That's grant-speak. They want money to test it, so they talk about it as the end-all, be-all, when it'd be more realistic to talk about in terms of smaller, more practical units.
Even if you built a full-size model, there would be no practical way to get the power back to earth.
You understand that the Earth is already out in the solar wind, right? With a surface area vastly larger than the proposed sail? If we were going to blow away, it'd have already happened.
Goes without saying no-one would cooperate on this, so, obviously, whoever gets off their ass and builds it.
And it's not about "who controls all the worlds power"...That doesn't even make sense from a commodity selling standpoint. Whoever launches it becomes a big time energy trader, until such a time as everyone else gets pissed at them, and shoots down their satellite.
If the satellite is attached to a 5000km sail, which is spread so as to catch the solar wind, what's to stop it from blowing away?
Also, who gets to volunteer to have the bazillo-watt microwave laser pointed at them? I've played sim city. I know it's only a matter of time before the satellite moves and cuts a firey swatch through my town!
The thing is, what did you do before those came along?
You joined a guild, paid your dues, and eventually were allowed to participate in the "toon" raid, where, if you were good enough, you were allowed to, eventually, move up to the main raid.
That's how it's always worked. You're acting like there was some magical world of pick-up raiding, where you could wander around in greens and get invited to high-level stuff.
The tragedy of the commons was an early eco-article describing the human tendency to over exploit shared resources for individual gain, especially when such exploitation was guaranteed to destroy the resource.
I read a story about abandoned nuke sites once: Chernobyl, the Savannah River plant, etc. Lot of really dirty sites, high levels of environmental radiation, etc.
In every case, the wildlife populations have blossomed. Environmental diversity has improved. Everything is actually pretty healthy...Stuff dies a little sooner than in less irradiated areas, but other than that the animals do much better than in places where there are people.
Well, since they'd about fished out the old one...
Honestly, I can't stand fishermen who talk about fishing grounds and fish populations as if they were their property.
I can pretty much guarantee that if they banned gulf fishing for a year, and studied the subsequent catches, they'd find that 5 million barrels of oil is less of a problem for the fish populations than all the commercial fishing.
They're not as bad as rats, but it blows my mind to think that someone somewhere thought of the possum as a predator. They will hunt, but only if there is no ready supply of garbage. New York is their promised land.
They'd have been better off importing bobcats. Though, of course, importing predators into New York to kill their pests is doomed: the pests are so commonly poisoned, that they're very likely to kill anything that eats them. That's a common problem with the falcons who feed on pigeons.
I can't believe how many people don't know this one: KFC changed their name because the State of Kentucky trademarked the word "Kentucky" and KFC would have had to pay licensing to continue to use the word.
The bigger issue is that we're currently trying, as a country, to generate some goodwill for ourselves in Muslim countries. That goodwill from moderate to moderately-crazy muslims has priceless benefits, and can be had at reasonably little cost, as long as we don't fuck it up.
The reason everyone is pissed at this pastor, is because he's trying single-handedly to fuck it up, and for no good reason.
Did you know that the area the world trade center was built in used to be called, "Little Syria" because it was the part of manhattan where the most muslims lived? There are plenty of mosques, and plenty of muslims in that area, and it's not a new thing.
Get over yourself. If they want to build a mosque next to a titty bar, in an old outlet store building, why the hell should you care?
We're effectively agreeing: my point is that the people who understand the work should be the ones doing it, regardless of which "team" they happen to be on.
Blah blah, the eternal struggle. On the one hand, I appreciate dealing with code where the coder has been forced to explain/justify his work to someone else.
On the other hand, having some joker whose job is to do nothing but criticize giving me the stink-eye coupled with 4 peoples worth of snide for some piddlyshit bandaid app that I tossed off in 5 minutes to fill an immediate need...Well, it rankles.
They were one of the first victims of downsizing here, and while I constantly bemoan the fact that they aren't still bugging people at other business units, I don't miss ours a bit. My boss, on the other hand, will be in for a rude awakening when I leave.
And I'm fine with that. And there are certainly admins I wouldn't trust with a pointy stick, more less production hardware.
My real point is that the people who need access, and who ought to have access, tend to include some people who are more dev than admin, and it makes no sense to put down a rule when you should be using your judgement.
I work for a big company where every significant business unit has it's own devs and own processes. And while I'm primarily an admin, I still deploy some dev-level stuff a few times a year.
And nothing, nothing annoys me more than going to a shop where the admin doesn't understand the tech, doesn't read the project requirements, and will not, under any circumstances, let me see his production hardware before he tries to deploy.
Because inevitably it fails and then he tries to throw me under a bus, and I have to get on a conference call and try to use my magic mind powers to debug a system I'm still not allowed to see.
