But if the atmosphere was gone, then the high energy particles would directly impact the ground, which would be worse, since we'd also be gasping for air and upset about the lack of romantic moonlight walks. Or something. In order to save the world, we must destroy the entire rest of the universe, especially including the sun. (Mainly, this will only really save us from doom-criers who don't understand the things they're panicing about, when they all freeze to death. Not that the rest of us will notice, since we'll also be freezing to death.)
It's the only way to get rid of those pesky high energy cosmic ray particles.
If you believe a thing that is not true, you are wrong.
Two wrongs do not make a right. Neither do two million wrongs - it just makes a lot of people wrong. There's no such thing as "reality by mass consensus", no matter how often the major religions of the world tell you that there is. If only one person in the whole world believes the truth about something, and all three billion other people in the world believe something that is not true instead, that doesn't make the one person wrong. The world was never flat, regardless of how many people believed it to be so at one time, and the people who did believe that were in fact operating under a delusion, not the ones who believed otherwise.
Well, the best I've heard of was at my old employer's - one of the sales people dropped their blackberry into a vat of industrial acid, and it was completely dissolved. It was an interesting support call to listen in on, my boss (the head of IT) was saying "Yeah, it, uh, got knocked into a vat of acid, and it's gone." "Well, getting the sim card out of it would be a problem, because that is also gone." "Well, we could skim the foam off the top of the vat to ship back to you, but you'd need hazardous materials certification before we could legally release it to you."
Buying the expensive version of the warranty was totally worth it for that one, just for the fact that it's probably the most unique replacement order they've ever had to fill. (And no, they didn't bother getting haz-mat clearance, so they didn't get the foam back.)
Go read the article - the first link in the summary goes to the one at dilbert.com includes a link to the original survey data in a 98 page powerpoint file.
Some of us are obsessive about putting as much stuff on the screen at once as we can, so more resolution instantly means more (and smaller) text.
This leads people to stare in horror at the 12 open shell windows on my desktop, scrolling logs, editing files, reading mail (yes, I use pine, not a single one of the 40 or 50 viruses I've received has managed to infect it), and other things. But the drawback of staring at tonnes of tiny text all day long is that your eyesight goes fast, and then you need an even bigger monitor, which the inconsiderate manufacturers will have rated for an even higher resolution (just in terms of pixels-per-inch) meaning that the obsession with more information at once makes the text smaller, and the problem worse, which means you need a bigger...
It gets pretty expensive, really.
I got my Eee701 as therapy to counter my screen-space addiction. So far it has worked, but now I have an obsessive hatred of the cursor-up key, which is far too close to the shift key for someone who does a lot of work in console windows.
Of course, if the results turned out differently, you'd be marked a racist just for collecting that data.
Yes, and that's why I didn't even try to publish a paper based on it or anything. I only use it to make co-workers who complain about "those cheaters" stop complaining and pay more attention. If it had turned out to be a valid observation, I'd probably have just shut up about it, and left things as they were. Besides, of the two most outrageous "get kicked out of the U for doing that" cheaters I've had in my class, only one was from that background - the other was from the group with the reputation for being "super studious and honest". Most of the stereotypes around here don't seem to hold water when you actually look at them.
This sounds like a severe case of deciding on a problem, and then picking out observations to support it. Let's say you have 1000 coders, and 1/10 of your coders (100 of them) write poorly documented code. Now we'll also consider the gender-split - if 1/10 of the coder population is female, and the statistical 1/10 of the coders writing poorly documented code applies to them as well - this means you'll have 10 female coders writing poor documentation, and 90 male coders writing poor documentation. WOW! NINE TIMES as many male coders who can't document code properly, CLEARLY that means that men can't document code, right? Right?
The same sort of thing applied here at the University I teach at - a certain ethnic minority had a very bad reputation as producing cheaters in Comp.Sci. So for a few years, I carefully recorded every instance of cheating, and kept track of the ethnic background of the people getting caught. You know what? The only reason more people of that background were getting caught is because they represented 85% of the population in the department - the overall percentage of them that were cheating was actually LOWER than others.
Perhaps this McGrattan person should concentrate more on fixing the problems than on blaming them on some group she doesn't like.
