They did just that.

The energy of the thrust effect is basically lost in the measurement error. Hell, the device measuring it could be affecting the measured thrust.

The problem is that there's a TINY, TINY effect and we're not sure of the origin. It's therefore useless for propulsion, for decades at least, and certainly until we know where it's coming from and why. Because it might not be something that can ever be scaled, and that amount of thrust is absolutely minuscule.

We're used to dealing with tiny thrusts - you can "push" a satellite with nothing more than light and we have measured that effect in some of our own objects in space. But we can explain that bit, because we know about the interaction that it undergoes.

However, this is barely out of the measurement error. It's nothing more than a blip at the moment. As such, it's infinitely more important to put this through the wringer of "what the hell is doing that" - which requires independent testing, and that's not being done.

Fact is, this may never be more powerful than it is, and we can barely know it IS there, even in a vacuum. Until we know more, any headline about its origin or potential usage is PR bollocks.

It doesn't imply the power range to be infinite. Everything has a working range. But, although the claim that it's a necessity is dubious, it's pretty well universal. If you supply an LED with less power, it will light less. We tend to PWM them in order to do this digitally with only one voltage on a digital circuit, but - for a certain range - their brightness correlates to the power supplied to even LED's, yes.

If you can't frame your rejection of an old person in terms other than age, then you are an incompetent PHB.

The 'article' is an editorial presented as something to be taken as representative of the community at large. My impression is that Canonical is losing mindshare quickly to Mint on the desktop, that Canonical really doesn't care that much about desktop anyway as they pin their business hopes and dreams on servers and embedded (where it also is failing to get much traction business wise).

Note that none of this has to do with the parents referenced points: Gnome 3 (which is largely defined by Gnome Shell, which Ubuntu doesn't even use by default) and systemd (I'm sympathetic, but not sure it's making much of a difference either way in the desktop distribution selection right now).

It's always open season on feral pigs in Texas.

We have armed guards for High Holidays or any large gathering. Nobody is going to take chances even if we aren't going out of our way to declare that this isn't the 16th century anymore.

It's like Scotty says... fool me twice, then shame on me.

> If you are so afraid that you need to carry a gun to work with you, then you may want to consider moving to a safer area.

You mean live one place and work some place else? That's already covered. That's why roads are so full of commuters. Jobs are often located in places that you would never actually want to live. My current job is like that.

On the other hand, I've actually been to Paris and I have seen for myself what kind of weaponry they routinely carry around. You would think that with that kind of firepower they could easily put down any nonsense.

A lot of noise is made about "American gun culture" but it's the Europeans that routinely carry serious firepower around their cities.

I grew up in the North and was taught how to shoot by the Boy Scouts at a relatively early age.

In this regard, there's nothing that remarkable about Texas really.

Yeah, and if you want to be scientific about that, and be honest, you'll see that cops stop a lot more people in high crime areas, and that poor urban areas tend to have lots of crime. And that some of those poor areas have a larger black population. If those areas weren't marinated in serious crime, there wouldn't be so many warrants out, stolen cars, cars full of contraband, and the rest.

What? The people whose lives are messed up are those who have to live in areas like west Baltimore where local thugs make daily life miserable for everyone else who lives there or tries to run a business there. So yes, the cops are asked to "get results," because the absence of any results would make those areas completely lost to civilization, rather than just sucking generally. Would you rather that the cops were told NOT to arrest known violent gang members, serial assault and battery specialists, and the like? What would you have them do?

That's a very insightful way to address the substance of the matter. Obviously you're not willing to say the actual numbers or description of the situation is incorrect ... you're just mad at someone for pointing it out? I get that. But you're not really making any sort of lucid point.

What? Each year, people's wages are taxed into those programs, and funds are transferred, that year, to the people who receive it. There is no "savings account." There is no "I paid into Social Security, so I'll get X when I retire." The amount that retired/disabled people get from that entitlement program is determined legislatively each year, and if you bother to read the fine print in your SS statement, you'll see that they explicitly remind you that there is no guarantee you'll get any future benefits.

Each year, funds are transferred from the people who pay to the people who collect.

What do they have to sell here? All you need is a legitimate business case to be on the network, and you have access. That's the point here: PillPack immediately changed their procedures, but if they were able to call up a full prescrption record using only name and DOB, any number of other businesses with a medical component can too. All you need is to associate names and DOBs (Facebook anyone?), call up the prescription records, look for something chronic, desperate and lucrative, and fire off an automated, personalized email. Profit!

Nonsense. It's not a distraction, it's different topic than the ebb and flow of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (which are transfer welfare taxes). Income taxes are what pay for all discretionary spending (the military, federal agencies like the EPA, the FAA, the FCC and a jillion other activities). There's a good reason we look at all of those differently than we do the entitlement programs.

And ... capital gains? You do realize that a whole lot of middle class people also earn capital gains, right? Directly or indirectly, through things like mutual funds. Warren Buffet's secretary can put a pizza's worth of cash every month into some investments when she's young, and can and should be looking forward to earning some money from that. You know, just like him: taking money on which she's already paid taxes, and putting it entirely at risk in an investment that stimulates the economy and if and when it happens to pay off, paying more taxes on that activity.

If Warren Buffet loses money in an investment? He doesn't get to write that off against his income taxes - he just loses it, plain and simple. But he's smart, and usually makes good investments. If he's making money, the money he risked is being put to very good use in an active economy. That's the entire reason why we reward that risk taking with a lower tax rate - because we want more of that risk taking to happen.

All of which has nothing to do with transfer entitlement taxes.