Back when I was primarily a java dev, I used to have to configure Tomcat all the time, and it was the sort of thing were you needed to have some experience. And time after time I'd end up dealing with some windows admin who knew absolutely nothing, but was utterly convinced that I could never know more than him about a server technology.
In short, common sense and a reasonable respect for experience beats a hard and fast rule any day.
I work both sides of the fence myself, so I have a better than average appreciation of the actual risks and the actual benefits.
It's my experience that the Berlin wall-like separation that many companies enforce between dev and production causes it's own set of problems, and that, instead of treating everyone involved as if they are involved, they just impose even stricter separation, which causes other issues, and makes the whole process glacial and inefficient.
See, to me this is more an issue of devs not obeying the rules. They damn well shouldn't be changing production code, and they damn well shouldn't be linking code from other servers.
Either your devs are a bunch of barely trained lunatics, or they're breaking the rules in a vain attempt to get things done in a timely manner.
Most times, when I see devs screwing with production it's either a "hero" coder who is way too good to use best practices, or a situation in which the environment is so hostile that the "best" solution seems to be breaking the rules.
I once did some contract work for a company where the Q&A and testing process took a minimum of two weeks for the most trivial changes, and where the admins on the production servers refused to deploy things like security patches without a testing period that ran close to a month. The devs there had a hundred tricks for sneaking their code into production, and linking production code to the development servers in an attempt to meet their productivity goals.
Fucking nightmare. Once we ironed out the Q&A thing, and split the admins into two groups (one who maintained, and the other who upgraded and approved changes) the whole process evened out and the devs stopped screwing around on production.
Everyone agrees that developers should never have access to production...Unless they're the developer, in which case it's different.
Its a good practice to keep them separated, but in the end its just a pissing contest. The server admins don't want some filthy dev messing with their stuff, and I can appreciate that.
However, admins often lack appreciation of some dev-specific issues, and their ignorance can lead to problems down the line.
In the end, its the best practice to have everyone work together sensibly, than throw down inflexible rules that cause more trouble than they prevent.
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That's grant-speak. They want money to test it, so they talk about it as the end-all, be-all, when it'd be more realistic to talk about in terms of smaller, more practical units.
Even if you built a full-size model, there would be no practical way to get the power back to earth.
Obviously, you just remember to plant a new star so it'll be ready by the time the old one burns out.
That's just common sense.
You must be new here.
You understand that the Earth is already out in the solar wind, right? With a surface area vastly larger than the proposed sail? If we were going to blow away, it'd have already happened.
Goes without saying no-one would cooperate on this, so, obviously, whoever gets off their ass and builds it.
And it's not about "who controls all the worlds power"...That doesn't even make sense from a commodity selling standpoint. Whoever launches it becomes a big time energy trader, until such a time as everyone else gets pissed at them, and shoots down their satellite.
If the satellite is attached to a 5000km sail, which is spread so as to catch the solar wind, what's to stop it from blowing away?
Also, who gets to volunteer to have the bazillo-watt microwave laser pointed at them? I've played sim city. I know it's only a matter of time before the satellite moves and cuts a firey swatch through my town!
The thing is, what did you do before those came along?
You joined a guild, paid your dues, and eventually were allowed to participate in the "toon" raid, where, if you were good enough, you were allowed to, eventually, move up to the main raid.
That's how it's always worked. You're acting like there was some magical world of pick-up raiding, where you could wander around in greens and get invited to high-level stuff.
The tragedy of the commons was an early eco-article describing the human tendency to over exploit shared resources for individual gain, especially when such exploitation was guaranteed to destroy the resource.
I read a story about abandoned nuke sites once: Chernobyl, the Savannah River plant, etc. Lot of really dirty sites, high levels of environmental radiation, etc.
In every case, the wildlife populations have blossomed. Environmental diversity has improved. Everything is actually pretty healthy...Stuff dies a little sooner than in less irradiated areas, but other than that the animals do much better than in places where there are people.
Well, since they'd about fished out the old one...
Honestly, I can't stand fishermen who talk about fishing grounds and fish populations as if they were their property.
I can pretty much guarantee that if they banned gulf fishing for a year, and studied the subsequent catches, they'd find that 5 million barrels of oil is less of a problem for the fish populations than all the commercial fishing.
They're not as bad as rats, but it blows my mind to think that someone somewhere thought of the possum as a predator. They will hunt, but only if there is no ready supply of garbage. New York is their promised land.
They'd have been better off importing bobcats. Though, of course, importing predators into New York to kill their pests is doomed: the pests are so commonly poisoned, that they're very likely to kill anything that eats them. That's a common problem with the falcons who feed on pigeons.
I can't believe how many people don't know this one: KFC changed their name because the State of Kentucky trademarked the word "Kentucky" and KFC would have had to pay licensing to continue to use the word.
