I give it less than 15 minutes until some arsehole settlers beat, kill, threaten or shoot at a Palestinian or block access to, evict from or steal some of their land.

Why are you so quick to blame one side? It looks to me like six of one and half-a-dozen of that other.

That was the reason I switched to Linux. Of course, I could have switched to BSD, but Debian potato was easier to install.

The hero tale is one with a long history behind it. I think it's always been the dominant style. So that's not really a legitimate criticism...not unless you are making an encompassing claim, and if you are, then it's false. (I've encountered several books with a heroine.) And the dominant style always reflects the zeitgeist. (In the late 1940's and early 50's there was lots of WWII echoes, often re-staged in different settings.)

FWIW, my tastes have always been quite narrow, and minority, but I think they've narrowed over the years. OTOH, possibly it's just that the net doesn't provide exposure to the tales that I would like. Perhaps they're still out there, but I can no longer easily browse through and tell that they're something I'd be interested in.

Part of the problem is definitely the sales channel. Grocery stores only carry "best sellers". (They may not actually be best sellers, but they're marketed as such.) 20 displays of 10 books, and two or three with only a few...probably left over from last month.) Also a few books that I already have on my shelf, from a decade ago.

Even book stores lean in this direction, sufficiently that I no longer want to browse in them. (OTOH, I always preferred science-fiction and technical books.)

But I really think part of the problem is the zeitgeist. Nobody wants to read it. It's like when the anti-hero became "popular with publishers". People found reading that stuff unpleasant, so they stopped. Except for a few. And some of those will be picked up, eventually, as classics that everyone should read. Just like "Jude the Obscure" was. Nobody that I ever met liked that story, but some academics thought it was important enough to force everyone to read it.

The last technical book I bought used grey ink for the examples. If I'd been able to see it before I bought it, I wouldn't have. I think they probably had a decent book, but the only editing was for the e-book, and that used color, but they printed the book in black and white.

Another turned out not to have any index. The text was decent, but just try to look something up.

The editors of print books are ... not quite worthless, as they may do a decent job for e-books, but the print version is merely an afterthought. If it weren't painful to read long text passages on the screen, I'd have given up on books.

Fiction:

12 books from the Deverry series
The Three Body Problem trilogy
Monkey
Treacle Walker
Various books on Powershell

Non-Fiction:
Linux Administrator's Guide
Linux Network Administrator's Guide
Both OpenZFS books
Ansible
Terraform
Various books on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL optimisation
C++ manuals
Various Cisco manuals
OpenPF manual

That's overly specific. How about "can, in principle, be at least as effective as a photon drive". I don't think one can really rule out one that's a bit more effective, even if I've no idea how one would make such a thing. (I believe that a photon drive has theoretic limits on it's efficiency that are a bit more stringent than the more general limits...but there might be some way of generating light that got around those limits...so perhaps "can't be any more efficient that a totally ideally optimal photon drive".)

Even so, I'm not sure. If it's something that can't ever return, most of the arguments about the maximum efficiency fail because there's no way of performing the measurements.

Also there are these cute arguments about drives that essentially require the mass of Jupiter (or more) to distort space-time. Some of those seem to be valid arguments for a drive without a reaction mass. They are just essentially impossible to build.

That said, perhaps these extreme devices...things involving zero point energy, FTL drives, reactionless drives, etc. are really just pointing out a place where the theories are wrong. None of these devices are actually buildable, so nobody can test them, as they all require some form or other of unobtainium. (Constructs with negative mass, portable masses heavier than Jupiter, etc.) I still remember "Rotating cylinders and a global causality violation", even though the plot of the story was a bit ... acausal. (The story doesn't seem to have any on-line references, but *it* was a reference to https://www.franktipler.com/ti... )

Every time I go past the In-n-Out Burger and see 40-50 cars lined up to talk into a scratchy intercom and wait half an hour to get food, I think how much more convenient it would be if all of those people could just park their car wherever they wanted (or even not have to get into their car at all), enter their order into an app on their phone, and have their food lowered down to them by a drone.

There'd be no more congestion issues, no need to spend 30 minutes idling in a slowly-advancing car lineup, and no need to repeat your order three times so a teenager can still get it wrong. You might have to deal with gangs of crows trying to intercept your order mid-delivery, though.

More to the point, if they don't collect personally identifiable information, how do they know that you've paid.

Well, this summary is based on a story from someone quoting a story in The Guardian. Not the best way to get accurate news on science.

That's an extreme formulation. It does imply that certain efficiencies would be equivalent to perpetual motion, but if the amount of energy required were sufficient to offset the gain in relativistic mass & potential energy I don't believe the argument fails. And it might be able to use half that energy, as the contradiction doesn't occur until it returns to the origin. And there's no thermodynamic reason that staying stable in a gravitational field should require any energy. (Anything in orbit is an example of that.)

I don't believe that this device will work, but I believe that your argument doesn't work either.

The conservation laws are statistical, at least to a degree. Local apparent violations can be OK, provided the system as a whole absolutely complies.

There's no question that if the claim was as appears that the conservation laws would be violated system-wide, which is a big no-no.

So we need to look for alternative explanations.

The most obvious one is that the results aren't being honestly presented, that there's so much wishful thinking that the researchers are forcing the facts to fit their theory. (A tendency so well known, that it's even been used as the basis for fictional detectives.)

Never trust results that are issued in a PR statement before a paper. But these days, it's increasingly concerning that you can't trust the journals.

The next possibility is an unconsidered source of propulsion. At the top of the atmosphere, there are a few candidates, but whether they'd impart enough energy is unclear to me.

The third possibility is that the rocket imparted more energy than considered, so the initial velocity was incorrectly given.

The fourth possibility is that Earth's gravity (which is non-uniform) is lower than given in the calculations, so the acceleration calculations are off.

When dealing with tiny quantities that can be swamped by experimental error, then you need to determine if it has been. At least, after you've determined there's a quantity to examine.