Great for work, but what about going to the store? The bar? The Theater? The Mall? Going to a friend's place? Going on a date? The real world isn't a Turn Based Strategy Game. You don't have to decide on one course of research for the entire nation at the cost of all others. There's plenty of people working on telecommuting and other communication technologies, and the skills needed for making a self driving car are different from the skills needed for those technologies. Self driving cars are far from a "stupid idea". Any problems with them are offset by the problems of the other options. Everything will have problems. Nothing is perfect.

Anyone who's making this argument hasn't followed the logic to its conclusion. At the speed the planet is going, even a 1 second jump would cause you to end up in space. So the fact that a 1 minute jump and 30 year jump into the past worked in the movie means that Doc's time machine compensates. Maybe the gravitational well of the Earth and Sun drag space-time around, at least as far as time travel is concerned. Or perhaps it's relativity --- all measurements are relative to something, there is no such thing as a fixed point in space. The time machine travels in time relative to the planet. So rather than be impressed with the speaker's intellect or the comedian's wit, I end up thinking they're both a bit dull, and slow to the punch.

Currently I have 3 screens. 1) The text of the IDE on a portrait monitor, or Unity Logs while the game is running. 2) Unity engine live editor plus the IDE tools (properties, solution explorer) 3) Unity engine gameplay. I'm considering getting a fourth so that I can have the IDE and Logs on different monitors, since I often have to move the logs elsewhere in order to see them while stepping through the debugger.

You don't even have two? I have three. I can't imagine getting any work done without at least two.

GuyThiebaut wrote:

What is a 'non-random' person?

A 'non-random' person would be a person who has actually had direct experience with the device, such as someone at Skunkworks, or Northwestern Polytechnical University, or... you get the idea. Build the em-drive yourself and you would no longer be a "random person".

GuyThiebaut wrote:

Also, I don't need to 'believe' evidence.

Sure you do! I can give you a picture of Neil Armstrong on the moon, but if you're a "Truther" you won't believe the evidence. Or the entire pile that goes along with it. Humans are quite capable of not believing evidence. All I ask is that when judging by the scientific method, you check your prejudices at the door. Don't declare it a hoax without doing the slightest bit of research, don't point out all the ways previous hoaxes worked in an attempt to discredit it even though none of them apply. Instead, say something like "The preliminary evidence is interesting. I look forward to its submission to a peer reviewed journal."

GuyThiebaut wrote:

'believe' is not a word that is used in scientific studies, 'evidence' and 'proof' are words that are used.

Right. I'm not talking about scientific studies not believing it. The scientific studies have provided evidence in the form of empirical measurements of thrust. It's random people like you and me who don't believe the evidence being presented. I argue for giving them the benefit of the doubt. If they're seeing thrust, they need to study it further, and to do that they need funding. People declaring it impossible and a hoax are essentially saying it's not worth their taxpayer money.

While being skeptical is fine... 1) The drive still exists. Multiple, independently built copies. 2) The inventor has released the secret. Two German labs, a Chinese lab, and NASA skunkworks have all independently built it. 3) As the above shows... Nope. No one's bought the patent, and the evidence hasn't been destroyed. Just people refuse to believe it. Everyone who's built the device is shocked to report it works; at least preliminary tests show thrust. They aren't fully ready to publish because they need to do more research, so yeah, it might be bunk, but it doesn't really look like a hoax. I want to see the device tested in orbit, but that's going to require a lot of money from people who believe themselves too smart to buy it.

Corporal Agarn wrote:

However, when has MS ever thought about what the users do?

Very often, actually, at least when they have examples. Go read The Old New Thing some time to see the horror stories of the Windows team dealing with the insanity of ensuring backward compatibility with every program out there.

Boeing issued a statement saying they do isolate the systems. "[Boeing said] IFE systems on commercial airplanes are isolated from flight and navigation systems. "While these systems receive position data and have communication links, the design isolates them from the other systems on airplanes performing critical and essential functions," Boeing said in a statement provided by spokesman Doug Adler." http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/05/17/hacker-sideways-chris-roberts-fbi-united/27492409/

"now we have industry A asking why every other industry isn't subjected to the same draconian practices" The phone companies are. The oil companies are. Gas companies are. Electric companies are. Water companies are. You can't ask why other industries aren't subject to practices when other industries ARE subject to these practices. If phone companies are subjected to these "draconian practices", why aren't the other telecoms?

