Google also has more than 10 times the market cap (15 currently but probably closer to 10 when the report came out).

Actually, according to its creator, it was "Horatio Hornblower In Space".

Still managed to win a Hugo award, though.

It's might be simpler than that.

Part of it might just be trade secrets, your ability to frack profitably is based on your ability to be more efficient than your competitors. Telling them your secret sauce makes that harder to do.

The other part is PR, when people want to criticize you it's easier for them if they have specific compounds to criticize. It doesn't matter if it's as innocuous as dihydrogen monoxide or as toxic as plutonium, if they have a specific label to attach to it they can make it sound bad.

On behalf of the rest of the Slashdot readership, I humbly invite you to bite me.

I would have gone with "I just leech Cowboy Neal's wifi" myself.

There does seem to be people who are permanently clueless but I suspect you're also seeing a limitation/feature of the academic setting.

If you are in fact teaching them something then things that were difficult at the start of the course will become easy at the end, in some cases you could even take a student who finished the course one semester and have them TA the next. But when you get into industry you've filtered out everyone who can't, at that point I find a lot of the remaining variance has to do with experience and motivation.

Several years ago I was really concerned about the 2038 rollover because so many protocols have hard baked 32 bit timestamp fields in them. Even if systems were updated the protocols might not be. But I've come to realize that once the systems are updated, the protocol tend to follow suit in the next revision, and in the next 23 years pretty much every protocol is going to go through at least one revision. There are still going to be a few holdouts that have trouble in 2038, but I'm expecting it to be as much of an event as the year 2000. A few fringe things act weird or even stop working, but pretty much everything important is OK.

Actually that is NOT what these tests show. They show that someone has done an experiment which, using their apparatus, returns readings consistent with a micro-newton force. What the experiment has NOT shown is that this is due to some new, as yet unexplained, physics.

There are a myriad of other, far more mundane, possibilities to generate such results before anyone will seriously start believing in new physics as an explanation. For example did they account for the radiation emitted bouncing back and forth between the apparatus and the vacuum chamber walls?

After the results have been confirmed independently and all the possibilities people can come up with disproven then you have an interesting result which is unexplained. At this point there are still two possibilities: either new physics OR an effect so subtle that nobody has thought of it. The only way to prove new physics is therefore to come up with a theoretical explanation which allows testing.

Whether or not you agree with this this is how science works: there are simply too many ways that a precision experiment like this can be fooled and history is littered with examples of this happening e.g. faster than light neutrinos, gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, cold fusion etc. The results have to be confirmed and stand several years of scrutiny before people will start to believe that they are interesting. Even when that happens to get people convinced that there is new physics here you need a model for that new physics that makes predictions which can be confirmed.

Uh, no. Fiorina ran for US Senate. You're thinking of Meg Whitman, who tried to click "Buy It Now" on the California Governorship ($150 million campaign). But your confusion is understandable, since they're both from the tech sector, and they both spout buzzword-bingo gibberish.

Whitman lost to Jerry Brown, BTW, thus earning Brown the singular distinction of having to clean up the mess left by a B-grade movie actor twice.

/me quickly skims the comment

Awesome! NASA invented a warp drive!!!

They'll step out of their spacecraft and inform us that our newly invented warp drive was invented 324,123 years ago and we cannot use it without paying the license fees of approximately 2.3 earth planets per earth year.

Otherwise we will need to wait another 14,675,877 years until it enters the public domain.

Actually this is the one criterion missing from the list of "what would it take to convince you that it is real": a viable theory as to how the drive works which makes a prediction that can be tested by another experiment. If this is a real effect then we need a theoretical framework which can be used to explain and predict the size of the effect under different conditions which can then be tested.

This is how the solar neutrino problem was solved. For decades experiments measuring the flux of solar neutrinos had come up short by a factor of 1/3 to 1/2 of the expected value. Initially people thought the experiments were somehow wrong, then focus switched to the solar models predicting the flux but these were confirmed as correct so ultimately nobody had a clue as to why there was discrepancy. People were split between inaccurate experiments, inaccurate prediction or new physics. The problem was solved only when the model which theorists had proposed as a possible solution - that neutrinos changed their flavour as they move through space - was tested by the SNO experiment which measured both the total neutrino flux and the electron neutrino flux separately.

You need both theory and experiment to agree to get understanding and without that clear understanding I would not expect the 'warp drive' effect to be resolved. No matter how much you repeat and verify the experiment there will always be questions raised about some effect which is not accounted for (assuming the effect remains so small). After a few decades you might get to the point where people will admit that the effect is not understood but even then many will ascribe it to some subtle experimental effect rather than new physics. The only way you will change minds is by having a new theory whose predictions are verified by further experiments.

I don't see what Al Gore has to do with it.

The problem with focusing on air and water quality is CO2 only becomes a major concern in the context of climate change. You could try talking about ocean acidification which is another side effect but I don't think ignoring the elephant smashing everything in the room that is climate change is the best strategy.

Huh. I always parsed Lemongrab as male...

Ok, I'll grant that I could understand your first sentence. However, if it were really a problem, installing a heating loop under the array would fix the problem at the touch of a button. For the DIYer, some plastic tubing, antifreeze, and aquarium pump, and a 5 gallon tank of propane would do the job. I'll also point out that although it snows frequently, that's not typically a disaster. It's also only been 200 years since a mammoth earthquake that would, if it happened today, paralyze this nation for months. That's only three lifespans, so the odds of witnessing that again may not be as low as you assume.

Your entire second paragraph is an incomprehensible bowl of word soup. You seem to be advocating that 50 million people without gas hop in their cars and find a hotel in a different region of the continent.

Your last paragraph disregards the whole point of the damned thread: that you can recharge the batteries indefinitely without fuel. Even when keeping a dangerous amount of volatile gasoline on your premises, you get a couple days max of electricity generation, and as I pointed out, natural gas generators are no panacea either.