I'm not being paid. I'm being a contrarian, but an honest one.
People keep talking about the crimes Hillary has committed, but nobody ever tells me one that holds up to examination. If she's committed crimes, there should be no problem in coming up with one.
People talk about Benghazi, where, as far as I can tell, she did nothing seriously wrong. They talk about mishandling of classified material, but people who did approximately what she did have not been criminally prosecuted. They talk about people she knew who have died, but, in fact, I've known people who later died, and I haven't associated with nearly the number of people she has. They speculate on crimes she might have committed.
All it will take to shut me up is one definite serious crime with strong evidence that she committed it. That's all you have to tell me about, guys.
A reactionless drive isn't one that takes no energy. Currently, people put power in and read some effect out. The problem is with the conservation of momentum, not the conservation of energy, since in the environments we're talking about we can get away with ignoring relativistic effects.
The philosophy of science includes the idea that, if it happens, it's possible. However, I'm not going to believe the results of tethered tests, or tests that might rely on Earth's magnetic field to succeed.
There will be major problems with any theory used to justify it, since a reactionless drive violates far too much physics as we know it. In the extremely unlikely eventuality that this does turn out to be a major breakthrough, we'll have to figure out new physics around it.
If the effect is torque, we're screwing with the conservation of angular momentum, which means that the laws of physics vary depending on which way you're facing.
Relativity can be seen as correction factors to Newtonian physics that apply as we get further away from the sort of environment Newton could observe. Some sort of quantum gravity would be significant in environments we can't yet observe much, but would be the same sort of correction factors to GR and QM. You can see relativity as rebuilding physics from the ground up, since it eliminated such basic concepts as time and space and simultaneity. It's very likely that, sometime in the future, we'll dump concepts like spacetime as fundamental. It may be that there's situations where momentum is not conserved, meaning laws of physics would vary over time. There's no a priori guarantee that the laws of physics are constant, but we have a tremendous number of observations that say they are at any scale we can measure.
However, if momentum is not conserved in the everyday environment, we'd have variations in physical laws that are inconsistent with all those observations. We have variation in physical laws from place to place on a scale that has not been observed. It would be as if we discovered that the speed of light was much lower around pizza restaurants. There's no absolute reason why it couldn't be, but it would have caused a lot of things to work contrary to observation.
We're not talking here about exotic experimental techniques; we're talking about bouncing microwaves around a funny-shaped cavity. If that caused the laws of physics to change over space, you'd think we'd have some effects from having microwave ovens in physics labs.
You can put it another way, which is to say that, if momentum is not conserved, what do we know because of Noether's theorem? The theorem says that, if physical laws don't vary in space, momentum is conserved. Therefore, if this is a reactionless drive, physical laws must vary in space, and I suspect this means significant variance over a fairly short distance.
I'm not getting into the relativistic version of the theorem right now, but I suspect such a drive would break energy conservation as well.
We don't want to just have a neat little gimmick, we want to know how it works and what else we can do with the concept. Knowing whether it is pushing on a magnetic field or not is a step towards that.
Pretty much from the start, science fiction has been violating the known laws of physics wholesale. FTL and time travel are gimmes, but there's details that are just not going to work. Most fictional Solar System space travel has been with impossibly efficient rockets. Psionic abilities, common in a lot of old SF, are magic under a more scientific-sounding name. The difference between fantasy and science fiction, historically, has been tone rather than anything substantial. Science fiction that's actually scientific has always been a small niche.
You have a seriously skewed view of antidepressants, and probably don't know anything about depression. This means you haven't suffered from it, which is good, but it also means you shouldn't be taken seriously.
There's always people who have grand goals of conquering or subverting or destroying the US. If I worried about every group that had it in for me as a US citizen, I'd never get any sleep.
Find me some people who not only want world conquest but have some ability to get it started near Western civilization, and I might start to worry.
Also, have you known toddlers? Lots of them are in it for the mayhem and for the attention.
The Second was gutted by the end of the Reagan administration, in that it was illegal to go out and purchase a new infantry rifle. For all the whining by idiot gun owners, the Democrats have done damn little to take away people's guns.
Everybody wants to subvert the First. A large number of Republicans want to establish a state religion, for example. Both parties are leery of peaceable assembly. Both generally want to put undue limits on speech.
Just what crimes did you have in mind? I'm not interested in baseless allegations or stuff sufficiently trivial nobody would bother prosecuting me if I did the same thing.
Low-hanging fruit has been going over the wall to non-developers for a long time. When I first got into the profession, creating a simple report from what we had instead of a database would take a few days of my valuable time. Nowadays, we have tools so non-developers can create simple reports, and I do more interesting things.
I remember when "fourth-generation languages" were supposed to revolutionize development in much the same way, back in the 1980s. I'm not old enough to remember when COBOL was supposed to do the same thing around 1960.
