So that just brings us right back to my question about why someone reviewing code for a file system would care about that level of detail. Like you said, the paper is from 1996; anyone working on file systems 30 years later already knows about bit flips.

Sure, but is the cited paper about file systems, radiation hardening of aerospace hardware, or something else entirely? My point isn't whether or not the phrase is a real scientific term used by physicists, the point is whether or not the phrase is meaningful or relevant to someone reviewing the code for a file system.

I understand everything you said, but the quoted line is still phrased pretty awkwardly. I frequently hear people talking about radiation, cosmic rays, etc. (I'm not an aerospace engineer myself, but I work with a lot of them). I don't think I've ever heard anyone talking about atmospheric neutrons though. Being that specific almost never matters to anyone except maybe the engineers working specifically on the radiation hardening.

And "the medium is not exempt" is just weird.

Extrapolate how? Why would you assume that the difference scales linearly with size?

The summary isn't clear on this. I also initially thought that it was talking about programs written in Rust and being managed by systemd's init/service management. But that can't be what's now supported, because systemd should be able to launch anything that's executable (any compiled binary, shell or Python scripts, etc.). So my guess is that this is some kind of systemd library that now has a Rust version.

I remember seeing a discussion about a sci-fi show (Babylon 5, for anyone else who remembers the discussion) where someone said basically the same thing about a dead body sticking to the outside of a space station. If you do the math, though, you'll find that it doesn't take as much mass as you might think for an object to have enough gravity to pull in free-floating objects.

Wikipedia says Phobos' escape velocity is 11.39 m/s (41 km/h), which is enough to hold down a jumping human. So all the probe needs to do to reach an orbit around Phobos is slow down enough.

It wasn't.

That's easy, just post a comment on Slashdot.

Just to correct one part of this, Python's virtual environments are in no way a virtual machine - they just alter the environment variable PATH and the search paths used by the Python interpreter to find installed modules. There's no additional hardware virtualization.

Actually, containers are similar. Normally, they use the same kernel as the host operating system. There is no virtualization unless you specifically need to run a different kernel (such as running Linux containers on Windows). Running a Linux container on a Linux host is more like chroot than a virtual machine.

Sure, you could just change the time that school starts for the few months of winter. And the parents who need to get their kids ready for school and/or drop them off at school can change what time they show up for work. And since the workers are showing up at a different time, businesses can change what hours they're open. And since these changes all have to happen on the same day, you'll need someone to decide what days the time changes should happen.

Congratulations, you've just invented Daylight Saving Time, just with everyone needing to remember new start times instead of changing the clocks.

Yeah, I thought of that after I posted. Unfortunately bribery isn't quite as illegal as it should be.

Congratulations, here's your medal for pedantic dickweedery. The example of shouting "Fire!" in a theater has always had the implicit assumption that there isn't really a fire. Everyone (except you, apparently) knows that, which is why nobody bothers saying it every time they bring up the example.

You mean Communism?

Or, more to the point, bribery of public officials.

And that's cutting me own throat.