Not really either. The astronauts were stuck on the ISS, which is designed for long-term occupation. As long as they can get (unmanned) supply missions, they can remain there indefinitely. The Space Shuttle was not designed to remain in space for an extended time, nor to be resupplied in orbit, meaning that being unable to safely return to Earth is a very difficult situation to deal with.

Not surprising really. Laron Syndrome seems to have a number of other effects which are rather undesirable - "obesity, craniofacial abnormalities, micropenis, low blood sugar".

My comment was suggesting that we should create hobbits - who don't seem to have any obesity problems despite eating six meals a day, and also seem to have rather robust general health despite the low-tech environment and presumed lack of advanced medical treatment in the Shire. The substantial resistance to demon-possessed magic rings probably just follows from general robustness, but fortunately we don't have to worry about that issue (or do we?).

I don't think the technology is there yet, but it's not a bad idea. While you're genetically engineering short people, you could also engineer out obesity - not only removing the need for drugs but allowing them to eat six meals a day without gaining weight. If you can beef up the lungs, that should allow risk-free smoking. The real challenge is to strengthen the brain, in case of magic rings containing demons...

Why does a datacentre need to use any water? It's quite possible to use a closed-loop cooling system. If they're using an open-loop system, it means they're getting the water too cheap.

So are you saying that no business should be allowed to have more than one million customers? If you're operating an online retailer, you can't really avoid storing the name, address, and contact details for each customer, and a password for them to log in - otherwise, how do they log in, and get a parcel delivered? And if you have 34 million customers, you have 34 million people's personal data.

Surely the obvious thing to do, if it's important to keep launching to the ISS, is to move one of the cabins from another site? The article mentions two being recently built. That would take the other site out of action, but it's a question of which site is more important.

Trucks (and cars) cause accidents, that's just how it is. Aircraft aren't supposed to have accidents ever and must be perfect. No, it doesn't make sense, but that's society for you.

People pay a lot of money to bathe in the effluent of a power plant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

CO2 doesn't cause smog. Just because CO2 emissions are down doesn't mean other emissions such as particulates and nitrogen oxides aren't getting worse at the same time.

No you don't. Take a map at the start of the store and look up where you're going. Look for the (marked and signed) shortcuts. And don't be afraid to walk against the arrows if the shortcut is just past your section rather than before it. Yes, they'd like you to follow the arrows and walk round the whole store, but you don't have to.

It doesn't "run code". It doesn't need to.
It's not a new issue, just a new instance of it. If you have a file that contains external resources, such as HTML, to preview it you need to load the external resources. Which isn't a vulnerability in itself, but allows you to initiate a new network access request without user action. And Windows will helpfully attempt to log in to the random external server with the username and password of the current local user, which is the real vulnerability.
And the password is hashed, but that provides no real security - the hash effectively is the password and is sent in plain text on the wire.

Yes, and I listed several fall-backs.
Computer is working but truck immobilised - computer commands beacons on
Computer breaks - watchdog trips, bypasses computer and turns beacons on
Electrical supply fails - local battery turns beacon on

It's not perfect - for example the computer could get into a livelock and keep resetting the watchdog but not triggering the beacons itself. But then neither is the current system - having the driver place flares or beacons assumes that the driver is able to get out of the cab, and has working beacons/flares.

The most likely situation is that the computer is fully working, but can't move the truck. Either there's something wrong mechanically (engine failure, flat tyre) or the computer can't "see" clearly enough to move safely. Even if the computer has failed, "turn on all the lights if the computer fails" is a fairly simple thing to do - a watchdog timer holding off a relay that connects the lights to the battery (bypassing any electronic control). You can even deal with an electrical system failure by putting a battery in the light unit, held off by the main power, as building emergency lights do.

Slashdot doesn't support Unicode and assumes all input is ASCII. If you enter a non-ASCII character, your browser encodes it as UTF-8 but Slashdot reads it as ASCII (or possibly one of the 8-bit character sets).
IIRC they did support Unicode at one point but trolls used it to mess up the page formatting (ridiculous numbers of combining characters, right-to-left markers, unmatched combining characters, etc) and kept evading simple sanity checks, so they just went with "no extended characters at all, ASCII only".

Filtered due to your own preferences. It's not censorship if you choose not to read something - no-one is stopping you reading it, just scroll to the top of the page and change your preferences to show everything.