The problem is that slope required for adequate drainage can be a very gradual change in the elevation of the ground, but the drone is not in contact with the ground. GPS located photos are great for locating lat/lon of visible items, but getting the precise elevation would probably require surveyed reference points and the full 3D treatment.

TFA states that the old algorithm breaks down once the number of source images exceeds a few hundred, at which point it can take thousands of hours to process. The new algorithm can accommodate over a thousand images and process them all in about four hours.

Jocular saga, fraternal sibling.

I question how much it's still "oil". Oil, outside of reservoirs, evolves. The volatiles slowly separate out; their ultimate fate is evaporation and photodegradation. The shortest chains are lost rapidly, but the longer they get, the longer they take to disappear. As volatiles are lost, the oil thickens. It eventually becomes tar, and then basically asphalt.

Oh, yes, I am sure that the choice of CAD programs has something to do with the launch failure, or points to some sort of cultural deficiency at Orbital. Really, you get a touch of shadenfreude over that? How petty are you?

"Can't be tolerated"? Spaceflight has always run on the ragged edge of engineering. Just sending an Antares booster to LEO means every unit of payload mass costs 40x its weight in fuel and booster weight, all of which is going to be consumed or destroyed during the four-minute-service-life of the machine. Do they choose expensive copper wire which weighs more than cheap aluminum wire? Do they reinforce the structure with steel, aluminum, or titanium? Where do they find extra weight to shave off? Do they leave in the quintuply redundant safety systems if it's not a manned flight? How do they balance all the physical requirements against their budgets?

They build it out of materials that meet the requirements with the tiniest possible safety margins over the service minimums, and test as best as they can that none are substandard. All it takes is one weak part out of the thousands in the ship. So you build a couple of your disposable ships, test fly a few, and watch for failing parts. But you can't afford to test a thousand rockets, so at some point you have to fly them for paying customers.

Failures have to be tolerated, or we'd never get anywhere interesting.

Wow, that's too perfect.

There's no other time and place I get to look down on cities from above, soaring past, or gaze out at a landscape composed of clouds. I wouldn't want to give that up. I can sit around with my laptop or smartphone or e-reader anytime; I can only see such a view during a plane flight, and I wouldn't want to give that up. If airlines started introducing such planes, i'd go rather far out of my way to avoid them.

Yup, their policies are considered left-wing, and entirely divorced from the hero-worship of the names, so much so that if you rattled off their policies you'd probably get the retort "well that kind of Anti-American nonsense wouldn't have flown back with Nixon or Reagan!"

NO way that they'd just give you straight account credit.

They'd give you $2.99 off of the purchase of something new that you don't already have that costs about $300. Maybe you'd get $2.99 off of the purchase of a new iPad, or off of your first month of T1 service.

Gentoo certainly as folks in both camps, but it generally supports both openrc and systemd, and at this point you'd be hard-pressed to find anything that doesn't work with systemd. I don't know which "side" has a majority, but Gentoo tends to be about choice so it isn't really something that anybody really feels the need to force the issue on.

I'd call OpenRC a middle-of-the-road solution. It is probably the best sysvinit-based solution I've ever seen, and nothing would stop anybody from using it on any distro (it is even bash-free).

However, I've been using OpenRC for many years now and I've happily moved on to SystemD. For me the benefits have been worth the pain of dealing with the early-adopter bugs. Plus, I got the sense that the wind was blowing this way a good year or two ago and felt that it was worth getting used to it.

One of the nice things about systemd is that even on a box that needs network connectivity you can deny it to specific processes.

You can even use a systemd socket to accept incoming connections and pass them to a service that is running in a separate network namespace so that it doesn't have any access to the network otherwise. It can communicate via the socket it was given, but it can't make any other outgoing or incoming connection. So, it actually lets you limit your exposure to attacks quite a bit. Or, maybe it is in a network namespace that has access to some other host on the DMZ, but nothing else, including the internet from which the original connection came in.

Yup. OpenRC is about as good a traditional sysvinit implementation as I've seen anywhere - it certainly is much better than what many of the anti-systemd crowd are currently using. However, I get this kind of behavior on Gentoo all the time and is just one of the reasons that I migrated to systemd.

With systemd I can stop a service, and it STOPS, unless there is some kind of kernel bug (can't help that other than to not use less-stable kernel features). It won't have any orphans. It won't have PID files left around. Etc. When I start a service it starts, and if it dies unexpectedly I get a failure status.

I'm using systemd to replace my cron jobs now, and for the first time I actually am taking notice of things like return codes. SystemD by default expects them to be zero (gasp!). If something normally exits with something else you can tell it to ignore it, but now when something fails I actually notice.

If daemons support it systemd can behave as a watchdog beyond just seeing if the process exists. You can put some code in the idle loop to ping systemd and on a timeout systemd will restart the process. Of course, it isn't a substitute for a protocol-specific watchdog, but your monitoring service can remotely connect via ssh and restart your process, and be sure it actually restarts instead of playing games like the one you just described. I used to run monit with OpenRC and I had to play all kinds of kill/zap/etc games in scripts to be sure it would actually restart processes.

What evidence is there that drinking a 22 ounce drink or eating a "baconator" increases your risk of heart disease compared to drinking a 12 ounce drink or eating a sandwich not called a "baconator" - or heck, not containing bacon at all? I just had a baconator for lunch today and I've lost 50 pounds in the last year, and my 16 oz drink contained no calories.

I won't argue that people eat a lot of unhealthy stuff, but I'm not convinced that bacon is necessarily among the worst of it.