That's the job. Many of my trine es go on to supervise or plan such jobs. They leave me with no doubt of the drain they put on people. And, in my experience they remember, and fight a corner for 24x7 experienced cover. But if the people aren't there to hire, and the bed space isn't available ... then at least they understand the problems of the (person)in the field better. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing.

I also get paid to be prepared to climb into the lifeboats, or go to the drill floor to deal with unexpected events. A wake up 2 hours after a 17 hour shift is not welcome, but is part of the job.

I've been doing this since 1987, to varying degrees. Some years I've been down to about 1500 hours work (though we bill by the day, or part of, door to door), some years pushing 3000 hours, and utterly exhausted. The intensity increases with time, because you get sent to jobs with absolute greenhorn (instead of being the greenhorn yourself). And sometimes you do have to just dump raw data upstream for assessment there, but even then you need to verify that the collection parameters were recorded appropriately.

(An 8h x 5d x 48w year is 1920 hours. On the other hand, when I'm not at work, I can go for a week hill walking if I want, and there's nothing the Boss can say - it's my compensatory time for sleeping at the work site and being on 24x7 call.

When I'm at work, and we go from routine operations (where I have a lot to do) to evaluation operations (where I have a lot to do and can't delegate chunks of it to my night-shift/trainee, because they're a trainee) then yes, I have to do this regularly. Bouts of 4-5 days are normal; up to 8 days not uncommon, but deeply draining. Then there will unavoidably be 1-2 days of engineering/ maintenance work, and then the cycle repeats. Bouts like this happen a couple of times a month, then I'm rotated back to shore or my home country to recover.

Don't get me wrong- this is draining. But it's not impossible.

OTOH, there is a good reason that 90% of trainees move on to office work instead of staying in field work : a lot of them can't handle the fieldwork.

The same issue applies to a police officer recording copyrighted matter in the process of his work in a private home. His possession of an unlicensed recording of Katy Perry (whoever he is) remains a crime, regardless of whether he also has footage covering work - related stuff. Even if it's the same footage.

The guy in Sandy Hook did really want to kill people, and because publicly available guns existed, he succeeded in killing 30 - odd.

Another victory for the gun industry.

Well, I wouldn't go directly to murder.

Removal of fingers, ears, external genitalia, in approximately that order. Lots of unsubtle anal rape with a cattle prod. Come on guys - you've got professionals doing this stuff for your government. It's not rocket science (though you can use pyrotechnics, if you want to be showy). Just good old torture. And you need to communicate to the spammers to make sure that they know their children, siblings or parents are paying for their actions.

RTGs were considered and rejected as too heavy for the power needed. You'll note that the large majority of the science programme was carried out, despite the unintended changes to operations.

The key word is "nearly" ; most people who haven't had to do it on a regular basis are surprised to learn that you can function on quite small amounts of sleep. You do still need some sleep, and your performance degrades over time, but it's not too drastic.

My normal working day is 18-19 hours, but when we're in critical operations I go down to working about 03:00 to 12:00, have a nap after lunch, then am back on shift from 13:00 to about midnight ; lather, rinse repeat. After a week, you're really looking forward to a solid 5 hours sleep, but you can get by, and make decisions and react to unplanned events during that time.

That's oilfield operations, and generally not safety critical (I don't operate cranes or powered equipment, for example) and it's not preferred to working a 12-12 hour shift pattern. But if that's what the manning provided requires, that's what you do.

I think they've found it already, to a couple of Philae-diameters.

A smaller panel got sunlight when the drill was used to rotate the probe. So, if it is powered down and we wait, it should eventually charge back up. Each time that happens, the ESA can work at getting it into a better position, little by little.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. A significant amount of power goes into heating the batteries up, which is necessary to get a significant amount of power out of (and in to) the batteries.

Batteries are, as I'm sure you realise, chemical devices.

All chemical devices operate at different rates at different temperatures.

A popular rule of thumb is that a 10degree (Kelvin/ Centigrade) increase in temperature will double the rate of a reaction.

These will be mollified as the comet comes closer to the sun. But working out the exact probabilities is just plain unpredictable. Plan 'B' of listening for "pings" regularly is indicated, while the rest of the science programme continues.

So, if I still had the 4-5 year old Mac which I got rid of in about 2009, then I'd be able to get it repaired?

Pretty good advert for watching fewer Hollywood movies. I can't watch fewer new releases, so I'll have to watch fewer repeats. That won't be hard either.

this phrase was not in the version that went to the reviewers.

Then there's an even more serious problem of version control.

death counts will be indistinguishable from your average school shooting.

Yeah, that's really been the experience here in Europe, where we have the death penalty for thinking about buying a water pistol. Why, only last week the river of blood gushing out of one of our infant schools was so intense that it washed a truck load of old age pensioneers off the road. Fortunately no harm was done, as their truck ride to the Soylent manufacturing plant ("the grinder" as we laughingly refer to it here) was diverted by the crash into the big cat enclosure at the zoo. One of the tigers has a little indigestion, but the veterinarian assures us that he'll recover.

In the words of Crocodile Dundee, that's not a sarcastic response, THIS is a sarcastic response.