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This is what some people really believe:

If EMdrive is real and scales with Q factor then we get almost Star Trek level Technology (or Stargate Atlantis, going by the picture)

An EM-Drive with a q factor of 3 billion would need required is 20 MWe for the 1 gee acceleration spacecraft. 20 MWe is more than any reactor ever orbited but well within known design parameters.

An EM-Drive with a q factor of 30 billion would need required is 2 MWe for the 1 gee acceleration spacecraft.

An EM-Drive with a q factor of 60 billion would need required is 1 MWe for the 1 gee acceleration spacecraft.

An EM-Drive with a q factor of 300 billion would need required is 200 KWe for the 1 gee acceleration spacecraft.

For 30 to 300 billion q factors the power levels for a 1000 ton vehicle drop to the level where, you could use solar power for Emdrive to counter gravity on earth. It would be virtual anti-gravity. Structures that would be possible would not just be flying cars or floating antigravity but flying cities.

Gee = G.

Even the millinewtons of thrust being measured currently are disputed.

I won't say that EmDrive won't kill thermodynamics, because the expansion of the universe is apparently accelerating. Maybe that is an energy source that is being tapped into by the magic thruster. In which case turning on enough EmDrives would save the Universe by preventing the Big Freeze/Rip.

Earth being unusually dry for a habitable world would be a Fermi Paradox soft landing

1. The Fermi Paradox is still a thing.
2. Many Earth-sized planets may be completely covered in water, with no surface land whatsoever.
3. If there are life forms on these planets, they would be unable to develop technologically even if they were intelligent. No metallurgy, no electromagnetic communications, no spacecraft.
4. We can land boats onto the water worlds and dominate the fishy lifeforms.

UFO researcher says new documentary exposes ‘what the secret agenda has been’

Even within the much-maligned and widely misunderstood field of “UFOlogy,” Steven Greer is a divisive figure.

His affinity for the spotlight and his willingness to dive deep into areas of the subject where other UFO researchers fear to tread have painted him with a broader target for contention than many of his contemporaries. He is at it once again with the recent book-and-film combo Unacknowledged: An Exposé of the Greatest Secret in Human History — the compelling documentary half of which will receive its Toronto premiere coupled with a Q&A with Greer this Saturday. The event is open to non-conference attendees as part of the three-day Alien Cosmic Expo UFO symposium taking place over the weekend at the Airport Crowne Plaza Hotel.

Greer is not easing off. As he puts it, Unacknowledged — the book and the film, the latter directed by first-time documentarian Michael Mazzola — “really take people from zero to 100 quickly.”

Video (warning: contains deplorable content) and text description:

On June 7th, 2017, Eichenwald claimed he had been sent an anti-semitic flyer as a result of Tucker Carlson mentioning him on his show. In an effort to prove the veracity of his claim, Eichenwald tweeted an image of him holding the flyer he was sent (shown below).

It was soon noticed that in the image, Eichenwald had a tab on his computer opened to B-Chiku, or Hentai. This led many to joke about the idea that Eichenwald masturbates to hentai pornography. These jokes were covered in Mediaite[9] (examples shown below).

The following day, Eichenwald defended himself by saying the tab was open because he was “trying to convince his wife that tentacle porn existed.”[10] Eichenwald went so far as to include a screenshot of a conversation with his wife where she verified his story.

Rather than tentacles, the tabbed hentai contained "traditional gender roles and values, with a submissive stay-at-home wife and a working husband".

Wikipedia profile.

US coalition in first downing of Syrian army plane

U.S. warplane downs Syrian army jet in Raqqa province

I'm a little shocked it took this long.

http://www.snopes.com/breatharians/

http://www.babwnews.com/2017/06/crazy-couple-says-they-no-longer-need-to-eat/

Some predictions from "the father of deep learning", Jürgen Schmidhuber:

He predicts trillions of AI in the 2050s will mine and develop [asteroids].

