People make mistakes all the time. Even smart people.

You've never made a mistake? Never missed a bug? Never misconfigured a system? Ever?

Do a hundred things right, and one thing wrong, and just guess which one will get caught.

Bounce?? This was calculated using Kermit's space program?

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.c...

What I find cool about this asteroid is that it's in a 1.5 year orbit. That means it's in a 3:2 resonance with Earth. So it'll come by again if you miss it this time, every 3 years.

Normally you'd expect asteroids that makes this close an approach to Earth to have a bit of a change in orbital parameters after the flyby, but that 3:2 orbital ratio is unlikely to be a coincidence-- it looks like a resonant orbit, in which the Earth's gravitational perturbation has already modified the orbit until it reached that stable resonance.

The small-body page allows you to propagate the orbit into the future, if you're interested. (Not a good tool to use if you're calculating missions, though-- you'll want a more accurate simulator! The V_infinity is a bit large for a rendezvous, though.)

I am reminded of Asimov's story "The Mayors," in Foundation (first published in Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1942, in which an "ultrawave relay" disables the warship that the Foundation sold to the Anacreonian navy when the Anacreons try to use it against them.

If you read the article, the interceptors hack into the baseband processor (that's not the phone OS-- it's the system that controls the radio system in the phone), and switch the connection "from 4G down to 2G, a much older protocol that is easier to de-crypt in real-time. But the standard smart phones didn’t even show they’d experienced the same attack."

So you may think you're using encryption, and stop whining. But although your phone says you are encrypted, you have been switched to a breakable encryption, which is to say, no encryption at all.

This is a hypothesis. You are stating it as a fact.

The evidence for this hypothesis is, at the moment, quite weak.

Evidence for this hypothesis would be best found by examining a society in which males and females are given identical treatment, and not given different social cues childhood or raised to different expectations. I'm not sure where you find that society.

Yes, this is the serious problem-- just as serious as the problem of people fooling the password-alternative is the problem of the false negatives: getting locked out.

Notice that most of these weren't fingerprint scanners or retinal scanners-- they were stuff like gait monitors, or even more bizarre stuff, like listening to your heartbeat. So, if you twist your ankle--or even buy a new pair of shoes-- you're out of luck. Taking pseudoephedrine for a cold? Ooops, your heartrate is different. You're locked out.

--instead of using these instead of password, however, what about if you use alternate ID as a second check. It doesn't lock you out, but it does trigger a watchdog alert that pays attention to what you're doing.

Yes, we've all seen dozens of those science fiction stories where they steal people's eyes, or cut off their fingers, or take swabs of their DNA.

If they can get usable energy out of waste heat, they have a means of getting around the second law of thermodynamics. It's hard to guess what a technology with that much sophistication can do, but if they can do that, they don't need to surround a star with a shell to harvest energy.

Well, I didn't say it was a good idea.

well, if Dyson spheres are anywhere near the size of the solar system, they would radiate in the infrared. Longer infrared the larger they are.

You could imagine a Dyson sphere that is vastly larger than a solar system -- like, a hundred AU across, or so--that would radiate waste heat in millimeter wave, or even something vastly larger than that that would radiate in microwave.

But, of course, that doesn't solve the problem-- they would be shine like beacons to radio telescopes.

Well, yes, but that's exactly what was desired:
You want the price to go up, so that it's more valuable to disclose the bug than it is for some thief exploit it.

Exactly. You mine out the easy-to-find exploits until they are depleted, and start in on the harder-to-find bugs, so that you get to the point where amateur hackers simply aren't sophisticated enough to find them.

Well, of course you can always manufacture more drugs; you don't "find" them. They don't get harder to make as the market increases.

If the objection here is "software companies will start deliberately introducing vulnerabilities, so that they can make money by selling the vulnerabilities to the government"-- yes, that might be an objection.

Just as a minor correction, this was one lab group, at one NASA center. It was not "NASA" collectively.

NASA is not a monolithic entity. Other scientists at other parts of NASA have expressed some amount of skepticism about the conclusion that the experimental results quoted are best explained as the thruster producing anomalous thrust. We all want to see these results carefully replicated.

It would be better if these results had been reported as "here's a preliminary anomalous result that needs to be verified," instead of "OMG, a space drive!"... but they weren't.

I have have a copy of the paper in question, "Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum," and have read it in detail. It does not reference Shawyer. This paper is not about the "EmDrive."

"Way less" means "over four orders of magnitude less." The Juan et al. test-- reference 1 in the paper-- did not test a thruster at hundreds of kilowatts input power! At best, you can say that the JSC test was testing something different form the Chinese test. They did not replicate the Chinese tests in any way.

The EmDrive was not mentioned or referenced in the paper being discussed.

Correct. This is a valid conclusion of the results of the paper.

Shawyer was not mentioned nor referenced in the paper. The EmDrive was not mentioned nor referenced in the paper.

It is hard for people to understand because in an article about the results of a paper "Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum," you reference a garbage-dumpster full of other stuff that is not mentioned nor referenced in that paper.

And laughing this off without even running an experiment is precisely the wrong thing to do.

Science is about replication. Replication requires doing the experiment. Or, at a minimum, not laughing at other people who do the experiment.

Now: the actual results of the experiment are pretty minor. The results they show, first, didn't replicate the results that they were attempting to verify, second, falsify the hypothesis that they were testing, and, third, are pretty low in magnitude-- probably spurious, in my (professional*) opinion.

Exactly.

This is the way science is done: you test stuff. You present your results. Other scientists then critique the results, point out flaws and sources of noise and bias.

It's rather brutal, actually. But if your result holds up to the criticisms (and most don't), maybe you've pushed the boundaries of science.

These results don't-- yet. They are not yet reporting consistent results (in that their results differ significantly from those of other researchers). They have not yet eliminated possible spurious effects.

That's science.

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*in fact, I am a rocket scientist