Yes, that is what I meant (and, even, what I said). To get the data you had to join one of the teams and collaborate with the other scientists in the team. Now, apparently, you don't.

I ran some numbers on this, and concluded it would take a good while to cool Venus - you would have to get rid of the clouds somehow to make the cool-down reasonable, and that means an intervention beyond just the shade. There will be plenty of opportunity for note taking and even PhD theses during the process.

There are two proposed solutions to that

- have a swarm instead of a shade - i.e., lots of little shades, which makes the orbital dynamics (and probably the manufacture) of the system much easier to manage.
or
- put the shade not at the Lagrange point, but a little bit sunwards, where the solar gravity, planet gravity and the shade radiation pressure give an orbit period matching that of the planet. There, the shade can be pushed by the Sun's radiation pressure and still be in static equilibrium.

Rosetta getting to P67 was much harder energetically than sending a spacecraft to Venus.

You are certainly correct that any of these would be huge engineering tasks, but they are just engineering tasks. They can be done if there is sufficient will.

With 90% of their revenue coming from Google yet they just signed a 5 year deal with Yahoo how is this going to work out?

I guess we'll see, but Yahoo is probably guaranteeing at least as much revenue as Google, for the opportunity to be the default search engine.

So that gives MoFo five years to have FirefoxOS take over the smartphone market.

Bwaahahahah.

I'm sorry, that was wrong.

Population count (507 mio. vs. 319 mio.) and GDP (18.4 trio. US$ vs. 16.8 trio. US$).

Given their superior regulatory environment, why does the EU only make less than 70% per-capita of what the US makes? Especially given that many US-headquartered companies are recognizing most of their revenue in Ireland.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"It has the investigating ability of a thousand detectives. The firepower of a hundred tanks. It can't be out-smarted. It can't be out-run. It's Crime Buster!"

What could go wrong?

And version 2.0 hides an extra (undocumented) backup battery that actives a cellular phone-home after a few weeks.

If it is sending video home, it doesn't matter what you did to loop it, the can drive an FCC triangulation van over and be in front of your door in a few minutes.

And, city kids don't have a place to set off land mines.

If you want to keep these sorts of things from phoning home, you have to not only unplug everything obvious, you also have to soak them in salt water for a few weeks, months, or years.

Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down.

The LHC would make an excellent particle beam weapon source, if you should have a starship (generation ship?) big enough to house it.

I was told, at a NSF meeting not many months ago, that CERN never makes its data openly available and never would and that US scientists should just plan on getting European collaborators if they want to work on it.

Now, if we just get ESA to start releasing the Rosetta data...

The whole global warming scare made it abundantly obvious that the current state of science (plus politics) is incapable of intelligently managing the climate, or perhaps even managing it at all, much less intelligently.

But, hey, look what Harvard Economists have done with engineering the economy! Can't we have some ivory tower academics "fixing" the planet too?

But seriously, an upper-bound projected sea level rise of 4 inches is completely unprecedented, so we should seek to thwart the productive capacity of humanity, and whatever happens, don't put one tenth of that money into ensuring clean water for every human on Earth, eliminating malaria, or building fusion reactors. Where the regulatory victory in that?!

Well, an Earth sun-shade would need to block at most a few % of the sunshine falling on the Earh, while for Venus (if we want to cool the planet off this millennium) we will need to block all of the Sun's rays for a while, so the engineering is a bit more difficult. Add to this the detail that the Venus Lagrange point 1 is quite a bit further away than the Earth's, and energetically harder to reach, and I think a more reasonable conclusion is that the Earth would be training wheels for Venus, and not vice versa.

I am convinced we will eventually build a sunshade, out at the first (inner) Earth-Sun Lagrange point. It won't help with ocean acidification, but it would make a global thermostat possible.

And, it will be good practice on fixing Venus.

If you must be entertained, find alternative sources, from indie stuff all the way to pirating.

Or - I know this will sound crazy - getting out and involved with your community instead of passively receiving 'entertainment' from the glowing screen.