w.r.t. drone videos.

Bingo. I spent a summer at PPPL, and *everyone* used a Mac (and all the cluster machines were Linux). Ditto for 2/3 of the faculty and students in my undergraduate physics department.

If you want a home* demonstration of how tiny hot-spots spread in glass in a slightly different context: blow torch a redhot-spot onto a glass bottle and then put the glass in the microwave for a few minutes. Whereas before the glass would have been fine in the microwave for an indeterminately long time, it will now turn into a puddle of molten goop in short order.

Different wavelengths and all for the laser stuff, but still.

*Don't try this at home.

I was damn happy with Torque, but then they went through a bunch of mismanagement with InstantAction and then when they recovered, put money into good documentation but not into maintaining OS X compatibility and I split. Nothing I've looked at since then has hit the right combination of cross-platform, having solid networked physics, and allowing me to hack hardware-instancing support into the graphics pipeline (or supporting it out of the box in the closed-source cases).

You didn't wait for the crickets ;) There are quite a few free engines on the market that predate the Unity/UE show, and if you've spent any time in the area you know the landscape pretty well. jME, Panda, Torque, Irrlicht, OGRE,....

Your post says "I don't know anything about game development, but I've got this sweet anti-F/OSS rant I've been waiting to post for a while"

Which is why the target power for most military lasers is orders of magnitude higher than this. This is a research milestone, not a finished project.

Rather: overheats, stops functioning as a mirror, and burns like everything else.

Transmission is where it's at. It's everything I used to love about uTorrent: small, fast, and unobtrusive.

I don't know why this is modded funny.....my natural rhythm seems to be 20/10, and this seems to be pretty common in my field.

Photons are "merely" localized changes in an electromagnetic field. Intuitively, "bumping" a charged particle will cause it to wiggle, causing just such changes to propagate. This is sort of a lie depending on your intuition for "bump", but it's close enough for a 3am /. post.

or...Andrew Stanton. Or Brad Bird.

I think this misses a little bit the problem with Lucas's film-making. The problem has never been the plot - he's fantastic at that. It's the dialogue and characterization. He does mythic, not interpersonal. I'd be all for a trilogy in which Lucas provided the plot structure and someone else handled the script-writing. This is basically what happened with the original trilogy, and it was amazing.

host the Olympics?

This true - but all of the activities I suggested also help self-select for a peer group that is less likely to be problematic.

Thankfully there are more options than "preppy preschool" and "melt brain on TV". Playing outside, reading, and construction toys are all pretty solid options.