Furthermore, most, if not all monkeys live in forests, not grasslands. I do not see where a taller upright walking monkey would have a significant advantage over those that walk on all fours across the forest floor when they were not swinging from tree to tree. The problem there is that the original discussion was about monkeys evolving to walk upright to become ancestors of humans, and it has been documented that the primary area in which humans developed was in fact grasslands, so the height=sight advantage applies, especially since monkeys live in large communities, and can keep lookouts that can warn the whole community of the approaching danger. Additionally, in the situation of the monkeys living in a forest, the fact that being taller doesn't allow them to see any further also applies to predators not gaining a significant advantage in seeing them. In that situation however, taller means able to reach higher branches for a panic-scramble into trees to escape, as well as reaching higher to get access to food.
There are also other places where the added height of standing upright would be an advantage:
a monkey standing upright appears to a non-upright monkey to be larger, and thus more intimidating. This can be a great advantage in scaring away potential competition for mates, which would make it an evolutionary adaptation regardless of whether the monkey was easier for predators to see or not.
an adult monkey that is standing up, tall, and easy for predators to see can lure predators away from it's much smaller offspring which the predator could not see sooner than the non-upright parent could - resulting in the offspring of the upright monkeys having a better chance to survive than the others. This is a technique used by birds frequently - the adult bird will draw attention to itself if a predator (or potential predator) comes near, and lead that predator away from the nest before trying to escape. Remember that evolutionary adaptations are not about personal survival past breeding, they're about producing surviving offspring.
standing upright instead of on all fours leaves the front limbs available to hold things, and thus carry more food from one place to another. Animals walking on all fours are limited to what they can carry in their mouths, but one that has learned to walk on it's hind legs can also use two limbs to carry more food back to it's young, which in turn gives those young a better food supply, and thus better chance to survive and grow faster than the young of an animal which can not bring as much food to them. Eventually with other mutations this can also lead to tool use, but that might be argued as more of a learned behavior than a biologically evolved one.
How would the ability to stand upright give a consistent survival advantage to monkeys who gradually stood upright over a time span of millions of years or even only 500,000 years? Being taller might give them an advantage in reaching higher hanging fruit or other sources of food, but also make them more visible to their enemies. Monkeys that get eaten because they are more visible certainly don't have an advantage. This reminds me a lot of a cat I had when I was young. A game he would play involved attacking someone's foot, then ducking his head behind someone else's leg and hiding his face - essentially he believed "If I can't see you, you can't see me". The same thing applies to these theoretical "taller" monkeys of yours - just because the short monkeys can't see the tiger that's about to eat them doesn't mean that it can't see them. On the other hand, the taller monkeys, with their heads up higher, will be able to see farther over obstructions, and will thus know about the tiger before it gets close and be able to get away. This means that being taller is also a way of _not_ getting eaten, and would be an evolutionary advantage*, since not being eaten makes breeding easier.
*This of course assumes that the particular genes for being taller that were used were not also linked to the genes for blindness, in which case they won't see anything, and are just doomed.
Ridiculous statement. The Sony VAIO Picturebook (PCG series) precedes both the OLPC and the EEE by a full decade. So? Even the people from ASUS responsible for coming up with the idea for the EEE said that they were inspired by the OLPC and decided that since Negroponte wasn't willing to sell it to the masses of non third-world customers who wanted something like that, (and were asking the OLPC people for it, and being told no) they'd make their own, and sell it to those people - and they did.
Wouldn't it just be easier to just not allow pop near the computer
With the computer in the kitchen (so she can make sure that my 12 year old niece isn't doing anything inappropriate on the internet - she's one of those rare people who believe in parental supervision instead of using the computer as a babysitter) most of the pop spills (that my niece admits to anyway) have been while bringing things to the table for dinner. Not allowing pop near the computer would probably be better for both of them health-wise, but it's not likely to happen.
There's also the Flexible Rubber Keyboard, which is not only easy to roll up and carry around with you, but is also waterproof (for shallow depths, anyways) and resistant to strong acid and alkaline environments. (But disintegrates fast with organic solvents like acetone, potentially leaving nothing but a few strands of copper wiring and gooey sludge.) I've never tried using mine underwater, but at least one of the reviews I've seen of them mentions using them in the bath. They're more resistant to being smashed by heavy-handed typists, and it's impossible to get crap-buildup underneath the keys since it's a sealed silicon unit.
