There's no point to artillery shells in space. The kinetic energy alone is all you need as it will dwarf the chemical energy you can pack within the projectile. What's the point of a kiloton of TNT when it can have a megaton of kinetic energy :)

The 10-20s warning you get doesn't depend on the presence of thrust, but on a radar echo. The ionized exhaust plume is, I'd think, a net radar absorber and actually hampers detection. Using radars for space combat threat detection requires big antennas if you wish to detect far-away threats.

You can, because vacuum is not vacuum, at least not in any practical sense.

A shock wave can form in a fluid medium of a very tenuous pressure. You have shock waves forming in the solar wind at the fringes of our Solar system for crying out loud, and that's vacuum that's much better than any we can make on Earth! You have spectacular shock waves forming in relativistic jets, and that stuff too is fancy looking but very good vacuum nevertheless.

They do - perhaps not in the way you'd tend to think - but man, they most certainly do. All of the laser energy for various laser fusion experiments is channeled through fiber optics and mirrors. You have either internal reflections in the fiber optics, or surface reflections on mirrors. And they route what, gigawatts these days? All going through multiple reflections.

Umm, just no. Remember that maneuverability implies a change in momentum. Good luck changing that orbital plane - you have to change the orbital momentum. For example, setting up an orbit perpendicular to the one you currently have requires you to shed all of your existing orbital momentum first.

While lasers don't self-focus in vacuum, in gases, though, laser beam self-focusing actually a problem! Yeah, when you have a beam of sufficient intensity in air, it'll self focus and stay that way until its intensity decays below the self-focusing threshold. Non-linear effects FTW :)

I know I'm feeding a troll, but systemd is quite likable, and I like it better than launchd. I'm looking into getting rid of launchd on my OS X box and adding a launchd-compatibility layer into systemd so that the rest of the system would be happy in its ignorance about not talking to a real launchd...

Interestingly enough, it's only one keystroke more on a mac: Cmd-Space, ter, Enter.

Don't be so obstinate. To sue someone, as it is commonly used, is independent of the presumed outcome. The very filing of a suit places possibly undue burden on the defendant.

This assumes that there are no sidechannel attacks against this storage, and that it's protected against power fluctuations. IOW: A very professional professional with a $1E6+ budget would probably be able to do something more with it than just stare at it with dismay :)

That's only true given an assumption of there being no JTAG chain on an iPhone - I seriously doubt that. This gives you debug access to all the chips, and all you need to do is to pull the case apart and cradle the phone in a very modest bed of nails. This is sufficient to dump the flash, but not encryption keys. Unless there's a backdoor in the chip that carries the key - one can't be sure without reverse-engineering the relevant chip.

For all I know, Apple could have sneaked in JTAG access even through the lightning interface, so an encrypted dump of the flash could be done using a specialized JTAG-over-lightning bridge, without opening the phone.

I think that such adaptations go even on a much shorter timescale. I don't eat between breakfast and dinner, and it used to be that I had a sugar low around 1-2pm. Right now it's the opposite: if I eat anything during the work hours, I get sleepy because there's an insulin low that starts after noon or so. And I did actually sample the insulin levels at hourly intervals for a month to make sure I'm not imagining things. These days, going out for an occasional lunch with coworkers is a surefire way to waste the rest of the day, falling asleep at the keyboard.

The best day for me is to get a bit of lactose from coffee with milk in the morning, not have anything else to eat, drink water, and then have a nice dinner. If I'm planning to do any work at night, the dinner must be under 1200 kcal.

And that's why, in 2000 years or so, the evolutionary processes will likely fix it. Of course we'll be all in a big doodoo if, for whatever reason, we'd be faced with going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle - not only due to population crash, but also due to a then-maladaptation to circumstances that wouldn't exist anymore.

Ada was quite painful before widescreen monitors became the norm...