It's as stupid as algorithm export bans. Supply of anything is rarely hampered for long provided sufficient demand. However, given a vacuum of good ideas invented by a certain political party, that party will happily supply bad ones. Should the other side manage to come up with something better, of course they'll make sure they encounter roadblocks.

Spoken another way. Conservatives seem to like to keep with the tradition of attacking supply. Liberals try to attack the demand. Since the latter came from the liberals it of course is socialism and therefore evil. It's unclear how successful tackling demand would be, but hitting supply is good for the MIC and prison industry even if it has a clear historical demonstration of failing to solve the original problem.

I believe the death penalty is automatically appealed. The defendant doesn't get a say.

The biggest failing of Agile seems to be the interpretation that no one has to care about the big picture. Planning and preparation are too narrowly scoped to specific functionality. Even in that there's a tendency to be lazy. Implementation often degenerates into hack and paste.

There's nothing horribly wrong with Agile development in theory. The chosen Agile method (yes I'm looking at you Extreme Programming), and especially the tendency to laziness sabotage development efforts.

How are your 20+ year old CDs doing? Tried to play them lately? Do you still carry around the 15x15x5 inch binders filled with CDs. Enjoy listening to a single artist for ~60min stretches or did you take over your trunk with a carousel? Can you even buy a CD playing walkman anymore or do you prefer to fill your Aiwa with D-cells and mount it to your shoulder?

I thought it was the musician until they sold the rights to a corporation, or if not sold, then to the "estate" what ever the fluff that means. Either way, the net result seems to be a perpetual toll taking.

The RIAA loves you too.

Seconded. May that horrible woman suffer the rest of her miserable life in kind to the scars she left upon mine.

Apparently it does require courage or at least a certain meager measure of empathy.

Palm was successfully sued by Xerox claiming it violated their patent. I agree with the assessment that a gesture input is probably the only practical "on-screen" solution. But I also suspect it's a mine field for anyone attempting to adopt such a thing.

I don't care about hearing anything. I want to throw the damn thing up into space and see if we get delta-v. Then we can hypothesize whether we heard anything and if so what the hell animal it was. Given the apparent reproducibility of something so profoundly game changing surely we're at a point to merit putting this thing on orbit to finally decide if we have something here.

Yes, but unlike reaction drives you are not carrying around a tank of photons that you impart energy upon to sling them out the a** end of your rocket. Both photon drives and the experiment are not carrying anything but energy yet managed to produce (or seem to produce) thrust. The part that's annoying people is that the experiment seems to be doing so at orders of magnitude greater than the photon drive. It's kind of like challenging the existence of a religious person's god. It tends to ruffle their feathers a bit.

Inventions often arise from discoveries. e.g. Primitive people didn't have to understand the physics of combustion to create the fire that roasted their mammoth. Science is often all about throwing sh*t at a wall, seeing what sticks then circling back to figure out why.

It has been reproduced by others. That's why everyone's scratching their heads. It's also why some people are starting to get bent out of shape. Their precious model of the universe is being challenged. From my armchair I see four possibilities: the microwaves are finding something to push against; the microwaves are creating something with mass and a net velocity pointed in a certain direction; the microwaves are distorting the shape of space-time; different groups of really bright people around the world are designing spectacularly fracked up experiments and coming away with agreeing yet completely fracked up results.

The last one is easiest to prove/disprove. Throw the device into space and see if it produces delta-v. If its one of the first three, regardless of which one, the world as we know it is no more.

By my reckoning if they're going to drive at .10 BAC then I'd prefer they shoot for 1.0 BAC. One way or another their body will malfunction before they managed to get into their car and the roads will safer for it. I figure it's similar to the trash that go bar hopping in their snowmobiles where I used to live. It's amazing how effective a farmer's fence is for culling the herd.

Don't kid yourself. If they bother mass producing this crap, they're not going to capture it from the air. They're going to exploit methane (natural gas).