I'm the same, my fingers don't reach and arthritis makes it hard to stretch. I was not talking about physical limitations though, I meant the mental capacity to understand and master the concepts.

Bingo. You are not the product, your personal information is. You gave that information away for free, so don't get any compensation. Due to the special nature of the information it has some special protections, but that's it.

Next time some company asks for my data I'm going to offer them a subscription service.

The author also vastly underestimates the Iranian navy. They have some fairly advanced subs that would cause major problems for any attacking navy. They also have some of the fastest and deadliest torpedoes in the world, and some effective anti-ship missiles. Dingies would be the least of the US navy's worries.

Yeah, they used them in the past, because they didn't need any more. They were not trying to start a war, and lasers would have been a huge escalation.

I think the Navy's primary long-term interest in this is a defensive measure against ASM tech, and it's frankly, a good application.

We're not going to be seeing gently-rolling guided cruise missiles any time soon (and certainly not for $10k) and we're not going to see long-range guided rolling rockets.

Anti-ship missiles are getting faster and faster, and CIWS is getting less and less likely to work. Aegis cruisers can already take out most ballistics that would threaten a carrier group. CIWS needs replacement- mounting lasers on support cruisers to train on a fast cruise missile is perfectly legitimate, and it increases the usefulness of having carrier groups to begin with.

I think the power-delivery capability is going to greatly outpace the defensive capabilities of ordnance. The kind of cooling necessary to stop that kind of energy is massive, and unlikely to work well on a cruise missile, and the only real defense- thicker armor is going to make it harder to keep the missiles as fast as they need to be to have any chance of success.
This isn't a waste of money, it's literally the only hope for keeping carrier groups relevant.
Mirrors will never be credible way to counter a high-power laser threat. Not even internally cooled. Mirrors are simply too easy to damage, and they're not a mirror after that happens.

They've been destroying 60mm mortar rounds from 500m out with 20kW lasers since 2006, what exactly is the basis for your disbelief in the usefulness of laser point-defense?

This is the only realistic protection. Rotation and ablative shielding. Reflection is folly.

Small portions of thin layer of beryllium is destroyed in some small fraction of a second, copper is hit, copper heats up, it and beryllium turn into slag en masse. There's no realistic battlefield mirror scenario that defends against 50kW of light. That's not to say 50kW of light is guaranteed to kill whatever is flying at it, but a mirror just doesn't buy enough time to matter.

Bad idea. The idea is to prevent the mirror from heating up. Covering it in the ablative equivalent of tinder is not a solution to that problem.

You are right- but it takes just a few J/cm^2 to make a mirror no longer a mirror. That's the cost of high reflectivity. A strong ablative armor is a superior route for laser protection. Unfortunately, that's also heavy and not well suited to guided ordnance.

7) Figure out how to design a guided missile that rotates at a high rate

I don't even see it being pitched as ABM. The congressional briefings on the system even mention that many-MW-scale lasers would be required to injure an incoming ballistic RV. This may however be highly useful for carrier protection- especially if not located on the carrier. Cruisers in the carrier group, spaced properly, could very likely take out ASM projectiles, especially since they tend to be cruise-missiles, not rotating warheads, and being able to target the incoming weapon from the side as opposed to head-on would limit the atmospheres disruption of the beam.
Most potential enemies that have ballistic ASMs are using shitty enough ballistics that we can intercept them with standard issue ABM systems (Aegis cruisers).

You're right- though at typical projectile velocities, the atmosphere makes a piss-poor coolant. Why pulse the laser in nanoseconds if you have a laser with sufficient cooling and available power as to hold the beam on the target? Obviously, we'll need MW lasers if we ever want to take truly well shielded and rotating/tumbling projectiles out, but for most things flying through the air, being able to hold 50kW on it for a reasonable amount of time is brutally devastating. Even coated in mirror.
Lockheed has demonstrated in-flight subsonic rocket destruction with 10kW lasers.

Oh, quite simple. Because 2.5kW in a that small of an area is more than enough to make that mirror no longer a mirror. You can try this at home, if you have sufficiently tough conductors. 10kJ is obscenely high for an estimate of what it takes to oblate a mirror surface. Usually a few J/cm^2 is enough to do the trick, and degradation (micropitting) starts happening at the 1J/cm^2 levels. ITER has some publicly available studies on this exact topic. Assuming a focal area of 126 cm^2 (roughly 5 inch diameter) and 2.5kW total absorbed energy, we're talking ~20J/cm^2- enough to turn the mirror into slag in fractions of a second. Now, in the case of a fast-rotating mirror object, this may be a lot more difficult to capitalize on, so ballistic RVs may be out of the question, but something like an anti-ship missile, or a cruise missile would be easy pickins'

So it's a simple ad-hominem attack? Why not make some specific criticisms, instead of just attacking the person? What is the GP's agenda that causes him to act this way?

I think we are going to need some mass consumer legal action to force the issue. In the UK the Sale of Goods Act requires devices to last a "reasonable length of time", which for cheap TVs is usually thought to be about 5 years and for expensive ones maybe 10 years. If the TV breaks down before then the retailer, not the manufacturer, has to sort it out. If it was half way through its expected life they could either fix it or give you a partial refund for lost functionality. A dead TV would get you a 50% refund, one where the smart features are broken would be based on how much you use the feature and decided by a court if needs be.

Some TVs from 2011 are losing YouTube support. I use the YouTube app on my TV every day. Replacement of this lost functionality would require something like an Amazon FireTV stick for £35. I would expect the retailer to offer me that, or at least part of that cost, if my TV broke down before it is 10 years old. It might not be a lot, but the retailer has to pay it and it might force manufacturers to try a bit harder.

Having said that, even if you were screwed, a FireTV stick or similar is so cheap now it's not a massive loss. If you get 3+ years of app use out of the TV that's good, and don't forget the smart features include other useful stuff like recording to USB HDD and streaming via DLNA etc.