Man, I just went to a good seminar today on finding habitable exoplanets that emphasized that we currently need ground based telescopes, because it is still impractical to make 30+ meter telescopes in space and would be very expensive, even if could be done. But progress is just launching a bunch of bullshit into orbit to avoid real investment in infrastructure like fiber and other telecommunication lines.
beautiful_boater
joined 1 year ago
sci-hub has already been mentioned, but I will say that though it is not piracy, depending on the field, you can find free version "pre-prints" of papers on arxiv.org and socarxiv.org
I should have been more specific. Yes, it is a wrapper around a closed source blob.
Well, TBF there is a lot of avenues to get locked into legacy software in python. I am still modifying and using Python2 code because the drivers and libraries for hardware are only available in python2 and the hardware developers wont spend the money and time to create Python3 libraries. So I am stuck using an airbridged, un-updated python2 environment until it gets to the point of updating/backwards engineering python3 drivers and libraries for all our hardware ourselves.
They can't make them non-reflective enough to not interrupt really deep observing. Also, that just shifts the problem around. If they are absorbing in the visible, they will likely have huge amounts of blackbody radiation in IR, sub/millimeter, and radio. You would need to make a satellite out of dark matter to not interrupt astronomy.