I read that as "landing *system* failure". If a plane's engines die it can glide; if its landing gear fails to deploy it can still perform a controlled belly landing; if it's approaching at a bad trajectory it can take another go-around.

Starship has redundant landing engines (at least one prototype landing test failure was because it wasn't prepared to *use* the redundant engines; lesson learned...), but unless they're keeping better ideas secret, the current backup plan if a trajectory goes bad is "fall in the ocean, tip over uncontrolled, and hope not to explode", and the backup plan if a tower catch fails (they're basically putting the landing gear on the *ground* rather than on the vehicle!) is "try again until a slim propellant margin runs dry, then fall onto concrete".

If Starship works at all, this shouldn't be a long-term problem, I think. They'll have loads of opportunities to iteratively improve the system once they're flying it unmanned every week. They may never get to 1-in-a-hundred-billion commercial aircraft risk levels, but they'll be under the 1-in-250 levels that astronauts tolerate in no time.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...

Linear Energy Transfer

It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.

While radiation mostly results in transient errors, it can also cause latch-ups that blow a gate off of the die. For rad-hard equipment in space this is mitigated by silicon-on-insulator fabrication, so that you can't have a latch-up between the substrate and a silicon feature.

We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!

:-)

I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.

Someone who broke their neck and was suffering from paralysis. You can control a chair or exoskeleton. People who can not hear today have cochlear implants, this is not all that different and might (eventually) work better. Or speak, or see. Other people who are disabled in various ways.

Oops. To continue: I'm just not seeing that it is so hard to access. But then, I use a Linux desktop, which has always come with a proper PDF renderer, there has never been a need to download "Acrobat".

Web pages use SVG to render vector graphics. It uses the exact same imaging model as PDF and is implemented in all modern browsers. The web in general has taken a lot of lessons from Adobe because Warnock and Geshke, in the PostScript Red Book, got so much right about how to build an image model that many GUI developers are still learning today. If you start with a PDF, it should be possible to machine-translate it to SVG and present it as a web page.

PDF exists because it is trivial to generate it from the document renderer meant for printing. Although I have once in a while run into an improperly scaled PDF meant to be printed 8-up, I'm just not

Lithium battery fires are in the news because they are new. There are many more gasoline fires every day.

Pistons? We don't need no stinking pistons! Next thing, they'll be adding a bridle and a bit!

Consider that it is evangelism. Saying "We did this, we're a big investment bank" implies "It's OK, and you should do it too". I've heard people refer to arguing a vendor to lower a price as "jew them down". Enough with that.

We will know if GM built a bettter car battery in 8 years or so. I am sort of dubious, because it's more like your cell phone battery than a lithium car battery. It uses cobalt. GM brags that their EV battery uses less cobalt "than other EV batteries", but Tesla uses none. We know that Tesla batteries last. It will take a while to know that about GM batteries.

Musk is great. He took a lot of things that everyone knew about and nobody would dare to do, and made them work from a business perspective. We need lots more people like that.