"So it's not completely insane to be concerned. They figure your personal odds of dying because of it to be one in a trillion, which most of us would say is too low to think about. But I can understand why a few people might say that even one-in-a-trillion (especially since it's repeated for everybody on the planet) is worth considering."

But it is insane to get into a car and drive to the protest since you are far more likely to die or cause a death then the launch...
In other words yes it is insane to worry about it.

A fear without facts.
The RTGs are very tough and would just hit the ground and not break apart.
But no level of safety is enough for the anti nuclear drones. They are fools that will accept a risk millions of times greater by getting into a car to go to a protest over a well designed space probe.

Really?
New Horizons?
It is not taboo at all except for a few loud nut cases.

Pretty much.
The big question should be what can India do to stop murder and corruption. It is not Facebooks job to do but the government's. If the Government will not do it then international pressure needs to be applied.
Maybe Amnesty International or the EFF should have some system for whistleblowers.

Yes and no. If you only include a basic "standard" library you are pretty much going to make the language useless. If your "standard" library includes things like widgets then it is a lot more likely to be useful.
Java had Swing which will not perfect worked as a cross platform gui.
For Swift on linux the best bet would probably be QT bindings so you can have a cross platform SDK.
Will QT make the effort to port to Swift?
Who knows.
Swift is not likely to flourish on systems besides IOS and OS/X who should do what really does not matter. Now if Apple had ported Cocca to the Linux and Windows you would have had something really interesting.

I did a little looking.
It uses an RF modem so in theory an emulator should work fine. Even better would be to "replace" the RF modem with something like an RPi and use a VPN. Or maybe an old PC booting from a flashdrive. You could even keep the RF modem and use it as a fall over.

No libraries and worse no Windows version.
Talk about a safe way to open source something. It will never be used. The Linux community often balks at c++! No library bindings so it is useless for application development. Now if you want to write bindings or write a replacement for ls you are all set.

For now.
But even that is changing. Now if we can just drop the stupid Freemium model and let me buy apps.

"Actually, I've heard the contrary argued on occasion: "Don't bother wasting code space on cleanup; the OS will do that when you exit."
On a modern OS with gigabytes of ram sure that can work. It is stupid and sloppy but it could work.
On an embedded system?
Not a chance.

They probably have some custom interface boards "I bet using the printer port"

simple
Things where simpler back then. a system to control all this was not in place a the time they made this. Some teacher had a bright kid and said, "let's see if we can have a computer control all the HVACs.
They had an Amiga which for the time was a very powerful computer "much more so than an x86 dos box running at best a 286" so they did it.
I would love to know how they are using radio links for this. DTFM over audio?
Today if they wanted to roll there own they could use some cheap wifi routers and maybe some aurdino clones and use a VPN to keep it all secure.

"diving through bad pointers would take out the entire system; and not meticulously free()ing every malloc() would lead to unrecoverable memory leaks which would... take out the entire system."

Ummm good programmers always free every malloc.
That is not really the issue without an mmu you can actually fragment memory over time.
Maybe the programer didn't use any dynamically allocated memory and just put everything on the stack? Frankly in most small embedded system you try and avoid alloc for that very reason.
Other option is the system just does a reset every x days.

Wow talking about buying into a fool's dilemma.

You can spend money on feeding those that can not feed themselves and explore the universe.
In fact I would say that a good society spends on both.

Frankly I feel the opposite.
Any project as large and complex as a nuclear reactor, airliner, or launch vehicle that passes inspection I think one thing. They did not look hard enough.

Except that they us Linux for the internal systems...
You are making a distinction without a difference.