The downside is that importing energy from space upsets Earth's balance
Depends where you position your sunlight catching satellite. If you collect energy that would have hit Earth anyway, then the net extra energy that would hit the Earth would be zero. A suitable place to do this is the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun (L1), and this would has the dual effect of providing clean energy and blocking sunlight hitting the Earth, reducing global warming in the process! Now all we have to do is to engineer some massive space based mirrors, and launch them 1.5 million km into space...
Granted, the average user is going to fall flat on their face if you show them git's history trees or some Journalist's revisioning software. But give people something simple like time machine with a nice slider, and they might do OK, so long as you do a good enough job of hiding the complexity of what's going on.
If you think solely in terms of undo histories then yes, getting back to a previous state can be time consuming, take up large amounts of memory and/or cause RSI. But If you think in terms of auto-revisioning then a scheme like this could make more sense.
Cat jumps on your keyboard? No problem, switch to an earlier revision
Accidentally delete the doc? No problem
Go back too far? Just spin forward a couple of revision
Admittedly it could be hard for the average user, and it will remember the almost all of the complete historical state of the document (including any insulting things you've written: why would you do that?!), but I'd consider it quite a benefit to be able to roll back time on all docs, not just the ones in a git/svn/hg repository.
It's already been done, if you count running a computer program as performing an experiment. Have a look at the 3rd paragraph of the 4 colour theorem for some more details.
The Lazy guns from 'Against a Dark Backgound' are pretty amusing superweapons, far from his best book though. From the link:'The Lazy Gun is the only weapon known to display a sense of humour.'
Not sure if you can do this in bash, but zsh can be set up to keep one complete history from all currently (or previously I guess) open shells.
Have a look at friedcpu.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/zsh-the-last-shell-youll-ever-need for how to set yourself up with it. The article also lists a few other benefits you get from using zsh. To change your shell for your user use $chsh -s/bin/zsh username
Now we are told that our solar system with its
incredibly beautiful planet that is our home might itself be very
rare.
Don't believe everything you are told, question the article (like other commenters have done) and you might not end up blindly believing everything you read.
Case in point: you're attaching quite a lot of weight to one article that "suggests that life may well have appeared on Earth long before the period of heavy-meteorite bombardment" based on the interpretations of light carbon values.
Slashdot Mirror
The downside is that importing energy from space upsets Earth's balance
Depends where you position your sunlight catching satellite. If you collect energy that would have hit Earth anyway, then the net extra energy that would hit the Earth would be zero. A suitable place to do this is the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun (L1), and this would has the dual effect of providing clean energy and blocking sunlight hitting the Earth, reducing global warming in the process! Now all we have to do is to engineer some massive space based mirrors, and launch them 1.5 million km into space...
Granted, the average user is going to fall flat on their face if you show them git's history trees or some Journalist's revisioning software. But give people something simple like time machine with a nice slider, and they might do OK, so long as you do a good enough job of hiding the complexity of what's going on.
If you think solely in terms of undo histories then yes, getting back to a previous state can be time consuming, take up large amounts of memory and/or cause RSI. But If you think in terms of auto-revisioning then a scheme like this could make more sense.
Cat jumps on your keyboard? No problem, switch to an earlier revision
Accidentally delete the doc? No problem
Go back too far? Just spin forward a couple of revision
Admittedly it could be hard for the average user, and it will remember the almost all of the complete historical state of the document (including any insulting things you've written: why would you do that?!), but I'd consider it quite a benefit to be able to roll back time on all docs, not just the ones in a git/svn/hg repository.
Hmmm, maybe a time machine would be handy?
Then there is tinfoil-hat type paranoid where the police target 5,000,000,000 users without any reason
hmmmm, could be tricky, given there are only 1,463,632,361 users (exactly!)
It's already been done, if you count running a computer program as performing an experiment. Have a look at the 3rd paragraph of the 4 colour theorem for some more details.
The Lazy guns from 'Against a Dark Backgound' are pretty amusing superweapons, far from his best book though. From the link:'The Lazy Gun is the only weapon known to display a sense of humour.'
Not sure if you can do this in bash, but zsh can be set up to keep one complete history from all currently (or previously I guess) open shells. Have a look at friedcpu.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/zsh-the-last-shell-youll-ever-need for how to set yourself up with it. The article also lists a few other benefits you get from using zsh. To change your shell for your user use $chsh -s /bin/zsh username
Now we are told that our solar system with its incredibly beautiful planet that is our home might itself be very rare.
Don't believe everything you are told, question the article (like other commenters have done) and you might not end up blindly believing everything you read.
Recent analysis of ancient diamonds
Case in point: you're attaching quite a lot of weight to one article that "suggests that life may well have appeared on Earth long before the period of heavy-meteorite bombardment" based on the interpretations of light carbon values.