That is the point I keep coming back to... the idea of a picture ID or any paperwork that you carry with you comes from a time when we didn't have networked computers with access to real time information. It seems reasonable that we could just eliminate having to carry around physical IDs altogether (at least as a requirement of the law) and have the police taking pictures and/or typing in a name to verify someone's identity.

Facial recognition could be used to make the look-ups faster and more accurate. And most drivers are associated with one or two vehicles, so the police could have someone's picture up before they even approach the driver in most cases.

At some point relying on the information provided by a picture ID just isn't reliable and has always been prone to being faked. Much better to just check the picture stored by the DMV than to trust a picture on an ID. Sure the network can go down, but that really should be the exception and we can probably think of a better fallback than a piece of plastic with your name and an old picture on it.

Nearly all of what you say are valid points. But one carries a misconception:

By it's very nature of being a focused, collimated beam a laser does not affect anything in "the general direction" of the target - if it was not focused and accurate, it wouldn't be an effective weapon and might not even be dangerous.

That's SO not true. There are two issues here:
  - Forward (and back) scatter: A laser beam "leaks" light, primarily in the "general direction" of the main beam and, to a lesser extent, in the general direction of back toward the source. It's not a big percentage. But when you start out with kilowatts of colimated light it can be more than adequate to burn out a human eye.
  - Scattering (also specular reflection) from the target, or the cloud of gas that remains of the target. This can be a substantial fraction of the incident beam.

"Do not look at the beam or the target with the remains of your face."

Deuterium/Hydrogen (D/H) isotope ratio is significantly higher (more than three times, in fact) than that of water found on Earth.

Q: How do you separate heavy water from light water?
A: Distillation. Light water boils off / evaporates more easily, because the molecules are lighter, and leaves the heavier water behind.

Why shouldn't this be true of vacuum sublimation as well?

Leave a chunk of dirty ice orbiting the sun in a hard vaccuum for a few million years, with the water quietly sublimating away. Seems to me the result would be that last remaining chunk of dirty ice would have a substantially larger fraction of heavy water molecules than the water on the planet where the deep gravity well hangs on to the lighter molecules.

Is it enough to explain a 3:1 enrichment? No clue. But I'd like to see that the analysis was done and what the scientists' estimates were.

(Not to say they ignored it. The last time I raised a similar question about a scientific paper reported here it turned out that the scientists HAD examined the issue.)

This will cost us billions of dollars in the private and public sector,

who is this "us" he is talking about?

The taxpayers. It's a clear violation of the "takings" clause of the US Fifth Amendment (long since incorporated against the states and their subdivisions, including the City and County of Los Angeles.) This means, after a bunch of legal wrangling, the courts are very likely to rule that applying such a law against a pre-existing building is a "partial taking" and the government must make the owner whole, i.e. reimburse him for his costs of compliance.

The takings clause:

No person shall ... be deprived of ... property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

if the public good is really being served here by improving safety of citizens, why isn't the discussion framed more along these lines?

When it gets to the courts, it will be. Count on it.

One of the religious prohibitions in Islam is making war with fire.

If this is used it will be interesting to see the effects on recruiting by the Islamic State and other anti-US organizations among those Muslims who are currently either opposed to them or unaligned.

Also: How do you keep a 30 kW laser, at any frequency, from blinding everybody in the general direction of the target? The last I heard, weapons that blind are banned by the current "laws of war" as recognized by the western powers - and that's been the major impeidment so far to deploying laser (and other directed energy) weapons. Has something changed? Or did the current administration just decide to play with the new toy despite past promises to the other kids?

How is this "directly connected to the internet" when it is using a router to access the net.

By that definition, NOTHING connects directly to the internet.

Anyone with a better understanding care to explain ?

The proper definition of a host running an internet-facing application being "directly connecting to the internet" is using IP for the first hop, with the packets having a route from there to and from the rest of the Connected (capital-I) Internet.

Bluetooth 4.2 added support for IPv6 to/from bluetooth devices. This means IP packets formed on, or directed to, the Bluetooth 4.2 hosts, for delivery to/from other Internet-connected devices, do not require a protocol-translation gateway to select and translate some subset of the packet types, services, and features, modifying the transport semantics to support some tiny subset of functionality that the gateway explicitly understands. An IP packet formed on the bluetooth device goes all the way to its destination semantically unmodified, and ditto packets going from some other device to the bluetooth device. The full feature set of IP (or as much of it as the stack implementer choses to support) is available, while the routers can be "as dumb as rocks" and totally ignorant of what the application on the Bluetooth device is up to, in classic Internet style.

A Bluetooth 4.2 device, using IPv6 and with a route, IS on the Internet, and is a peer to all other internet-connected hosts.

I really hope nobody is still leasing land line phones... But according to that article as of 2007 there were still about 580,000 mostly older or elderly people leasing land line phones.

If you have a parent or grandparent, maybe you can help them get out of one of these leases... seriously: take a look at what your grandma (or someone's grandma) is still paying every month on her phone

• Traditional Rotary - Monthly Lease Rate: $4.45
• Traditional TouchTone - Monthly Lease Rate: $5.95 (now we are getting fancy)
• Trimline® Rotary - Monthly Lease Rate: $5.25
• Trimline® Touch Tone - Monthly Lease Rate: $6.45 (Currently the equivalent style phone is selling on Amazon for less than $10)
• And it goes on. Basically the equivalent of most of these phones can be purchased for less than a few months of what they charge for a lease, but their customer service will convince your grandparents that they are still living in the 1960s and they need to continue to lease their phone in order to keep phone service.

This is relevant to nerds and technology how?

Some of us are eco-nerds.

Seriously. Planets and space habitats will need ecological engineering - the real stuff, not the eco-wacko knee-jerks.

Examinations of how this horrendously complex system works when tweaked are definitely "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters".

There are lots of different sorts of nerds, and lots of nerds geek out on many different technologies each. If you sometimes see nerd-fodder that isn't on one of YOUR subjects on Slashdot, suck it up and shut up, while the nerds of THAT topic finally get to have THEIR conversation.

We get enough of that disruptive raining-on-our-parade from the jocks.

We all want to have a monopoly on what we do for a living. We want limited competitor and supply s and be able to charge high prices. As consumers we want unlimited choices, lots of supply, and low prices. A free market will provide the latter and a command economy is required for the former. What we have now is the worst of both. Those with political power use it to restrict start up and small competitors while trying to have unlimited supply of cheap labor.

It only takes one predator carrying a pregnant fish from one pond to another to eat it and having the eggs wash into the pond to start. I'm sure they take off pretty quick with no large fish predators in the water.

The difference is that this is the first compile and test of Orion and it costs a couple billion so don't mess up.

I think the original reason is that employee benefits are typically calculated over 40 hours. So after 40 hours the cost of the employee actually goes down to the employer.

In case anyone is interested.
http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv

Especially since those evil men were most likely raised by single women and educated in schools made up almost entirely of women.

If men's lives weren't disposable think how hard it would be to get things done or have wars.