The UK has a head of state (a king) they've spent a thousand years learning should stand around a look pretty with medals and things but that's about it. The US has a head of state (a president) they've spent at least the last hundred years turning into a cult of personality and giving more and more power to.

France has spent a few hundred years violently oscillating back and forth between the two. They've demonstrated it doesn't really matter whether you call it a king or a president, it's how much power you give them.

The first fission reactor in space, the American SNAP-10A had an experimental ion thruster.

Yes, but it didn't go to Mars. That's why I said we didn't have good ion thrusters. The one on SNAP lasted a whole hour and apparently had quite a few problems even then. Getting the things to last long enough and produce enough thrust to be useful even for station keeping is a fairly recent thing.

I was so proud of this robot that I went up and gave it a hug. Everyone around me started yelling at me to get away and then the robot tried to install a solar panel on me. Long story short, I ended up in the hospital with a restraining order against to stay away from the robot.

THIS ROBOT IS NOT FRIENDLY.

You probably can't see how because of the same vision problem that prevented you from reading my post.
"simulate materials without ever having to construct them."

Finally, we're seeing applications of QC that are actually useful. I look forward to this expanding so that we can greatly advance materials science by being able to simulate materials without ever having to construct them.

You do realize they have Mennonites in Oregon right? If not then you should really educate yourself about the nation you live within because it's quite diverse. If you think diversity is a bad thing then perhaps you're in the wrong nation.

Right but what they are talking about is nuclear propulsion. Don't like how space.com writes? You can go right to the source instead of wasting other people's time. https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/

I even wonder why they haven't done it much sooner.

We didn't have good ion thrusters back in the 50s, 60s and 70s and after that launching nuclear reactors into space was considered a bad idea, not without reason. A nuke plus ion engines isn't a slam dunk either, ion engines produce very little thrust and reactors are heavy even if you don't have to bother shielding them much, so there's an efficiency threshold you need to hit before it's worthwhile.

NASA has realized that beating, or at least competing with, the Chinese to a moon base is probably going to require a reactor, so why not demonstrate it as part of a drive too?

the original formulation of relativity and physics in general did not distinguish between rest mass creating gravitation and light speed particles generating gravitation

Maybe you have access to some early draft notes of Einstein's, but in his actual papers on relativity mass does not "create gravitation." Energy, momentum and some off-diagonal terms like stress and pressure gravitate. There is no mass term in the stress-energy tensor, nor anywhere else in the Einstein Field Equation. Mass is not fundamental in relativity, it's a property of a system. That property is the product of energy and momentum (and the other stuff) in particular configurations within the system so in many situations it can be used as a surrogate for the underlying energy, momentum and other stuff.

Physics prior to relativity did indeed say a lot of different, confusing things about mass, gravitation and light speed particles.

"Creating fusion" isn't hard. Kids do it for science fair projects. Here's a guy on Youtube making a fusion reactor.

Making a fusion reactor that produces more electricity than it uses is hard. That's what you're thinking of. Rocket engines famously do not usually produce electricity, and if they do they do it extremely inefficiently, so it's a completely different problem.

we don’t have massless drives

Reactionless drives. A massless drive would be an engine that didn't have any mass, I guess. We have lots of drives that don't involve throwing mass out the back, including solar sails, magnetotorquers, electrodynamic tethers, flashlights, etc. Hard drives have a few. Your car has at least one big one and a bunch of others besides, as does your body. None of them are reactionless though.

Reactionless drives are called that because they violate Newton's third law, which is really a statement about the conservation of momentum.

Individual photons don't have mass, abstract or ortherwise, they have energy and momentum. Individual fundamental particles of any kind don't really have mass because mass is a property of a system.

A system of multiple photons can have regular old non-abstract mass if they're configured properly.

Anecdotes are great for swaying the mindless but how about some statistics on the rate of success this thing has. I would also want to know the rate of false identifications because who wants to have their hopes dashed?

However, what would VASTLY improve helping lost pets is directly microchip reading into the computer. I'm not joking when I say, the biggest issues with microchip'd pets is that many times, the ID code read from the chip, shown on the scanner display, and then is manually transcribed into the computer. This results in a lot of transcription errors which is something absurdly high like 7%. Sometimes the transcription error happens upon registration, sometimes it's upon lookup. Either way, if everyone simply used readers that relayed the info directly to the computer then a lot more pets would be reunited with their owners.

One has to question why Dolby would wait 8 years before making a peep. Yeah, AV1 was released in March 28th, 2018 which was exact 8 years ago, and this is the first time they have ever made any claim about it. What about Snapchat? The complaint states that Snapchat has used AV1 for video streaming "since at least November 24, 2023" but it appears that they have been using the "dav1d" AV1 decoder all the way back in Mar 21, 2019 which wasn't long after it was announced.

Their extreme delay should be enough to dismiss this case but I know it's not.

As far as I can tell, it see like Dolby was trying to wait until AV1 started getting hardware implementations in order to make alterations maximally harmful, in order to either extract the largest settlement or maximally disrupt the competition to HVEC. Either way, it seem like Dolby is acting in bad faith.

In response to Alain Williams comment, "How long before a patent troll magics up some patent relating to AV1 ?" It seems the answer is 7 years and 5 months.

These people have no shame.