People develop, or lose, motivation all the time. You're born with the motivation to do things like look at faces, imitate people around you and eat. More complex motivations are born out of experience and necessity. Lots of people are motivated to do things if there's a sufficient reward involved.

Your statement is based on theories that aren't exactly widely accepted yet and/or very liberal use of the term "space".

The measurements NASA made of their EM drive, if they're correct, are just the kind of space warps you'd need to go faster than light. The NASA test was firing a laser through the device and measuring how fast the light travelled. The answer was, in some cases, faster than c.

Nobody knows enough about either one to determine what it's doing yet. The inventor of the Cannae drive hypothesized that it was exploiting some relativistic effect of the microwave reflection. One of the predictions he made, that certain slots were necessary for the effect, turned out not to be true. The inventor of the EM drive believes the Cannae drive is just an inefficient EM drive.

The device NASA built, which started out as a kind of Cannae drive but now does indeed seem to be an inefficient EM drive, is hypothesized, by the NASA group, to be accelerating virtual particles. The same device is reported to show some signs of possibly warping space, again by the NASA group.

Not really. He's got a PhD in physics but hasn't published anything since 2008. From his CV it looks like he got his PhD, did some postdoc, then got an education degree. Forbes says he's a professor, but it looks like a teaching position at a college.

He does write a blog with a very irritating style.

Currently the only way we know to bend space is through gravity, which is inconvenient because, as far as we know, you need a LOT of mass to do anything significant. If you really can bend space with a few hundred watts worth of microwaves, that's a really giant step towards actually building a warp drive. The tin can they're testing might not go flying away faster than light, but if the effect is real it brings a warp drive out of the realm of mathematical possibility into the arena of engineering possibility.

The inventor of the EM drive, Sawyer, says he got about 0.1 N, and the Chinese say they got about 3/4 of a N. The NASA group was testing a very similar device invented by a different guy that Sawyer says is nothing but an inefficient EM drive.

It would be nice if NASA built something to Sawyer's specifications to test. 1 N of thrust is pretty easy to measure. 1 N / kW is pretty hard to get by experimental error.

If the EM drive really is warping space, then that's the mechanism you use to warp space.

You have to read the articles all the way to the end.

The NASA group shot the beam of an interferometer through the device while it was running and says they got readings that look like spatial distortion. If it's true, it would be a giant step towards building a warp drive.

There are two factors. A propellantless drive (regardless of whether it is actually reactionless or not) gives you the ability to make a ship with enormous delta-V. That lets you go really fast if you want to.

Secondly, the NASA group is reporting the possibility of some distortion of space. If you can distort space in the right way you can make the distance you have to travel shorter. While you don't technically go faster than light, because you're travelling a shorter distance the overall effect is that you could make a trip to another star faster than light could do it.

That's not correct. Their original test involved three models - (1) one that was designed to provide no thrust, (2) one that was missing a particular feature a particular person claimed was necessary to produce thrust, and (3) one that had all the design features recommended.

(1) produced no thrust, as expected. (2) and (3) both produced equivalent thrust, showing that one particular theory was incorrect.

The NASA group has created a model that assumes the EM drive is a magnetohydrodynamic drive using virtual particles as propellant. Their model makes predictions about the thrust to power curve, including that it has a peak efficiency. They're building a variable power prototype to test it.

It was almost a postscript in the NASA article, but they fired the laser beam of an interferometer through it and got some anomalous readings, as if it were warping space. Being able to warp space is required for the best current idea for how to travel faster than light.

Just read the rest of the comments. Slashdot is a hotbed of programmers who think they're god and everyone else sucks. They also argue that programming is some kind of talent you're born with.

I teach programming mostly to people you wouldn't expect. Anybody can learn and, just like any other skill, their ability is mostly determined by the time and motivation they put in. Learning programming is even easier than a lot of academic subjects because there's instant, fairly unambiguous feedback.

Are you saying Americans would be happier if you broke up the country?

As a whole, the EU is similar to the US in population and geographical size but is older and more socialist. Canada is also on the happiest list. It's also a nation of immigrants, quite a bit younger than the US, and similar in geographic size, although about 1/10th the population. Also much more socialist than the US.

The OP is correct, the common factor seems to be the type of economic system.

Debt is okay if you use it to invest in things that will make you more money than the interest payments. Since the US also has a large deficit, and the debt to GDP ratio has been rising for the last thirty years, that doesn't seem to be the case.