And, in fact, non-developers got the ability to do some stuff that previously required developers. However, this freed up developers to do more interesting work, and didn't seem to depress developer employment and pay.
You're making some sweeping statements there about EU law, and I doubt you're qualified to make them.
If you manage to get an IRS agent to agree to a crazy tax scheme, that counts as following government guidance, but it won't save you in tax court.
Apple should have asked itself, "Is this too good to be true?" and acted accordingly. Always distrust deals that look too good. You don't know what will turn up later.
Your vision of the EU economy looks flawed to me. The issue with Greece is that they're stuck on the Euro, and therefore they need to borrow large numbers of Euros just to be able to keep their economy going. Were they on the drachma still, they'd have enough drachmas to run an economy without having to borrow Euros. The situation is basically German economic colonization by taking advantage of Greek problems.
The Kardashev scale measures civilizations by the amount of energy they use, not its source. However, anti-matter is not an energy source, and neither is dark matter. It is possible to use black holes to generate energy, but I'm not sure how well. It's conceivable that there are more exotic energy sources, but that doesn't matter here. There's no a priori reason why a Type 3 civilization needs to harness the power of their galaxy, as long as they can get the energy somehow.
The amount of energy usage relates to the ability to use energy. It's a very general measure, but it has the virtue of being potentially observable. We're very roughly Kardashev 0.7, and we don't have the technology to make it up to Type 1, so such a civilization has considerably better technology than we do.
A world with 1970s technology could not use energy on that scale. They might well be spiritually very advanced (whatever that means for nonhuman intelligence) and very happy and such, but we can't detect a civilization like that at any likely range..
IBM has a pretty solid lock on the mainframe market nowadays, so in a sense they're in better shape than when they had Amdahl and Itel as competitors. Microsoft is going to keep a similar grip on the desktop/laptop market for a long time to come. Microsoft is showing no signs of being able to compete in the general phone/tablet market, despite screwing their main customer base over in order to try. Microsoft isn't going to go away in my lifetime, but it will become increasingly irrelevant for most people.
My son did his college CS coursework mostly in Java and C, which strikes me as a reasonable mix. I really don't want someone graduating with a CS degree who hasn't been shown to be able to handle a relatively low-level language like C.
These issues are the same in C++ only if you have crappy and/or ancient C++ code. Only a bad programmer would find C++ merely a source of new ways to screw up bad code.
Tell me, if a car had a switch selecting front-wheel drive and all-wheel drive, would you consider that a safety problem because it's something I might get wrong?
A program that can be compiled with a C compiler is usually lousy C++. Ensuring that a C program is valid C++ is typically pointless and can introduce some infelicities. (The one that's coming to mind: double * double_array = malloc(30 * sizeof(double)); is valid C, but C++ requires the cast to double *. This adds verbiage, doesn't help the program, is another thing to potentially get wrong, and masks problems if the appropriate system header file isn't included.)
Decide which language you're going to write in, and write your program. I'd recommend C++ for most things, but C isn't a bad language itself.
When you're shipping, you want to have messages friendly to the user, which unmodified assert() tends not to be. Lots of these programs don't use stdin/stdout for user I/O.
One is that it turns out to be experimental error, like excess neutrons detected from the early cold fusion experiments. I consider this by far the most likely.
Another is that they've stumbled on an interesting effect that's an unexpected result of the physics we know. It may or may not have real-life uses.
Another is that they've found some minor new physics. I find this extremely unlikely. We've been bouncing microwaves around in cavities longer than most of us have been alive. This isn't some new device doing novel things.
It's conceivable that they've discovered some sort of action at a distance, which would be major new physics.
It's almost inconceivable that this is a reactionless drive that violates conservation of momentum. That would require physics to be rebuilt from the basics, since such violation would have vast implications that literally every scrap of theory would have to be rethought.
The reports are that it's far more efficient than a straight EM drive. Photons make really inefficient reaction mass, since the amount of momentum change you get per unit energy is very, very low. Assuming that the reported thrust is accurate, it means that the drive is reacting against some external matter.
First, "Sir Newton" is incorrect. If you're going to use "Sir", you have to go with "Isaac". "Newton" is correct, as is "Sir Isaac Newton".
Second, Einstein is more correct than Newton. Relativistic physics is pretty much the same as Newtonian for most practical purposes, but diverges under conditions Sir Isaac had no way to consider or test. We've tested relativity to death, and it's always at least as accurate, and in more extreme conditions much more accurate, than Newtonian physics. Meanwhile, we know that relativity is incomplete (we don't know how general relativity works on the quantum scale, for example), and presumably we'll eventually have even more accurate physics. It's conceivable that we'll get the laws of physics just right sometime, but it isn't happening right now.
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I'm not being paid. I'm being a contrarian, but an honest one.