They also come in a variety of colors and styles. My sister wants the pink one. she needs it considering how much pop my niece has dumped on their old keyboards, and the fact that they both type like they're trying to leave finger-shaped dents in the floor underneath the desk.
There's plenty of words that start with I other than "Intelligent" that could all be used. Idiotic, Ignoble, Ignorant, Ill-advised, Inappropriate, Icky (I mean, what if they become slime people? Ew!), and so on.
Yes, but you realize that this means one important thing: Even if there wasn't life on Europa before they look for it, there will be once they've found it. And 10 million years from now, the Europan flibbity-wumpus people will argue with eachother over whether life arose there spontaneously, or was "seeded" from space.
Silverlight is not meant for the World Wide Web. Rather, it is, like many other Microsoft products (...) for the corporate intranet.
So basically this is just like when they took ActiveX, which was designed as an application interface programming toolset (and a very good one) and shoe-horned it into their web browser as an "alternative" to Java. One must then wonder how much "enhanced and superior functionality" has been left enabled that should not have been there in the first place. Lack of proper planning with ActiveX led to wonderful things like unauthorized bank account transfers, viruses and worms, and people's computers spontaneously turning off when they visited websites that used it.
Actually, they started the weird name thing when they changed the name of OLE (Object Linked Environment) to "ActiveX". Seriously, what did they think they were going to do? Convince the programmers that rather than sitting in their chairs gathering cobwebs while they coded away, they would actually be out playing Tennis and Windsurfing while using it? (And then we'll stick an "X" on the end, 'cause everybody knows "X"es are cool.)
Unfortunately, it seems that those of us who've trained ourselves to be lucid in our dreams have taken away those important reflexes that we're supposed to be using for survival or something. I dunno. Still, the last time there was a car accident in front of me, I didn't have any urges at all to wave my hand and "change the channel" or anything. Then again, that happens a lot in my city, so it may be that I don't need practice dodging auto-shrapnel anymore.
The reason we as web developers can not simply code to the standards, and then point fingers at the browsers when problems happen is because we'd all be out of jobs if we tried that. Clients, employers, and end-users don't want to sit around and wait for browser makers to fix a bug so they can see a website - they want it to work. When your client gets told "This is a great website, but it won't work perfectly anywhere because the medium it's viewed through is flawed", they'll say "Oh, well I guess I'll go give my money to someone who can work through that medium and make things work properly in it" and you'll be back on the unemployment line. The majority of the web developer's job is making sure that the page actually works properly for the end-user, regardless of what they're using as a browser. Any website that says "You can't use this site if you don't upgrade to the latest version of browser X" was made by an incompetent two-bit hack, and the client should be demanding their money back. Most of the IE only websites I've seen and/or had to fix so they worked were the result of someone deciding that $20 an hour was too much to pay for web development, when they could get their 10 year old nephew to do it for a few chocolate bars. They usually get what they pay for. The problem is, if you coded exactly and only for the standards, your page would be no better than the one produced by that buzzed-on-sugar 10 year old, because the end user's experience would be just as bad.
Going back to the often over-used automotive analogy, it would be like a gasoline company formulating their product for the "theoretical optimum performance", and then when they notice that it makes a car's fuel line melt, telling their customers "This is perfect gasoline, and it is flawless. Your fuel line melted because it had flaws, and that's the car maker's responsibility to fix. We still think you should buy and use our gas though, and we're not going to change it."
This goes back to the whole "death star contractors" debate from the movie Clerks (link here), and the important point: "You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault.". Those people chose to work for a company that was in a very obviously unethical position, and taking a high-risk path. The ones who wanted long term employment should have jumped ship at the first opportunity, and if they chose to stick with the rotted carcass and got burned by it, that's their fault, not IBM's, not Novell's, and definitely not judge Kimball's.
you're comparing 32 GB with 4 GB. That's a factor of 8. 8 x $350 = $2800
Um, your math is a little off there if you think the SSD is the only cost factor in the machine. Adding 28GB of flash alone would only add at most a few hundred to the overall cost of the machine. There's also the massive difference in screen resolution (800x480 versus 1366x768) and size (7" vs. 11.1"), a jump in processor speed (900MHz to 1.2 GHz) more RAM (512 MB vs. 2GB), and the addition of a dual layer DVD burner. Those are all pretty expensive add-ons, and the sum of them all leads up to a roughly equivalent massive price jump, and probably comes out much more in Sony's favor than it looks at first. Shrinking all of those electronics into that small of a form factor is not cheap.
