Unlike Farty Don, who merely wants to shoot them.

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... )

Technically speaking the crime of fraud has three elements: (1) A materially false statement; (2) an intent to deceive the recipient; (3) a reliance upon the false statement by the recipient.

So, if you want to lie to people and want to avoid being charged with fraud, it's actually quite simple. You lie by omission. You distract. You prevaricate (dance around the facts). You encourage people to jump on the bandwagon; you lead them to spurious conclusions. It's so easy to lie without making any materially false statements that anyone who does lie that way when people are going to check up on him is a fool.

Not only is this way of lying *legal*, it happens every time a lawyer makes an closing statement to a jury. It's not a problem because there's an opposing counsel who's professionally trained to spot omissions and lapses of logic and to point them out. But if a lawyer introduces a *false statement of fact* to a trial that's a very serious offense, in fact grounds for disbarrment because that can't be fixed by having an alert opponent.

We have similar standards of truthfullness for advertising and politics because in theory there's competition that's supposed to make up for your dishonesty. In practice that doesn't work very well because there is *nobody* involved (like a judge) who cares about people making sound judgments. But still, any brand that relies on materially false statements is a brand you want to avoid because they don't even measure up to the laxest imaginable standards of honesty.

Now investors have lots of money, so they receive a somehat better class of legal protections than consumers or voters do. There are expectations of dilligence and duties to disclose certain things etc. that can get someone selling investments into trouble. But that's still not as bad as committing *fraud*, which is stupid and therefore gets extra severe punishment.

Don't trust a company with "spin" in their name.

If I understand your argument properly, you're suggesting that things will be OK with the reefs because "survival of the fittest" will produce a population of corals better adapted to warmer conditions.

Let me first point out is that this isn't really an argument, it's a hypothesis. In fact this is the very question that actual *reef scientists* are raising -- the ability of reefs to survive as an ecosystem under survival pressure. There's no reason to believe reefs will surivive just because fitter organisms will *tend* to reproduce more, populations perish all the time. When it's a keystone species in an ecosystem, that ecosystem collapses. There is no invisible hand here steering things to any preordained conclusion.

So arguing over terminology here is really just an attempt to distract (name calling even more so) from your weak position on whether reefs will survive or not.

However, returning to that irrelevant terminology argument, you are undoubtedly making an evolutionary argument. You may be thinking that natural selection won't produce a new taxonomic *species* for thousands of generations, and you'd be right. However it will produce a new *clade*. When a better-adapted clade emerges due to survival pressures, that is evolution by natural selection. Whether we call that new clade a "species" is purely a human convention adopted and managed to facilitate scientific communication.

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Put it to any working biologist you know.

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.

Sometimes a hypothesis has potentially observable implications, even if a mad scientist can't reproduce everything in their lab.

I think it has been decades since cosmologists believed the universe is expanding at a constant rate.

Yeah, the really old processors aren't the cheapest option because of the unit cost. They're cost effective because changing your production line is expensive. You need engineers to update the product, testing, updating the production lines, new supply contracts, etc. You need to sell a lot of units to make back those costs.

It's especially a big deal with heavily regulated productions. Things like cars and medical devices will often rely on very old components because changing them would require a lot of expensive testing to ensure they meet the legal standards.

"Not totally unlistenable" - Robert Christgau, The Village Voice.

Personally, I think it's the closest thing to sound that will make you drive cutlery into your ears to make it stop.

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.

IANAPhysicist, but isn't a thrust of 1g specific to the mass you are accelerating? Same device pushing heavier mass gives less acceleration?

Is a claim that you can create a thrust of 1g even meaningful without additional details?

It's not a term for which there is a "generally accepted" definition. It's slang, which is widely variable between sub-populations.

The general idea of "drone" is usually someone who's useless.
The general idea of "suit" is someone who dresses excessively formally.
These are both judgements based on the perceptions of the one doing the describing.

If you think of it as a missile, you've also got a different idea than what I'm talking about. It's sort of a cross between a missile and a fighter that is designed to work in swarms, run by a "home base" that could be a large truck for small swarms of short distance versions. Imagine *highly* souped up model airplanes that are designed to act like missiles, if called upon. Long distance versions would probably always be more ammunition than craft (sort of like cruise missiles) for cost reasons, but shorter range versions would be expected to be refuel-able, and reusable unless the particular craft was used for an attack.
FWIW, I expect most of them to be relatively short-range, but too fast for the quad-copter design to work. Perhaps one model could be designed for "site defense".