People keep talking about the crimes Hillary has committed, but nobody ever tells me one that holds up to examination. If she's committed crimes, there should be no problem in coming up with one.
People talk about Benghazi, where, as far as I can tell, she did nothing seriously wrong. They talk about mishandling of classified material, but people who did approximately what she did have not been criminally prosecuted. They talk about people she knew who have died, but, in fact, I've known people who later died, and I haven't associated with nearly the number of people she has. They speculate on crimes she might have committed.
All it will take to shut me up is one definite serious crime with strong evidence that she committed it. That's all you have to tell me about, guys.
A reactionless drive isn't one that takes no energy. Currently, people put power in and read some effect out. The problem is with the conservation of momentum, not the conservation of energy, since in the environments we're talking about we can get away with ignoring relativistic effects.
The philosophy of science includes the idea that, if it happens, it's possible. However, I'm not going to believe the results of tethered tests, or tests that might rely on Earth's magnetic field to succeed.
There will be major problems with any theory used to justify it, since a reactionless drive violates far too much physics as we know it. In the extremely unlikely eventuality that this does turn out to be a major breakthrough, we'll have to figure out new physics around it.
If the effect is torque, we're screwing with the conservation of angular momentum, which means that the laws of physics vary depending on which way you're facing.
Relativity can be seen as correction factors to Newtonian physics that apply as we get further away from the sort of environment Newton could observe. Some sort of quantum gravity would be significant in environments we can't yet observe much, but would be the same sort of correction factors to GR and QM. You can see relativity as rebuilding physics from the ground up, since it eliminated such basic concepts as time and space and simultaneity. It's very likely that, sometime in the future, we'll dump concepts like spacetime as fundamental. It may be that there's situations where momentum is not conserved, meaning laws of physics would vary over time. There's no a priori guarantee that the laws of physics are constant, but we have a tremendous number of observations that say they are at any scale we can measure.
However, if momentum is not conserved in the everyday environment, we'd have variations in physical laws that are inconsistent with all those observations. We have variation in physical laws from place to place on a scale that has not been observed. It would be as if we discovered that the speed of light was much lower around pizza restaurants. There's no absolute reason why it couldn't be, but it would have caused a lot of things to work contrary to observation.
We're not talking here about exotic experimental techniques; we're talking about bouncing microwaves around a funny-shaped cavity. If that caused the laws of physics to change over space, you'd think we'd have some effects from having microwave ovens in physics labs.
You can put it another way, which is to say that, if momentum is not conserved, what do we know because of Noether's theorem? The theorem says that, if physical laws don't vary in space, momentum is conserved. Therefore, if this is a reactionless drive, physical laws must vary in space, and I suspect this means significant variance over a fairly short distance.
I'm not getting into the relativistic version of the theorem right now, but I suspect such a drive would break energy conservation as well.
We don't want to just have a neat little gimmick, we want to know how it works and what else we can do with the concept. Knowing whether it is pushing on a magnetic field or not is a step towards that.
Pretty much from the start, science fiction has been violating the known laws of physics wholesale. FTL and time travel are gimmes, but there's details that are just not going to work. Most fictional Solar System space travel has been with impossibly efficient rockets. Psionic abilities, common in a lot of old SF, are magic under a more scientific-sounding name. The difference between fantasy and science fiction, historically, has been tone rather than anything substantial. Science fiction that's actually scientific has always been a small niche.
You have a seriously skewed view of antidepressants, and probably don't know anything about depression. This means you haven't suffered from it, which is good, but it also means you shouldn't be taken seriously.
There's always people who have grand goals of conquering or subverting or destroying the US. If I worried about every group that had it in for me as a US citizen, I'd never get any sleep.
Find me some people who not only want world conquest but have some ability to get it started near Western civilization, and I might start to worry.
Also, have you known toddlers? Lots of them are in it for the mayhem and for the attention.
The Second was gutted by the end of the Reagan administration, in that it was illegal to go out and purchase a new infantry rifle. For all the whining by idiot gun owners, the Democrats have done damn little to take away people's guns.
Everybody wants to subvert the First. A large number of Republicans want to establish a state religion, for example. Both parties are leery of peaceable assembly. Both generally want to put undue limits on speech.
Just what crimes did you have in mind? I'm not interested in baseless allegations or stuff sufficiently trivial nobody would bother prosecuting me if I did the same thing.
Low-hanging fruit has been going over the wall to non-developers for a long time. When I first got into the profession, creating a simple report from what we had instead of a database would take a few days of my valuable time. Nowadays, we have tools so non-developers can create simple reports, and I do more interesting things.
I remember when "fourth-generation languages" were supposed to revolutionize development in much the same way, back in the 1980s. I'm not old enough to remember when COBOL was supposed to do the same thing around 1960.