One the other hand, the eeePC actually has a real ethernet port so you can still connect in areas with no wireless, and contains _zero_ moving parts (no DVD drive) so it's a hell of a lot more shock resistant. And if you're obsessed with running windows, it does come with drivers so you can install XP on it, which it runs just fine. (if a bit sluggishly, since it's only 900MHz at best speed, and runs at 650MHz normally.)
In the default Xandros Linux install, there's open office which does, contrary to popular belief, load and run most MS Office files just fine. Overall, I'm happy with the cheap version - I'll wait for prices to come down before I go for the superpowered machine.
Well, aside from applications in "defense", the most likely application of this technology would be "offense". Being able to poke holes in pretty much _anything_ from a long distance away is a pretty good way of attacking someone. A few of these in a network of orbiting "communications satellites" would make a very effective means of reducing enemy locations to rubble - just target key installations such as fuel refineries and ammunitions storage, and the secondary explosions would take care of the rest.
Of course, there's probably some non-combat related applications for this type of technology as well, there have been discussions of methods of propulsion for space-craft that employ lasers as a means of producing thrust - more powerful lasers create more thrust. (and a bigger hole in whatever the thruster is pointed at...) Additionally, if we wanted to set up a "communications laser" to send messages to another solar system, a laser of this magnitude would be useful.
Slashdot Mirror
But if the atmosphere was gone, then the high energy particles would directly impact the ground, which would be worse, since we'd also be gasping for air and upset about the lack of romantic moonlight walks. Or something. In order to save the world, we must destroy the entire rest of the universe, especially including the sun. (Mainly, this will only really save us from doom-criers who don't understand the things they're panicing about, when they all freeze to death. Not that the rest of us will notice, since we'll also be freezing to death.) It's the only way to get rid of those pesky high energy cosmic ray particles.
If you believe a thing that is not true, you are wrong. Two wrongs do not make a right. Neither do two million wrongs - it just makes a lot of people wrong. There's no such thing as "reality by mass consensus", no matter how often the major religions of the world tell you that there is. If only one person in the whole world believes the truth about something, and all three billion other people in the world believe something that is not true instead, that doesn't make the one person wrong. The world was never flat, regardless of how many people believed it to be so at one time, and the people who did believe that were in fact operating under a delusion, not the ones who believed otherwise.
Well, the best I've heard of was at my old employer's - one of the sales people dropped their blackberry into a vat of industrial acid, and it was completely dissolved. It was an interesting support call to listen in on, my boss (the head of IT) was saying "Yeah, it, uh, got knocked into a vat of acid, and it's gone." "Well, getting the sim card out of it would be a problem, because that is also gone." "Well, we could skim the foam off the top of the vat to ship back to you, but you'd need hazardous materials certification before we could legally release it to you." Buying the expensive version of the warranty was totally worth it for that one, just for the fact that it's probably the most unique replacement order they've ever had to fill. (And no, they didn't bother getting haz-mat clearance, so they didn't get the foam back.)
Go read the article - the first link in the summary goes to the one at dilbert.com includes a link to the original survey data in a 98 page powerpoint file.
Some of us are obsessive about putting as much stuff on the screen at once as we can, so more resolution instantly means more (and smaller) text.
This leads people to stare in horror at the 12 open shell windows on my desktop, scrolling logs, editing files, reading mail (yes, I use pine, not a single one of the 40 or 50 viruses I've received has managed to infect it), and other things. But the drawback of staring at tonnes of tiny text all day long is that your eyesight goes fast, and then you need an even bigger monitor, which the inconsiderate manufacturers will have rated for an even higher resolution (just in terms of pixels-per-inch) meaning that the obsession with more information at once makes the text smaller, and the problem worse, which means you need a bigger...
It gets pretty expensive, really. I got my Eee701 as therapy to counter my screen-space addiction. So far it has worked, but now I have an obsessive hatred of the cursor-up key, which is far too close to the shift key for someone who does a lot of work in console windows.
Of course, if the results turned out differently, you'd be marked a racist just for collecting that data.
