From a radiation engineering point of view, outer space is not the most stringent environment. It is actually significantly more forgiving than a lot of useful earth orbits or the radiation belts of the gas giants (but of course, you can hardly replace a failed transistor in space...).
These "vacum tube like" diamond field emission devices have shown radiation tolerance from 10 to 100 Mrad (1 MGy in SI units), so we are more talking about the levels required for operation in nuclear reactors or close to the beam of particle accelerators.

The last Mac OS X version for PowerPC is 10.5.8, though.

It seems that a paper airplane, as proposed by the grand-parent poster, would be pretty stealthy.

The problem was more fundamental than the cockpit crew not being able to see what the pilot flying was doing. The problem was that it seems that nobody knew what were the right inputs to make. As the summary of the investigators interim report puts it:
- Neither of the pilots made any reference to the stall warning
- Neither of the pilots formally identified the stall situation

All right, just for you I looked up the total duration of dual inputs in the reports. :)
- from 2h 13min 17s to 2h 13min 24s (7 seconds)
- from 2h 13min 40s to 2h 14min 7s (27 seconds)
For the record, the stall warning first sounded at 2h 10min 10s. The plane crashed at 2h 14min 28s.

The BEA interim report will show you clearly when "dual input" situations happened. It's quite easy to follow, because there is an audible alarm each time that happens (the synthetic voice says "dual input"). You will see that even if there were a few moments of dual input, especially at the end of the stall when the pilots were panicking, overall this was quit short. The critical problem behind that crash is that nobody in the cockpit identified that the plane was stalling. In fact, nobody said the word "stall" (or its french equivalent "décrochage") during the whole event, except the computer synthetic voice.

Indeed, the article is surprising, or more accurately, void of new information
But there is another, worrying implication that the Telegraph can disclose for the first time: that the errors committed by the pilot doing the flying were not corrected by his more experienced colleagues because they did not know he was behaving in a manner bound to induce a stall. And the reason for that fatal lack of awareness lies partly in the design of the control stick – the “side stick” – used in all Airbus cockpits.
For the first time ? As you said, this has been beaten to death in various reports. There has already been an almost full transcript of the cockpit voice recorder leaked in a book months before. The last and final report from the investigators is scheduled to come out in June. They have put in place a special panel composed of pilots to try to understand the reactions of the crew (including seemingly ignoring the stall warnings, the apparent lack of confidence in the instruments, etc), and have dug into the history of flights during which pitots tube froze at high altitude. I think their conclusions might be slightly more revealing than the Telegraph copying-and-pasting other websites.

There were also Blinkenlights in Berlin (2001) and more to the point, ARCADE in Paris (2002). Both were made by Chaos Computer Club.
Anyway, whatever the prior art was, it is always a very thrilling development.

There are many examples of species extinctions in the past (and present). There has been one mass extinction event roughly every hundred millions of years, if not more. You do not need to wipe out every living entity during a cataclysm, you just need to make the planet inhabitable for them (think about the meteor from K-T event and what happened to non-avian dinosaurs). It seems a quite likely event in the list.

South Korea does not have a much better track record with their launch vehicles.