That may be correct but the article you linked has an incredibly misleading title. This process does not convert photons into electrons it simply imparts the photon's energy to one or more electrons which, in the case of thrust, causes them to be ejected from the graphite. The coupling of electrons to photons is extremely well understood, in fact it is the second most accurately tested scientific theory ever discovered (the first being special relativity). The only way to create electrons from photons is to also create an equal number of positrons. However this requires far higher energy processes ~1 MeV of energy which is many orders of magnitude higher than the energies involved in visible light and would easily break apart graphite which is something they ruled out.

They could easily come from all the material which is surrounding the graphite. As the charge builds up on the graphite due to all the electrons being expelled it will develop an increasingly strong electric field eventually will pull electrons from the walls of the chamber. Since the vacuum will also not be perfect the remaining gas molecules could also transfer charge by moving back and forth between the graphite and the chamber walls.

A similar effect exists in the LHC where the electrons are 'helped' to leave the walls by synchrotron radiation hitting the walls of the beam pipe and are then dragged along by the electric field of a bunch of protons forming a electron cloud. This effect is one of the primary limiting factors on the number of protons we can have in an LHC beam.

Actually this could provide more thrust. Use sunlight to propel the craft until it has built up a large enough electric charge that the efficiency of the thrust begins to drop (since it will take an increasing amount of energy to expel the electrons from something with a large positive charge) and then introduce a stream of neutral gas into the sponge. This should strip the electrons off the gas and the remaining positively charge ions will then be repelled by the positive graphite and provide even more thrust.

Of course this means that you need to have a fuel source but it's likely to be far more efficient than current rocket fuel plus there it no need for it to be something explosive like hydrogen - you could probably use Xenon which is a noble gas and so extremely inert and so a lot safer.

The one advantage we have with Netflix over broadcast stations is that it is on demand and, like websites, it is conceivable that if the ads become obnoxious it will motivate someone to provide a plugin to Ad Blocker to deal with them like there is for YouTube.

Actually if that is done well then I don't mind it at all since it is almost invisible. However when done badly it is the most obnoxious of all advertizing since it is impossible to avoid as it is part of the show.

In other words, within a year or two we will be rolling out ads that you will be forced to watch before you can view the programming you pay a subscription fee for.

Granted, I run Minecraft with a ginormous amount of mods, but is there any reason I have to give 5GB to a game that should have ridiculously low resource requirements based on what it is actually doing?

I thought I covered the independent under "socialist". Which he actually is, I'm not just calling him names. Unless I missed another independent in there.

And yes, there do tend to be some different people early in the process. They usually either have no chance, they have one idea and one idea only, or they have a completely impractical platform. Although they're colorful for about five minutes, I think that they'd actually be worse than the retreads, for the most part.

I don't mind bland candidates, I mind that the candidates that we have because they're both bland and only vaguely competent.

Except that it isn't an instant. Insulin takes effect pretty darned quickly. Thyroid changes can take days or weeks, and the synthetic hormones themselves actually have to be taken under specific circumstances, as absorption into the blood stream orally requires no significant intake of food. My wife takes her medication early in the morning and then cannot eat for something like three hours.

Having an artificial thyroid that would more closely monitor TSH (thyroid-stimulating hormone, the way your body monitors and adjusts thyroid hormone levels is complex) and adjust actual thyroid hormone levels directly would be far better in the long run.

Yea, managed by assholes like that ... Knowing how they already treat their employees/drivers ...

They didn't get top researchers, that got the idiots to stupid to realize how much your fucking yourself over by willingly going to work for Uber.

Are you really that stupid? You think leaving a stable Uni to go work for "the most punchable management shit weasels" is a smart plan? You think they'll follow through on all their promises and standard social contracts for these guys ... But otherwise will shit on all the rest of society world wide?

There's a VERY solid chance uber won't exist in a couple years when governments finally get tired of their bullshit and fine them into oblivion ... At which point your just fucked because everyone else in your field knows about the morons who jumped ship for a big paycheck at a really shitty company.

Pretty amazing advance. Now I wish they'd do the same for the thyroid. My wife had hers removed due to cancer nine years ago, and has to manage her thyroid levels via synthetic thyroid hormone pills, which, while effective, are crude and require regular testing to make sure she's not hyperthyroidic or hyothyroidic.

"The Supreme Court doesn't accept my legal genius, therefore the Supreme Court is wrong, and I remain the greatest constitutional expert EVERRR!!!!"

Internet trolls and other hyperbolic posters have been around as long as the Internet was around. I remember when I first started posting one Usenet in the very early 1990s (1990-91 or so), that there were many flamewars that ended with everything from legal threats to, at least in one case, a poster threatening to show up at another poster's house and beat him senseless, and in those days many of us actually had our home addresses in our bloody sigs! I don't think anyone ever really took it seriously, even when the poster making the threats was a net kook (and ye olden days there were some legendary kooks, particularly in places like talk.origins). People, particularly when shrouded in anonymity, behave in ways that they would never dream of behaving in person, which to my mind is a key to the notion that most of even the vilest trolls are really just assholes letting off steam in public forums.

I'm not saying that all conduct on the Internet should be protected, but I think we have to accept that anonymity and instant communications from any corner of the globe creates a somewhat different situation. I've personally been threatened with bodily harm a couple of times in the over a quarter of a century I've been on the Internet, and while I can't say it didn't effect me, I suppressed any desire to panic and realized that the assholes in question were, well, just assholes, and the odds were pretty damned low that I was ever in danger.

Actually before the Higgs the problem with the model was that the particles all had non-zero masses. This breaks symmetries which we observe to be held in nature and was a huge problem and also gave rise to the violation of unitarity: if there were no masses there would be no unitarity violations.

Part of the beauty of the Higgs mechanism is that not only did it explain how the particles could have masses while the symmetries of nature we observe are preserved but it also called out the unitarity violations which the non-zero particle masses caused!

Every model has its problems though. The issue with the SM is that the Higgs mass is so much lighter than the Planck scale. This means that there has to be something probably not much higher in mass than the scales we have already probed. However this is not a hard constraint. The higher the energy of this new physics the less "natural" but with only one universe to play with there is no way to be certain that a one in a million chance did not occur when setting up the laws of nature....it's just not very likely.

It sounds like he was answering a different question: "What is the shape of a black hole?". That's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. Asking whether they have a shape is akin to asking: "Does something which exists have a shape?". In fact this article is actually a violation of Betteridge's law because the answer is 'yes', Black Holes do indeed have a shape although that answer imparts no useful information whatsoever.