He has a long list of “truths” that many disagree with.

1. Many think that intelligence is this awesome, infinitely complex thing. Juergen think it is just the product of a few principles that will be considered very simple in hindsight, so simple that even kids will be able to understand and build intelligent, continually learning, more and more general problem solvers.
Partial justification of this belief:
(a) there already exist blueprints of universal problem solvers developed in my lab, in the new millennium, which are theoretically optimal in some abstract sense although they consist of just a few formulas (http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html).

(b) The principles of our less universal, but still rather general, very practical, program-learning recurrent neural networks can also be described by just a few lines of pseudo-code, e.g., http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/rnn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/compressednetworksearch.html

2. General purpose quantum computation won’t work (Juergen’s prediction of 15 years ago is still standing). Related: The universe is deterministic, and the most efficient program that computes its entire history is short and fast, which means there is little room for true randomness, which is very expensive to compute. What looks random must be pseudorandom, like the decimal expansion of Pi, which is computable by a short program. Many physicists disagree, but Einstein was right: no dice. There is no physical evidence to the contrary http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/randomness.html. For example, Bell’s theorem does not contradict this. And any efficient search in program space for the solution to a sufficiently complex problem will create many deterministic universes like ours as a by-product. Think about this. More here http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html and here http://www.kurzweilai.net/in-the-beginning-was-the-code

[...] Juergen won’t be surprised if Moore’s Law holds for another century. If so, computers will approach the Bremermann limit of 10^51 ops/s per kg of matter in the mid 2100s

Femtocomputing, please.

Interesting Wikipedia talk page.

This is from last month but there's no newer article about AV1:

Google’s Royalty-Free Answer to HEVC: A Look at AV1 and the Future of Video Codecs

AOMedia Video 1:

AV1 can be used together with the audio format Opus in a future version of the WebM format for HTML5 web video and WebRTC.

What kind of features are you looking for in AV1 (other than the obvious: better compression efficiency than H.265/HEVC)?

Apple is adding HEVC support to its products.

The fine pieces of shit over at Rolling Stone recently interviewed Billy Joel:

Critics used to give you a hard time. But it seems like in the past few years you've become cool.
Look, man, Trump is president, so all kinds of weird shit can happen.

What do you make of that?
I'm still flabbergasted. I try to stay out of politics. I am a private citizen and I have a right to believe in my own political point of view, but I try not to get up on a soapbox and tell people how to think. I've been to shows where people start haranguing the audience about what's going on politically and I'm thinking, "You know, this isn't why I came here." As a matter of fact, one of the biggest cheers of the night comes when we do "Piano Man" and I sing, "They know that it's me that they're coming to see to forget about life for a while," and the audience lets out this huge "ahhhh" and I say, "OK, yeah, don't forget that." We're more like court jesters than court philosophers.

Normally I wouldn't even pay attention to some celebrity spouting off on politics (Because who gives a damn?) but Joel absolutely nails what a whole lot of folks are thinking on the matter. Tip of the hat to the Piano Man for keeping it classy.

In a break from my usual interests of business and geopolitics... Culturally we are still not above paying people anywhere from $50 to in this case, more than $100m for punching each other for the sake of entertainment.

Unbeaten boxer Floyd Mayweather will fight UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor in a much-discussed boxing match on Aug. 26 in Las Vegas, a well-placed source told Yahoo Sports on Wednesday.

Mayweather and McGregor both confirmed the fight on social media on Wednesday.

[...] It is a stunning development given that Mayweather, the greatest boxer of his era, had said he was retired after compiling a 49-0 pro record from 1996 through 2015. But with a fight which could pay each man in excess of $100 million, he reconsidered.

Mayweather is considered the greatest boxer of his generation and among the best of all-time. The fight with McGregor, in addition to paying him in excess of nine figures, will give him the opportunity to improve to 50-0.

Source: Yahoo! Sports