Pentagon has a laser that can identify people at a distance by their heartbeat

Mostly the fact that

1. as someone mentioned already, x-ray lasers are not easy to generate, with designs sometimes using nukes to pump them [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur ];

2. while x-rays can be reflected, x-ray mirrors don't behave like optical mirrors because the wavelength of an x-ray is in the same ballpark as the size of atoms (10 nm to 0.1 nm, with atomic radii being in the 0.1-0.01 nm range), and they only reflect 100% of incident radiation when it hits them at very shallow angles ("For gold at 1 keV, the critical reflection angle is 2.4 degrees") [see https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/128247/how-would... http://henke.lbl.gov/optical_constants/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_optics ].

When talking about lasers pumping out enough energy to be usable as weapons over distances of hundreds of kilometers - to bounce them off a satellite - you will need a mirror that can reflect that ray almost perfectly, or you'll just blast your own satellite out of the sky. And to do that, that mirror will only be able to reflect your ray at a shallow angle, which pretty much rules out bouncing an X-ray off it (unless your target is in orbit or, I suppose, if you have a fleet of such satellites, and coordinated enough to bounce the ray down 2° at a time).

[Also see http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent... , C-s for "X-ray" and "grazing", but that whole website is a goldmine]

Also, I said "pumped x-ray laser" for a reason; this type of design usually involves blowing up the energy source and/or the laser medium. Fits the missile or shell use cases.

> The whole point of ordinance is its cheap

Not in the US, with how much missiles cost.

No, it was snipers or specialist teams if it was about taking out one person or a small group with minimal collateral damage. Carpet bombing was for taking out unknown opponents in a specific area with no concern for collateral damage. They could switch off stuff like drones and guided missiles to get more precision using the trained specialists. This is exactly what Richard Marcinko of SEAL 6 wanted after watching SIGINT and technical solutions screw up missions for so long that the human soldiers then had to salvage.

They aren't but the bots and drones are.

I'm not actually clear on what's incorrect about this logic -- unless there's some kind of agreement across all superpowers not to research this subject, or the subject itself is not actually beneficial to research.. why would you assume that none of your potential adversaries are researching it?

And once you recognize that they might research it, and that if they did research it, and you didn't, they might switch from potential adversary to actual adversary (as they now believe themselves to have the upper hand), the only moral and ethical thing to do ... is to research it yourself!

Perhaps the more moral and ethical thing is to give away the technology once you have it, so that you yourself won't have the chance to be aggressor ... but otherwise, I'm not sure how you can justify not researching it (war, and the potential for it, exists regardless of whether you want it to)

I actually can't think of something more cyberpunk dystopia we-are-the-bad-guys than mindless killing machines that uphold imperialism.

> They better be smart and unhackable and free of bugs though.

Damn it, this is a joke that I misread, right? Surely you're not serious?

Only because the relevant APIs choose to allow this. Javascript served from the website should not be able to read this kind of data including element sizes.

My browser should report a minimum of info such as viewport size and rendering engine, and if you (by this I mean the general "you") require more info then either you're a bad developer or your design needs to be rationalized.

Edit: and to the guy whose comment got flagkilled asking about how I want to solve the "problem" of breaking sites that rely on crutches like knowing the rendered size of an element, I say this:

I don't propose to fix the problem because it isn't a problem for anyone but advertisers, and fuck those people.

  - Jesse James
  - Bonnie and Clyde
  - Arsene Lupin
  - Lupin the third