Heh. I remember at one place, my password wasn't liked very much by the account creation script the sysadmin wrote. The password started with a dollar sign and I think that was being inadvertently parsed as a $variable somewhere.
Thinking about it, I have to wonder what would have happened if the password started and ended with backticks. Bobby Tables moment?
(The thought also occurs now that he might have been siphoning off the passwords something, but even though some of my generation (and moreso previous generations) are known for using the same password for everything, this was in the days before the Web really took off, so most people would have only had one place where they used a password: that system.
The system wasn't encrypted, and being the sysadmin, he had access to everything and to change passwords anyway, so keeping plaintext passwords would have been a pointless endeavour.)
They could send the energy wirelessly in the form of light beams, then use special panels to transform those beams of light on Earth. Let's call them "solar panels".
That number didn’t really seem enough to me. However, the solar luminosity is about 3.8×10^26 watts and the surface area about 6.1×10^18 m2, ie. 62.3 MW / m2. 8760 hours in a year times 62300 kW equals 545 million kW/h, at twenty percent efficiency times twenty cents each is $21.8 M/a.
The sun might seem to be really, really hot; but in fact, it is just quite hot and really, really big.
The corona is indeed super hot, but also quite tenuous in comparison to the rest of the sun. The photosphere is only about 5500 °C. If our solar panels were made of diamond they would have melted at 3500, but it’s not impossible to imagine a solar panel that could be positioned ‘quite’ close to the sun’s surface - would just need to be made from some quite fancy materials.
Installing a solar panel on the sun is easier said than done. The closest real example is probably the Parker Solar Probe: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOZhPz92Dic
I’ve been using git for 10+ years and still sometimes do this. I know I could fix it, I also pretty much know what to do to fix it. However nuking the thing from orbit and restarting takes like 30 secs, so it’s never worth fixing.
xkcd
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