It would be exceedingly unlikely that any concept thrown together in the 20minutes BrowserUk took to think through his reply (I normally take about 3, at best!) would be workable in its first incarnation. Heck, it's unlikely that any code I write is going to be workable in the first incarnation.

The key here is that there are solutions and, frankly, it's not that hard to get them going. And, it's not a matter that you're going to rendezvous with a 2" bolt this year. The question as posed 6 replies back was how to effectively make space something that private enterprise can colonize. tilly brought up the tragedy of the commons and cleaning space. I replied with one possible way that private enterprise can solve that specific problem. BrowserUk then replied (several replies later) with one possible way to solve the technical problem of cleaning space. I didn't care what the solution was, only that if there was enough potential revenue, a solution would be found. Just like the problem of clearing minefields post-conflict. Right now, it's expensive. But, imho, that's just because the value of clearing the mines is too low. If several US states were heavily mined, the cost of de-mining them would go down significantly because there would be competition to clear the land because there would be significant value in having that land cleared. Right now, there are mines in places where the land has little value. Increase the value of the land to be cleared and you increase the number of companies willing to invest in mine-clearing technology, thus driving down the cost of removing a single mine.

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

In reply to Re^11: "Practices and Principles" to death by dragonchild
in thread "Practices and Principles" to death by ack

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.