Yes colors have a meaning. However, they change ober time and culture. So why not use the word which describes exactly what we mean?
I agree, nowadays blacklist/whitelist has practically nothing to do with skin color. However i do think it is weird to use the same words for describing the appearance of people and good/bad.
Well i would be indifferent to the renaming to primary, because it doesn't really matter to me what they call their branches, as long as it is descriptive. primary
also conveys the meaning.
I would probably continue using main/dev because i see no reason to change.
I am not someone who says "You should change this!". I just say, think of it, there are some reasons to change and the only reason to keep it, os that we did it always like this. I think there are reasons for selecting better words. And I am only annoyed by people who are outraged by things others do, which does not really affects them negatively. I get it that someone wants to continue using blacklist, master, etc. and I am ok with that.
It holds if the light spreads wider than the target. So also for directed light sources at large enough distances. Even a perfect mirror must spread the light in the same angle as it is incomming. Hence the beam would at least 3 km wide at the satellite. Therefore the satellite can only recieve a Illumination of ~65W/m^2 which is a few percent of the normal sun brightness of 1300 W/m^2.
Another way to look at it, the mirrors cant make the sun seem brighter only larger. From the tower you see a large solid angle around you the mirror, therefore, it can seem like you are at the surface of the sun. However, fro. the position of a satellite, the power plant only takes a small solid angle, so it seems like a "smaller" sun. Assuming 400 MW and 1 kW/m^2 (at surface) solar power, it has an area of 400000 m^2, so a solid angle of 4.5e-6 sr from 300km while the sun has 70e-6 sr. So ten times smaller, therefore weaker. Note however here i did not account for attenuation in the atmosphere