I don't know if staying on target is a problem.

Oh, it definitely is in the case of an ICBM. Anywhere within the atmosphere, the missile will be shaking. A lot. Randomly. Very likely it will be rotating about its long axis as well, in or out of atmosphere, so you'd have to track across the short axis at the rotational speed, then wait for the spot to come around again (while it is also cooling off, if it isn't in a hard vacuum at the time.) The atmosphere between the emission and the target will be turbulent, both naturally and as a result of incidental heating from the beam, and this will serve as an optical lens, moving the beam off target (high speed laser pulses can avoid this with a very fast double pulse: One to blow the atmosphere out of the way, and one to hit the target through the hole. However, 30 kw isn't enough for that, not even close.) Beam collimation is also very important, and the atmosphere fouls that up as well. The larger the area the beam covers when it hits, the lower the energy per square inch is, and the less local heating occurs (or conversely, the more local heat dissipation can be effective.) So you can't fix this by making the spot bigger (decreasing collimation.)

All these factors work together to interfere with the delivery of energy to one well defined region on the skin.

I suspect that in these cases, a kinetic kill is far easier and more reliable. Blow off a cloud of lead pellets in front of the missile, let it run into them, it's finished. Such an intercept missile can self-guide and actively measure distance to target which can significantly reduce misses, and it can compensate somewhat for its own velocity forward by shooting the cloud backwards so it stays in front of the incoming missile longer. Using a cloud of pellets reduces the need to be spot-on. At ICBM speeds, just one pellet is likely to incur completely fatal damage to the incoming missile's airframe. If you significantly disrupt the airframe's streamlining, it will self-destruct due to structural overload. And at these speeds, "significant" doesn't amount to very much.

I love the late day sun in the Summer. In Winter, dark is dark, who cares.

Well, then, let's stick the the DST hours...and freeze it there..then summers would have late hours.

I lived in AZ and the lack of changing hours didn't affect anything poorly, in fact, it was nice to never have to twice a year have your sleep cycle all screwed up for days and have to re-adjust.

I just think in this day in age, it really makes no sense for the majority of the US to have to switch back and forth twice annually.

We are so far east in the Eastern time zone that when we go to Standard Time, we get to see no sun whatsoever in the winter if you work a daytime job.

We really should be in the Atlantic time zone, along with the Maritime Provinces but that makes too much sense.

--
BMO

Why don't we just pick one time DST or Regular...and stick with it. I think I've been reading that the change in times has been shown pretty readily that it takes a bad toll on our health. People die because of the changes even....

Nothing wrong with timezones, that make sense, but it makes no sense in this day in age (we're not all farmers anymore)..to shift the day back and forth twice a year by an hour.

First of all, only an idiot - gay or otherwise - would use FedEx, UPS, or the postal service to ship a wedding cake.

That said, if we substitute something else gay-positive for the hypothetical cake, they could still say "we won't transport that product" and the conservatives would be championing their cause. Carriers have the right to refuse to do business with whomever they want, for whatever reason they want. In this situation, however, the conservatives are shooting themselves in the foot by trying to force a company to take a type of business that it does not want.

If you think FedEx doesn't decide what goods it will or won't ship, go ask them to ship your car, or your pet. They refuse both for different reasons and nobody has ever tried to make a constitutional crisis out of either. There is no law prohibiting them from shipping either, they decided on their own that shipping them isn't worth their bother.

Of course it isn't, but in ancient times most men didn't live long enough to worry about anything like Parkinson's.

No, my watch is a superior watch. Their watch is a superior bracelet. To each their own, just don't lie to yourself about what you're buying, that's dumb.

Apparently you're not the only one who thinks so. I once bought a pair of boxing gloves to spar with friends. The cardboard box had this big bold warning on the side: "WARNING: Boxing is a contact sport"

I wish I were joking.

Make the fights to the death. Then americans will watch it more than all the other shows combined.
Make them death row criminals, and Pay per view, become a trillionaire overnight.

The blue light protects women by being attached to a phone that calls the campus police. The point of the light is so that no matter where on campus you are, at least one is always in view so that if you need the police you know which way to run.

Nope. Violence is the problem, not the solution.

There isn't one solution. But every decision you make shapes the world, and the beginning is to be conscious of that.

They have a strategy? They're actually thinking? It's not just two guys beating the shit out of each other? So?

Not only does boxing have a great deal of strategy and thinking, but there's actually something on the line, unlike eSports.

I wonder how well eAthletes would fare if there was a component of physical confrontation in eSports? One thing for sure, you would hear a lot less of the "I'm gonna rape you so hard" trash-talking of eSports.

I have nothing against playing games -- I have a thing against paying people to watch them do it

So I assume that's a "no" on eSports?

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/...

the same vein of idiocy as Tim Schaefer.

I figured I was arguing with the contingency from 8chan. That means the words "white genocide" are not far behind.

GamerGate history is great fun. It's kind of like the History Channel's Ancient Aliens series without all the solid information.