Yes, and that's why I didn't even try to publish a paper based on it or anything. I only use it to make co-workers who complain about "those cheaters" stop complaining and pay more attention. If it had turned out to be a valid observation, I'd probably have just shut up about it, and left things as they were. Besides, of the two most outrageous "get kicked out of the U for doing that" cheaters I've had in my class, only one was from that background - the other was from the group with the reputation for being "super studious and honest". Most of the stereotypes around here don't seem to hold water when you actually look at them.
This sounds like a severe case of deciding on a problem, and then picking out observations to support it. Let's say you have 1000 coders, and 1/10 of your coders (100 of them) write poorly documented code. Now we'll also consider the gender-split - if 1/10 of the coder population is female, and the statistical 1/10 of the coders writing poorly documented code applies to them as well - this means you'll have 10 female coders writing poor documentation, and 90 male coders writing poor documentation. WOW! NINE TIMES as many male coders who can't document code properly, CLEARLY that means that men can't document code, right? Right?
The same sort of thing applied here at the University I teach at - a certain ethnic minority had a very bad reputation as producing cheaters in Comp.Sci. So for a few years, I carefully recorded every instance of cheating, and kept track of the ethnic background of the people getting caught. You know what? The only reason more people of that background were getting caught is because they represented 85% of the population in the department - the overall percentage of them that were cheating was actually LOWER than others.
Perhaps this McGrattan person should concentrate more on fixing the problems than on blaming them on some group she doesn't like.
There are also other places where the added height of standing upright would be an advantage:
*This of course assumes that the particular genes for being taller that were used were not also linked to the genes for blindness, in which case they won't see anything, and are just doomed.
Scheme can also be pretty fun for web development.
Wouldn't it just be easier to just not allow pop near the computer
With the computer in the kitchen (so she can make sure that my 12 year old niece isn't doing anything inappropriate on the internet - she's one of those rare people who believe in parental supervision instead of using the computer as a babysitter) most of the pop spills (that my niece admits to anyway) have been while bringing things to the table for dinner. Not allowing pop near the computer would probably be better for both of them health-wise, but it's not likely to happen.
There's also the Flexible Rubber Keyboard, which is not only easy to roll up and carry around with you, but is also waterproof (for shallow depths, anyways) and resistant to strong acid and alkaline environments. (But disintegrates fast with organic solvents like acetone, potentially leaving nothing but a few strands of copper wiring and gooey sludge.) I've never tried using mine underwater, but at least one of the reviews I've seen of them mentions using them in the bath. They're more resistant to being smashed by heavy-handed typists, and it's impossible to get crap-buildup underneath the keys since it's a sealed silicon unit.
They also come in a variety of colors and styles. My sister wants the pink one. she needs it considering how much pop my niece has dumped on their old keyboards, and the fact that they both type like they're trying to leave finger-shaped dents in the floor underneath the desk.
In perl, you could do it in one line with a haiku poem.
True, but it'd be more fun to do it as a limerick. Or as ascii art of the NSI logo.
Yeah, but it'd really mess up all of those bacteria samples we're exporting...
There's plenty of words that start with I other than "Intelligent" that could all be used.
Idiotic, Ignoble, Ignorant, Ill-advised, Inappropriate, Icky (I mean, what if they become slime people? Ew!), and so on.
Yes, but you realize that this means one important thing:
Even if there wasn't life on Europa before they look for it, there will be once they've found it.
And 10 million years from now, the Europan flibbity-wumpus people will argue with eachother over whether life arose there spontaneously, or was "seeded" from space.
Silverlight is not meant for the World Wide Web. Rather, it is, like many other Microsoft products (...) for the corporate intranet.
So basically this is just like when they took ActiveX, which was designed as an application interface programming toolset (and a very good one) and shoe-horned it into their web browser as an "alternative" to Java. One must then wonder how much "enhanced and superior functionality" has been left enabled that should not have been there in the first place. Lack of proper planning with ActiveX led to wonderful things like unauthorized bank account transfers, viruses and worms, and people's computers spontaneously turning off when they visited websites that used it.
Actually, they started the weird name thing when they changed the name of OLE (Object Linked Environment) to "ActiveX". Seriously, what did they think they were going to do? Convince the programmers that rather than sitting in their chairs gathering cobwebs while they coded away, they would actually be out playing Tennis and Windsurfing while using it? (And then we'll stick an "X" on the end, 'cause everybody knows "X"es are cool.)
