Worse.

They can go back to 1965 and tell your parents not to have kids.

My brother-in-law recently reminded me of when I "introduced" him to the internet by showing him (among others) a website titled "Fifty ways to kill Barney". Ahhh, the age of dial-up internet on slow computers; how I do not miss you. Rest in peace, Barney, 9600bps modems, and 640x480 graphics.

A quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that this plan is currently unworkable.

Brazil covers 8.5 million square kilometers; that's 8.5 x 10^12 square metres. Assuming that a "small bubble" is a 10 metre diameter sphere, it would occlude 31.4 square metres. So, to occlude 8.5 million square kilometers, they would need 2.7 x 10^11 10-metre-diameter bubbles to create a "Brazil-sized raft".

Since these bubbles don't already exist (there's no stockpile or warehouse full of them), we need to manufacture them; all 270 billion of them at massive and irreversable climate, environmental and economic costs. Then we have to ship them to L1 (again, with massive environmental, climate and ecnomic costs). And assemble them into a "Brazil-sized raft" (open call to the worlds construction workers: see the foreign lands of L1. not to mention the massive costs of transporting and housing those construction workers). And position them to occlude the sun. And maintain that positioning against solar winds.

If we (humanity) had a well-established and extensive industrial, commercial and residential presence in space, we might be able to build this "small bubble" raft. But, we don't. And, to do it now, would present massive environmental costs, massive economic costs, and massive technical costs.

So, unobtanium.

In my opinion, the problem with trying to teach Computer Programming is that it requires that the student first practice "critital thinking". Code-monkeys are a dime a dozen; anyone can write code. Computer programming, on the other hand, takes effort, talent, and the ability to analyse and solve problems; the meat-and-potatoes of "critical thinking".

So, first, teach those rote followers how to apply critical thinking, then teach them programming.

- Sendmail, configured as a "smarthost" relay,
- mimedefang to clean up received emails,
- SpamAssassin for filtering incoming emails
- an https webmail service like RoundCube, using imap to the mail service
Done

There are many, many useless posts in fora these days. A lot of it is dis-information; ranging from deliberately unhelpfull to downright dangerous. And many of those posts are answers to questions.

But, a few of those useless posts are the questions, themselves. These seem to fall into two broad categories:
1) I want to implement this complex, fragile and esoteric solution to a simple problem, but can't figure out how to do it, and
2) I want to implement this common solution to a complex problem, but don't really want to read how to do it, or understand the implications.

Usually, the answers I see to these sorts of questions fall into your two groups of "useless answers". The first answer is usually phrased "You are trying to solve the wrong problem", but I guess you could paraphrase it into "Why would you want to do that in the first place?" This answer is usually given by someone who sees that you are taking the wrong approach to solving your bigger issue, and is trying to guide you to the simpler solution.

The second answer is usually phrased "Please read this handy guide that someone took days to write to assist you with this exact problem" (OK, I lie; it is usually phrased "Why don't you Read the Fine Manual?"), but I guess that you, in your frustration at not receiveing an immediate, detailed-yet-simple-to-follow technical answer to your question might see this as "Why don't you look at X poorly written documentation page " . Of course, your problem is complex, and you haven't given all the relevant facts (some, you don't even know that you need to know), but you'd rather that someone else take the (possibly hours) out of their day to read the documentation, research your issue, locate or invent a solution, write out the solution as a set of tailored-to-your-situation simple-to-follow instructions, and post those instructions immediately in reply to your query.

Buy the way, "You're welcome". But, then again, should I have done all that in answer to your question, you wouldn't have thanked me anyway.

Mathematician, Astronomer, Geographer
A scholar in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate (c. 780 – c. 850)
The source of the western understanding of decimal numbering, algorithms (a word derived from his name, to honour his insight), and algebra.

Even caliphates can encourage enlightened thought, investigation into maths and sciences.

Over my career, I worked on many different mainframe systems (IBM "big iron") and with many different commercial applications. No matter which system or application, we were always involved (either passively or actively) with the associated "user group".

For IBM systems (both hardware and software), it was "Guide" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUIDE_International) and "Share" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_%28computing%29). Other applications and services had their own user groups.

I can't comment on the trend to dispensing with vendor-support in favour of user-group support, but I can assure you that user-group support has (for decades) been a staple in the industry.

Two elements of TFA caught my eye:

1. The object radiates at "around 225 – 260 Kelvins", or (if I got the math correct) 12.878971111111
   micrometers
2. the object "has a very low mass, too, probably between 3 and 10 times the mass of Jupiter".

Together, these figures are within the range for a type I (or, maybe even a type II) Dyson sphere.
And, it is only 7.2 light years away?

Yes, it is very probably the Brown Dwarf that the astronomers think it is.
But, imagine. It could be a Dyson sphere; our first evidence of advanced life beyond the earth.