And, in fact, non-developers got the ability to do some stuff that previously required developers. However, this freed up developers to do more interesting work, and didn't seem to depress developer employment and pay.
No, some differences in taxation levels can be considered subsidies while others aren't. Duh.
You're making some sweeping statements there about EU law, and I doubt you're qualified to make them.
If you manage to get an IRS agent to agree to a crazy tax scheme, that counts as following government guidance, but it won't save you in tax court.
Apple should have asked itself, "Is this too good to be true?" and acted accordingly. Always distrust deals that look too good. You don't know what will turn up later.
Your vision of the EU economy looks flawed to me. The issue with Greece is that they're stuck on the Euro, and therefore they need to borrow large numbers of Euros just to be able to keep their economy going. Were they on the drachma still, they'd have enough drachmas to run an economy without having to borrow Euros. The situation is basically German economic colonization by taking advantage of Greek problems.
The Kardashev scale measures civilizations by the amount of energy they use, not its source. However, anti-matter is not an energy source, and neither is dark matter. It is possible to use black holes to generate energy, but I'm not sure how well. It's conceivable that there are more exotic energy sources, but that doesn't matter here. There's no a priori reason why a Type 3 civilization needs to harness the power of their galaxy, as long as they can get the energy somehow.
The amount of energy usage relates to the ability to use energy. It's a very general measure, but it has the virtue of being potentially observable. We're very roughly Kardashev 0.7, and we don't have the technology to make it up to Type 1, so such a civilization has considerably better technology than we do.
A world with 1970s technology could not use energy on that scale. They might well be spiritually very advanced (whatever that means for nonhuman intelligence) and very happy and such, but we can't detect a civilization like that at any likely range..
IBM has a pretty solid lock on the mainframe market nowadays, so in a sense they're in better shape than when they had Amdahl and Itel as competitors. Microsoft is going to keep a similar grip on the desktop/laptop market for a long time to come. Microsoft is showing no signs of being able to compete in the general phone/tablet market, despite screwing their main customer base over in order to try. Microsoft isn't going to go away in my lifetime, but it will become increasingly irrelevant for most people.
My son did his college CS coursework mostly in Java and C, which strikes me as a reasonable mix. I really don't want someone graduating with a CS degree who hasn't been shown to be able to handle a relatively low-level language like C.
These issues are the same in C++ only if you have crappy and/or ancient C++ code. Only a bad programmer would find C++ merely a source of new ways to screw up bad code.
Tell me, if a car had a switch selecting front-wheel drive and all-wheel drive, would you consider that a safety problem because it's something I might get wrong?
A program that can be compiled with a C compiler is usually lousy C++. Ensuring that a C program is valid C++ is typically pointless and can introduce some infelicities. (The one that's coming to mind: double * double_array = malloc(30 * sizeof(double)); is valid C, but C++ requires the cast to double *. This adds verbiage, doesn't help the program, is another thing to potentially get wrong, and masks problems if the appropriate system header file isn't included.)
Decide which language you're going to write in, and write your program. I'd recommend C++ for most things, but C isn't a bad language itself.
When you're shipping, you want to have messages friendly to the user, which unmodified assert() tends not to be. Lots of these programs don't use stdin/stdout for user I/O.
There's different possible outcomes here.
One is that it turns out to be experimental error, like excess neutrons detected from the early cold fusion experiments. I consider this by far the most likely.
Another is that they've stumbled on an interesting effect that's an unexpected result of the physics we know. It may or may not have real-life uses.
Another is that they've found some minor new physics. I find this extremely unlikely. We've been bouncing microwaves around in cavities longer than most of us have been alive. This isn't some new device doing novel things.
It's conceivable that they've discovered some sort of action at a distance, which would be major new physics.
It's almost inconceivable that this is a reactionless drive that violates conservation of momentum. That would require physics to be rebuilt from the basics, since such violation would have vast implications that literally every scrap of theory would have to be rethought.
The reports are that it's far more efficient than a straight EM drive. Photons make really inefficient reaction mass, since the amount of momentum change you get per unit energy is very, very low. Assuming that the reported thrust is accurate, it means that the drive is reacting against some external matter.
First, "Sir Newton" is incorrect. If you're going to use "Sir", you have to go with "Isaac". "Newton" is correct, as is "Sir Isaac Newton".
Second, Einstein is more correct than Newton. Relativistic physics is pretty much the same as Newtonian for most practical purposes, but diverges under conditions Sir Isaac had no way to consider or test. We've tested relativity to death, and it's always at least as accurate, and in more extreme conditions much more accurate, than Newtonian physics. Meanwhile, we know that relativity is incomplete (we don't know how general relativity works on the quantum scale, for example), and presumably we'll eventually have even more accurate physics. It's conceivable that we'll get the laws of physics just right sometime, but it isn't happening right now.