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.

The GSA should be held accountable for the solarwinds123 fiasco. They have sat on their hands for years spending billions (trillions?) and not really taking their supply chain seriously. Also worthy of mention is the NTIA's Software Transparency initiative:
  https://www.ntia.doc.gov/Softw...

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".