You're thinking of SOPA, not Net Neutrality. NN is pretty much the polar opposite.

What do you mean it didn't find anything? Googling "Atlantis Pegasus", the very first result points to what I was referencing. So does the second... and the rest of the first page. (Hint: Sci Fi T.V. show. I was making a joke.) But yes, Atlantis is a name for a resort these days. I've seen the ads.

Pretty sure Atlantis is in the Pegasus galaxy...

Collin Jasnoch wrote:

_Maxxx_ wrote:

Losing knowledge over time certainly has happened in the past

How can you be so certain? If the knowledge was "lost" then it is not likely anyone would know it...

We know that certain things existed from archeological records, but we don't know how to make it or what it means. For example, we know of Greek Fire from the writings of Theophanes and other contemporary accounts, but we don't know what its formula was. Another well known example is Linear A and Linear B, languages that we know exist and have examples of, but don't know how to translate or what the examples mean. I could go on. So we do know, for a fact, that knowledge has been lost in the past, so it's not unlikely that it could happen again in the future.

I'm actually guilty of writing a program where, in one version, "move the mouse" was required to keep it from getting stuck while processing in certain conditions. In my case, I neglected to close a file that was reopened later. It got stuck because it was waiting for someone to release the file, but it was holding the file itself. Moving the mouse produced enough garbage to trigger the garbage collector, which then closed the file that was no longer in use. Once the finalizer had closed the file, the app was able to open the file and continue. It wasn't caught in QA because usually enough work was done in QA's tests that the garbage collector would be triggered at least once... Technicians only had to move the mouse for a few days while the patch went through QA...

I can't speak to your DBMS, but on MySQL a nullable column has an implicit default of NULL, and so are not required by INSERTs. If you want to make sure that the developer always sets that column, you cannot use NULL. If the column is NOT NULL and the developer INSERTs without the column, MySQL will complain that the column has no default value, but if they include the column with a fake-null sentinel value, MySQL will let that through. This means that NOT NULL requires the developer to intentionally set the value to "null", never by accident. I've had occasion to use this technique, but only with columns that really, really must be filled in and only rarely have the value of the fake null. Usually a null is and should be used, and this technique reserved for when it is absolutely necessary. As always, it's about knowing when to use a feature, not about outright outlawing said feature.

Be careful with assumptions about what the user can and cannot do through the UI, especially if you work on the web. The QA team at my company has specific instructions to enable all disabled buttons and controls using various means (on the web, it's pretty easy: Inspect Element. For Windows applications, a special app is needed). The main reason is to secure the app against users being malicious rather than stupid, though.

This was just a really quick Google search, but I got the result that the whole lunar program was $83 billion in 2005 dollars. (I don't know off hand the conversion of 2005 dollars to 2012 dollars, but I figure this is close enough) $83 billion / 500 Kg in $/ounce = 4,706,020.84 US$ / ounce, or $4.7 million / ounce is the target you're asking for. Current prices, according to the article given, are $1.7 trillion / ounce. That would be six orders of magnitude, more or less, for fuel alone to be equivalent to the entire Apollo program. Considering how it came down 3 orders of magnitude without anyone really trying hard to make it cheaper, I could see it coming down much further than that if we really put our minds to it.

Personally I'm hoping we can overcome Heisenberg uncertainty so we can convert our Quantum Encryption devices into Quantum Communication devices...

Hmm. I always assumed you needed something inside the warp bubble to maintain the bubble, but like I said, that's an assumption. Is there something in the research that indicates a bubble is persistent and can be created at an arbitrary location, rather than around the "warp drive"? You may still want a warp drive with navigation capabilities so that it can correct itself if something gets in the way or it misses the catcher. I do wonder about your sending an RF signal idea though. Are you assuming the RF signal will just bounce around inside the bubble? Or do you need a 2-light-year long bubble to keep up with the RF signal's natural propagation inside the bubble? I really want to know what happens when something touches the edge of the bubble....