Unfortunately, it seems that those of us who've trained ourselves to be lucid in our dreams have taken away those important reflexes that we're supposed to be using for survival or something. I dunno. Still, the last time there was a car accident in front of me, I didn't have any urges at all to wave my hand and "change the channel" or anything. Then again, that happens a lot in my city, so it may be that I don't need practice dodging auto-shrapnel anymore.
Dude, that's not a dream, it's a repressed memory. Just push it back under, and you'll be a lot happier.
The reason we as web developers can not simply code to the standards, and then point fingers at the browsers when problems happen is because we'd all be out of jobs if we tried that. Clients, employers, and end-users don't want to sit around and wait for browser makers to fix a bug so they can see a website - they want it to work. When your client gets told "This is a great website, but it won't work perfectly anywhere because the medium it's viewed through is flawed", they'll say "Oh, well I guess I'll go give my money to someone who can work through that medium and make things work properly in it" and you'll be back on the unemployment line. The majority of the web developer's job is making sure that the page actually works properly for the end-user, regardless of what they're using as a browser. Any website that says "You can't use this site if you don't upgrade to the latest version of browser X" was made by an incompetent two-bit hack, and the client should be demanding their money back. Most of the IE only websites I've seen and/or had to fix so they worked were the result of someone deciding that $20 an hour was too much to pay for web development, when they could get their 10 year old nephew to do it for a few chocolate bars. They usually get what they pay for. The problem is, if you coded exactly and only for the standards, your page would be no better than the one produced by that buzzed-on-sugar 10 year old, because the end user's experience would be just as bad.
Going back to the often over-used automotive analogy, it would be like a gasoline company formulating their product for the "theoretical optimum performance", and then when they notice that it makes a car's fuel line melt, telling their customers "This is perfect gasoline, and it is flawless. Your fuel line melted because it had flaws, and that's the car maker's responsibility to fix. We still think you should buy and use our gas though, and we're not going to change it."
This goes back to the whole "death star contractors" debate from the movie Clerks (link here), and the important point: "You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault.". Those people chose to work for a company that was in a very obviously unethical position, and taking a high-risk path. The ones who wanted long term employment should have jumped ship at the first opportunity, and if they chose to stick with the rotted carcass and got burned by it, that's their fault, not IBM's, not Novell's, and definitely not judge Kimball's.
you're comparing 32 GB with 4 GB. That's a factor of 8. 8 x $350 = $2800
Um, your math is a little off there if you think the SSD is the only cost factor in the machine. Adding 28GB of flash alone would only add at most a few hundred to the overall cost of the machine. There's also the massive difference in screen resolution (800x480 versus 1366x768) and size (7" vs. 11.1"), a jump in processor speed (900MHz to 1.2 GHz) more RAM (512 MB vs. 2GB), and the addition of a dual layer DVD burner. Those are all pretty expensive add-ons, and the sum of them all leads up to a roughly equivalent massive price jump, and probably comes out much more in Sony's favor than it looks at first. Shrinking all of those electronics into that small of a form factor is not cheap.
One the other hand, the eeePC actually has a real ethernet port so you can still connect in areas with no wireless, and contains _zero_ moving parts (no DVD drive) so it's a hell of a lot more shock resistant. And if you're obsessed with running windows, it does come with drivers so you can install XP on it, which it runs just fine. (if a bit sluggishly, since it's only 900MHz at best speed, and runs at 650MHz normally.)
In the default Xandros Linux install, there's open office which does, contrary to popular belief, load and run most MS Office files just fine. Overall, I'm happy with the cheap version - I'll wait for prices to come down before I go for the superpowered machine.
Well, aside from applications in "defense", the most likely application of this technology would be "offense". Being able to poke holes in pretty much _anything_ from a long distance away is a pretty good way of attacking someone. A few of these in a network of orbiting "communications satellites" would make a very effective means of reducing enemy locations to rubble - just target key installations such as fuel refineries and ammunitions storage, and the secondary explosions would take care of the rest.
Of course, there's probably some non-combat related applications for this type of technology as well, there have been discussions of methods of propulsion for space-craft that employ lasers as a means of producing thrust - more powerful lasers create more thrust. (and a bigger hole in whatever the thruster is pointed at...) Additionally, if we wanted to set up a "communications laser" to send messages to another solar system, a laser of this magnitude would be useful.