I wish people felt the same about going to space as I do. I think that if we were more knowledge focused as a species that we'd be racing to the stars which would mean an insanely different mentality than the 'tow the line' kind of thing I think we have nowadays.
Im a huge fan of learning about space, but sending human bodies seems impractical outside the novelty.
Everything is unfathomably far away.
There are lots of obstacles, near light speed travel is a necessity and we are nowhere near this ability, or that ability with a human undergoing the acceleration to light speed.
EDIT: So I suppose I'm suggesting putting our resources toward those beneficial causes on earth is better use.
The greatest enemy of us all is the Universe itself. It's the thing that is trying to kill each one of us individually, and all of us together, and to destroy everything we ever built or cared about, and then even tear apart the very atoms.
It depends on if you are happy with the state of things as they are. I would think that if all of humanity was content, and not a single soul was unhappy then we would stop the analysis. But so long as our minds can imagine a newer 'better' reality, i.e. so long as the grass is always greener on the other side: We will act this way.
I PERSONALLY decided if it seems like 20-25% probability, this is 'likely' because it means I can accomplish it if I can try 4-5 times. If it is 1%, I'd have to attempt 100 times to make a thing happen.
Credit where it is deserved. Span is a great idea, and building fixed sized streams on top of them is a great idea (I haven't read it, but I assume this is the thing they're going after).
Ok, beautiful and highly optimized code needs to be a standard in my opinion. If it is genuinely well written, it simultaneously teaches new comers good habits (implicit training), and makes future modifications that much easier. These are time savers. Time is money. It is a money saver.
Conclusion: Beautiful and optimized code is a money saver.
One addendum: Optimized code results in a performant application. This means you are better than a competing product that accomplishes the same thing but at a slower speed. You've maybe heard: 'performance is a feature' for this reason. This, one COULD argue, is a direct money maker.
You can then tack on words like 'slick', 'snappy', etc. to your list of descriptors.
The problem is beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I've been around long enough to see a few cycles of "best thing ever" -> "never do this". Each time massive disruptive changes were done to the code base, and each time they were simply ripping out last cycle's fad.
Certainly there are new things under the sun, but one should try and be respectful of what has come before. It wasn't all crap.