Snopes Link
The bigger issue is that we're currently trying, as a country, to generate some goodwill for ourselves in Muslim countries. That goodwill from moderate to moderately-crazy muslims has priceless benefits, and can be had at reasonably little cost, as long as we don't fuck it up.
The reason everyone is pissed at this pastor, is because he's trying single-handedly to fuck it up, and for no good reason.
Did you know that the area the world trade center was built in used to be called, "Little Syria" because it was the part of manhattan where the most muslims lived? There are plenty of mosques, and plenty of muslims in that area, and it's not a new thing.
Get over yourself. If they want to build a mosque next to a titty bar, in an old outlet store building, why the hell should you care?
We're effectively agreeing: my point is that the people who understand the work should be the ones doing it, regardless of which "team" they happen to be on.
Blah blah, the eternal struggle. On the one hand, I appreciate dealing with code where the coder has been forced to explain/justify his work to someone else.
On the other hand, having some joker whose job is to do nothing but criticize giving me the stink-eye coupled with 4 peoples worth of snide for some piddlyshit bandaid app that I tossed off in 5 minutes to fill an immediate need...Well, it rankles.
They were one of the first victims of downsizing here, and while I constantly bemoan the fact that they aren't still bugging people at other business units, I don't miss ours a bit. My boss, on the other hand, will be in for a rude awakening when I leave.
Sorry, that's a scatalogical joke on my part.
Q: Why do they call it QA?
A: Because it's full of Quislings and Assholes
Ergo Q&A.
And I'm fine with that. And there are certainly admins I wouldn't trust with a pointy stick, more less production hardware.
My real point is that the people who need access, and who ought to have access, tend to include some people who are more dev than admin, and it makes no sense to put down a rule when you should be using your judgement.
I work for a big company where every significant business unit has it's own devs and own processes. And while I'm primarily an admin, I still deploy some dev-level stuff a few times a year.
And nothing, nothing annoys me more than going to a shop where the admin doesn't understand the tech, doesn't read the project requirements, and will not, under any circumstances, let me see his production hardware before he tries to deploy.
Because inevitably it fails and then he tries to throw me under a bus, and I have to get on a conference call and try to use my magic mind powers to debug a system I'm still not allowed to see.
Back when I was primarily a java dev, I used to have to configure Tomcat all the time, and it was the sort of thing were you needed to have some experience. And time after time I'd end up dealing with some windows admin who knew absolutely nothing, but was utterly convinced that I could never know more than him about a server technology.
In short, common sense and a reasonable respect for experience beats a hard and fast rule any day.
I work both sides of the fence myself, so I have a better than average appreciation of the actual risks and the actual benefits.
It's my experience that the Berlin wall-like separation that many companies enforce between dev and production causes it's own set of problems, and that, instead of treating everyone involved as if they are involved, they just impose even stricter separation, which causes other issues, and makes the whole process glacial and inefficient.
See, to me this is more an issue of devs not obeying the rules. They damn well shouldn't be changing production code, and they damn well shouldn't be linking code from other servers.
Either your devs are a bunch of barely trained lunatics, or they're breaking the rules in a vain attempt to get things done in a timely manner.
Most times, when I see devs screwing with production it's either a "hero" coder who is way too good to use best practices, or a situation in which the environment is so hostile that the "best" solution seems to be breaking the rules.
I once did some contract work for a company where the Q&A and testing process took a minimum of two weeks for the most trivial changes, and where the admins on the production servers refused to deploy things like security patches without a testing period that ran close to a month. The devs there had a hundred tricks for sneaking their code into production, and linking production code to the development servers in an attempt to meet their productivity goals.
Fucking nightmare. Once we ironed out the Q&A thing, and split the admins into two groups (one who maintained, and the other who upgraded and approved changes) the whole process evened out and the devs stopped screwing around on production.
Everyone agrees that developers should never have access to production...Unless they're the developer, in which case it's different.
Its a good practice to keep them separated, but in the end its just a pissing contest. The server admins don't want some filthy dev messing with their stuff, and I can appreciate that.
However, admins often lack appreciation of some dev-specific issues, and their ignorance can lead to problems down the line.
In the end, its the best practice to have everyone work together sensibly, than throw down inflexible rules that cause more trouble than they prevent.
You're being obtuse. For catholics, the bible, while yes, obviously, the word of god, is not literally true. It's an allegory, meant to teach.
More than that, the last three popes have spoken ex cathedra in favor of the Theory of Evolution. For catholics, that's it. That's like god saying it.
That's a pretty big leap. It wouldn't be the first time that a disease was eradicated in the wild.
What he's saying is, "I think this is worthy of an actual trial." That's it.
This isn't a bad thing. This case is so hilariously bad that he's likely to lose, and thus help build precedent for the inevitable future cases.