This is needed at the bar when pouring into a glass or pitcher.

By then it's far too late. This is about spreading out the active ingredient from the hops during the original mixinig, before brewing, so it can keep the ingredient from the fungi from loading up on carbon dioxide during brewing. By the time you pour, the opportunity for the hops to do anything but add flavor is long gone.

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?

The guy in the cubicle next to mine spends his lunch hour browsing Fox News, Drudge Report and Townhall. I can make a very solid case that he's not.
=Smidge=

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.

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.

That the list contains people without convictions means that you can be added, and your sentence affected, by things you haven't been proven guilty of: Due Process Fail.

That stuck out like a big sore thumb to me. It's police and prosecutorial misconduct, pure and simple. (I'm appalled that this wasn't brought up until this far down in the discussion.)

Other items, just from the little bit quoted here:
  - 'people whom the D.A. considers "uncooperative witnesses,"'

One of the big differences between the US and English systems is that in the US you are NOT REQUIRED to risk your own life to do the police department's work by testifying about what you've seen. (You aren't allowed to lie, but you are allowed to be silent.) The police often can't, or won't, provide you with protection against criminal retaliation for your testimony, at the same time that they block you from obtaining or using the means to protect yourself. Don't want to be a martyr? Just say nothing.

But these guys are turning that principle on its head: If they decide you're an "uncooperative witness", into the database you go, to be harassed and minutely scrutinized from then on, threatened with arrest at any slip-up, treated differently, and far worse, than other citizens. That's selective enforcement at its worst, and denial of civil rights under cover of law.

Then there's "gang members". If some policeman don't happen to like you and the friends you hang out with, they he can define your group as a "gang", regardless of whether you've committed any crime, and treat you and your group as they would big-time repeat offenders. Any bets on whether this gets used against political opponents of the prosecutors' party?

150Nm is about what a typical small car engine might be capable of at peak, but torque at the wheels would typically be greater due to gear reductions. Not really relevant, though - the torque of the engine applied to the wheels is not applied to the lug nuts on the wheels as a torque, but applied to the lugs themselves as a shear.

Maybe imperial units will help?

15 Newton-meters is roughly 11 foot-pounds. Most people can comfortably apply that kind of torque with a normal wrench, and that's about twice what a strong person could do with a screwdriver.

Torque specifications for lug nuts are typically in the 80 to 120 foot-pound range, though practically nobody outside of a reputable auto shop will bother with that (and even most reputable shops will gloss over it...). Most people, including myself, either use an impact gun or step on the lug wrench, which results in slight over-tightening. Figure a 150-lb person standing on a 12" long wrench and that's 150 ft-lbs... slightly over but not too bad.

For gasoline car engines, torque (ft-lbs) seems to always be fairly close to horsepower... so 120 ft-lbs is about right for a 120hp engine, plus or minus. It boils down to the fact that most gasoline engines are designed to run at a certain RPM, which makes the math turn out that these two metrics are often within maybe 10% of each other.
=Smidge=

As the AC said, for a very limited torque; 15 Newton-Meters. For a sense of scale, the recommended torque on a lug nut for a car tire is typically around 8-10 times that.

It's also under cryogenic conditions, intended for space applications, which is a rather special case (ultra-reliable under extreme environments) where it makes makes more sense to use something exotic.

And having said that, the more I learn about it the less I'm impressed with it. Magnetic bearings are pretty old hat technologically speaking, and the harmonic drive aspect is only novel in that it uses magnetic repulsion to flex the spline cup rather than physical contact. Meh. Even their "through-wall transmission" thing is a glorified magnetic stirrer.
=Smidge=

Your argument basically boils down to "since electric motors can produce high torque, then permanent magnet couplings can also provide high torque"

My contention is you make it sound way, way simpler than it is. Also, you'll find that the really big motors are not the permanent magnet type exactly because producing a high-torque motor with permanent magnets is more difficult and expensive. It's an issue of flux density.

I'm sure you COULD design a permanent magnet coupling for any particular purpose, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to do so.
=Smidge=

Electric motors can stall, and when they do so they draw a terrifyingly huge amount of power compared to when they're operating properly. Providing that static torque is very expensive and often dangerous unless the motor and controls were designed for it.

It's not that magnetic fields can't be strong enough, it's getting fields that are strong enough without additional energy input.
=Smidge=

So basically "Project 2501" then?

=Smidge=

Try flying some small helium party-style balloons on kevlar fishing line tethers, creating a forest of near-invisible strings.

Copter drones don't fly well with the blades wrapped in string.

(Indeed, I hear full-sized helicopers don't work all that well with a few hundred turns of 75-pound test line wrapped around that pitch control mechanism at the hub, either.)

This might not work against those with the bumpers all around. But the ones with the blades unguarded would have quite a time getting through.