I don't believe Philae has thrusters, much less thrusters that can be fired gently. I get the impression that there is one single-use thruster that was meant to counter the reaction of firing the harpoons, and neither went off as planned. I would guess that at some point they will attempt to manually fire both. But if something goes wrong with that attempt it's very possible that Philae will get launched off of the comet, so they probably want to get as much science done as possible before they even try it.

The bigger problem is the lack of sunlight on the solar cells.

I suspect that some would think that externalizing all possible costs is a legitimate path to higher profitability, and therefore a Good Thing under Capitalism as practices in the US. However I also suspect they'd be very careful who they would actually say that to.

Utter side point, and I'll probably get flamed for this, but since you've said "conservative enough", even as an AC...

It bothers me that I've never heard a Republican utter the phrase, "too conservative." It seems almost past their lexicon, which leaves me thinking that if someone spent the time coming up with conservative-to-the-absurd ideas and threw them out there, there would be Republicans lining up behind them. I would feel much better, like there might even be real political discourse, if some Republican could say that some idea or other is, "too conservative," without being immediately dismissed as being a RINO.

Since this is Slashdot, I'll say that that is another disturbing thing about systemd. From what I can tell by its advocates, there is absolutely nothing wrong with systemd. Any problems at all that show up are because of some piece of software that just isn't working well with systemd, or because of stupid obsolete Unix thought modes that haven't been purged from the rest of the system.

Incidentally, "too liberal" is in my lexicon, as is "too conservative," and I think that there are problems with SysVInit and OpenRC, as well.

Unused. I'm a bit amused to hear them refer to their examples as "strongly typed" languages.

Might this have bad implications for those who can keep their appetites and activity levels in decent proportion?

I'm thinking about the fact that airbags can be harmful to kids, because they're tuned for adults. What happens when we start tuning our restraint systems for the obese? Will they continue to function properly for trim people, will they work less effectively, or might they actually become harmful, like airbags for kids? (I would expect that they might become too stiff for old-normal body proportions, for instance.)

There's something else different about systemd - the dreams of monocultuer by its proponents.

There are some other near-monocultures in Linux - glibc, xorg, gcc, etc. But I don't see glibc people trying to stamp out uclibc, nor did I ever see xorg people trying to stamp out svgalib, etc. As for gcc, there is what appears to be healthy competition with llvm, and I see no significant politicking there, either.

We have Postfix, Courier, Exim, sendmail, etc. They all coexist, and they all try to be best for someone's needs.

There may be some other near-monocultures in Linux, but nowhere but systemd is anyone insisisting on becoming THE monoculture, and working to tie everything possible into their monoculture.

I think I'm on the same page as you on this, but with even weaker A.I.-fu. We're not going to suddenly jump to Vanamonde, the Mad Mind, or even POne or HAL. Far before we get to such a point we'll have far weaker A.I. that very likely does exactly what we ask of it. Except that we really shouldn't be asking it to do the things we will be.

One of those steps might be a battlefield drone that does target acquisition, then waits for a person to press the "Kill" switch. How much judgement will that person be using, and how much will he come to trust the target algorithms? How long will the followup continue to make sure the algorithms didn't target an innocent?

Simpler - how about an insurance optimization algorithm that denies coverage or treatment, sometimes fatally?

How about a financial trading algorithm that missteps and causes finanical ruin to some people? (Oops, we already have that one.)

We can do some really bad things with weak A.I. - we don't even need strong A.I. for that, though one can extend our "progress" and see the negative possibilities.

By that definition, nobody has a serious space industry, not even the government players.

Actually I think I might almost agree with you, but that's not a ding against SpaceX, it's a ding against our species.

I don't agree about launching more habs that we can fill with people - I'd just like to see enough SOMETHING launched to make opportunities. I'd also like to see a second basket to keep some of our species eggs in.

... on a vintage Model-M keyboard purchased years ago at Flea@MIT. Someone had a bunch of unopened boxes of them, brand new 15-year-old keyboards. My only mistake was in not buying more than one. I've picked up a few more an various flea markets and hamfests, but none as good as that one...

That is, except for the 1987-vintage Model-M on my wife's computer upstairs that came an the XT-286.