhere else).

Some pointers for would-be comedians attempting to amuse the rest of us:

1. it should be funny
2. it should be funny to someone other than yourself (your other personalities don't count, neither does your mother - and no, combining the two won't count either)
3. humor should be involved

As a litmus test, if you think you should post as AC - it isn't nearly funny enough. True comedians want to take credit for their craft.

Comment Re:Original iPads Work Well ... (Score 3, Insightful) 386

My iPad 1 got slower and slower with each update, until IOS 5, when the updates cease. Now, many apps in the app store cannot be installed on my iPad 1 because the IOS version doesn't meet the criteria for the apps.

I keep it around because I must support iPad 1 for some of my customers, but its usefulness is fading - as designed.

Comment Re:Is anyone actually stuck on Snow Leopard? (Score 1) 241

They didn't completely remove annotation though, everything else is still there. We can still draw pretty boxes, circles, arrows and text. Those are features we don't use (often).

It just strikes me as odd that apple drops the feature, adobe drops the feature from reader, and a third party editor drops the feature - at roughly the same time.

Comment Re:Is anyone actually stuck on Snow Leopard? (Score 2) 241

We tried option B, and when the software received an update a few days later, link annotations were no longer available.

At that point, we went digging in the parts closet for the machines.

Personally, I think the Apple/Adobe relationship is driving this. Get people hooked on a feature, then yank that feature to force them to purchase an expensive product (Acrobat).

Comment Re:Is anyone actually stuck on Snow Leopard? (Score 2) 241

One piece of older OSX that is no longer in newer versions is an (apparently) often used function of Preview. The ability to add link annotations to PDF documents has been removed. You can still add text and arrows and circles (the things we don't use it for). That particular function is the most often used, but there are others.

We used it for customer reports generated in other applications. To make it easier on our customers, we would create table of contents and link it in preview before sending it out. With older Snow Leopard machines in the office, the process now must be performed on an older machine before being sent out. Of course, we are now very protective of these older machines.

Comment Re:Is anyone actually stuck on Snow Leopard? (Score 1) 241

There are reasons not to upgrade. Apple has silently removed features from OSX that my business has come to rely on. New equipment, of course, runs Lion or Mavericks - but we keep a few older machines around to do the tasks that Apple doesn't think we need to do anymore (tasks that require us to spend $2500 on software for Lion or Mavericks but could do in Snow Leopard).

Comment Re:Its too bad.. (Score 1) 357

This was done in the ancient olympic games - sort of. It wasn't really that the competitors used the same gear - they competed in the nude, covering their bodies with olive oil.

The athletes usually competed nude, not only as the weather was appropriate, but also as the festival was meant to celebrate, in part, the achievements of the human body. Olive oil was used by the competitors, not only as a substitute for soap for washing, bathing, and cleaning, but also as a natural cosmetic, to keep skin smooth, and provide an appealing look for the participants. Because the men competed nude, married women were forbidden to watch the Olympics under penalty of death.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Comment Re:It's more science than religion (Score 1) 625

The positions of the planets and angular relationships isn't science? What the hell have astronomers been doing all these years?

The portion of astrology that deals with the positions of the heavenly bodies is exactly a science, and is provable FACT. When someone is born and their sun sign is, say Aquarius - this means that the sun was in Aquarius when the person was born, which is a provable FACT.

Astronomy was born from astrology. Many of the terms still used in astronomy came from astrology (conjunction, opposition, aspect, etc.)

Astrology has one non-scientific aspect (pun intended), the assignment of meaning to planetary positions and angular relationships.

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