Rank of this problem in things we need to worry about: 4,534,211.

Low-cost terahertz radar imaging is going to be very useful in handheld devices. You really can see a short distance into many materials. Great for seeing pipes and electrical wiring in walls. The day will come when that's a standard tool one buys at Home Depot.

Until that's working, a cooled IR imager would be useful. Those are great for finding heat leaks in houses, but currently cost too much.

I'm not clear as to why every single person flying into an airport from the hot spots isn't put in quarantine upon landing.

Then eBay can become a bank. In exchange for more regulation, they get to do lending and can borrow from the Fed.

Why not? There have been $30 Android tablets available in Shentzen for a year or two.

The assumption here is that the exhaust is in the form of a gas.

Okay.

Once it passes through the constriction of the rocket nozzle, it expands (the effect is to turn thermal random motion of the particles of the exhaust into directed velocity).

Explain how "it expands" does not equate to expanding beyond the boundary of the shielding.

After leaving the bell, there are no more restrictions to expansion of the gas aside from the small amount of matter in space.

Again, explain how "it expands" does not equate to expanding beyond the boundary of the shielding.

And how it cools to background radiation levels BEFORE "it expands" hits the shield boundary.

Because THAT is the issue you've been skipping.

And again, so what?

Because "stealth" probably does not include "dying of old age 200 years before getting out of your own back yard".

Then use physics to make that argument not assertions that I brought up Voyager.

I already have. But you keep skipping over it. I just did it again at the beginning of this post.

Here it is again:
PHYSICS says that the exhaust will expand. Eventually the exhaust cloud will be larger than the area covered by the "shield". At which time the exhaust will be visible.

You claim that the exhaust will cool to the same level as the background radiation before that. Yet you do not explain HOW it will cool that much.

You keep confusing "cool" with "background radiation". Going from 3,000 K to 2,000 K is "cooling". But 2,000 K is not the same as "background radiation".

Stealth isn't perfect. It would be relatively hard against large, sensitive detectors.

Then it is not "stealth".

You are not "invisible" if you depend upon the enemy being blind.

OK, so now you're encrypted from user to Cloudflare, in plaintext within Clouflare, and possibly in plaintext from Cloudflare to the destination site. That's more an illusion of security than real security. Even worse, if they have an SSL cert for your domain, they can impersonate you. Worst case, they have some cheezy cert with a huge number of unrelated domains, all of which can now impersonate each other.

LAX just runs people through huge powered revolving doors to enforce one-way traffic. They used to have a sign that said "Once you have passed this point you cannot return".

We get a warped view here in Silicon Valley. Lots of Teslas. No Supercharger stations, though. There are a fair number of electric car outlets around, of too many varieties.

FTFY

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win, and then their paid lobbyists have you legislated out of business.."

This is no big surprise. All the mammals have surprisingly similar DNA.

True. My Android phone has no Google account, so I disabled Google Account Manager, Google Bookmarks Sync, Google Contact Sync, Google One Time Init, Google Play Magazines, Google Play Movies and TV, Google Play Music, Google Play Store, Google+, Market Feedback Agent, and Picasa Uploader. No major problems.

Do you need me to post the distances that you did not understand?

kilometers 350,000 is about Earth to the Moon
kilometers 200,000,000 is about Earth to Mars
kilometers 39,900,000,000,000 is about Earth to Alpha Centauri

Light travels about 1,000,000 kilometers an hour.

So what you're saying is that from a million plus kilometers away, a ship with a forward profile of maybe a few score meters ...

That is just 3x the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

And only 1/200th of the distance from the Earth to Mars.

And that isn't even counting the kilometers of shielding that you kept insisting upon.

area of a circle = pi r r
So a circle with a radius of 2 kilometers (you've proposed larger shielding) would give an area of 12,566,400 square meters. Which should be very easy to spot at 1,000,000 kilometers.

It's the laws of physics. And the math isn't that difficult, either.

deviating from the formula is almost always a way to make a crappy book

Go grab the last 20 titles in any genre. You'll see that most of them adhere to the tropes of that genre and are still crap.

A good author can write a good story even with the most formulaic plot.

A good author can write a good story even while subverting the established tropes of the genre.

But that's not important in this specific case. Martin can still change the specific tropes for individual characters in order to "twist" the ending from the predictions. (Boy meets/loses/gets girl) becomes (boy meets/loses/dies-in-battle-to-impress girl who married the local royalty once boy had left).

Since the "mathematical model" was wrong there, who's to say it isn't also wrong in X?

Nevertheless, this statistical approach to literature could introduce the process of mathematical modelling to more people than any textbook.

Until the writer reads that analysis and intentionally deviates from it.

In which case you've just shown them that mathematical modelling is unreliable.

When the real lesson should be not to use a tool for a job for which it was never intended.